Blue Apron: Shrimp and Pesto Gnocchi with Summer Vegetables

My first Blue Apron recipe, and boy was this good. Pan-fried shrimp and gnocchi combine with pesto, mascarpone, and tomatoes for a dish that feels light and right. It’s universally appealing (unless you have dairy or seafood allergies) and relatively quick and easy to make.

What you’ll need (for 3-4 people)

  • 1 lb. of shrimp, 21-30 count

  • 1 lb. of gnocchi

  • 1/2 lb. of tomatoes - aim for the cherry size

  • 1/3 cup of basil pesto

  • 2 Tbsps Mascarpone cheese

  • a bit of grated Parmesan cheese

  • 1 Tbsp butter

  • Red Pepper Flakes

  • Salt

The original recipe from Blue Apron involves corn (2 cobs of the stuff) and more butter. I’m not a big fan of the taste or texture of corn in the first place, and I think that corn is just messy to work with - likely due to my inexperience, my kitchen ended up covered in half-cut kernels and corn silks. As for my choice to use less butter, I don’t think you’ll miss it. The end result is already fairly creamy thanks to the Mascarpone.

Prep work (10 minutes):

  1. Quarter the tomatoes. My knife wasn’t too sharp, and this took far longer than it needed to.

  2. Peel and rinse the shrimp. Coat and toss with salt and pepper.

Cooking (15 minutes):

  1. Get a large pot of salted water boiling. The pot is where you’ll end up combining everything, so make sure you also have a lid for it so that it’s easier to shake and mix the food.

  2. Thinly coat a large skillet with olive oil, and heat it on medium-high. Add in some red chili flakes, and add the shrimp in an even layer. After 3 minutes, stir the shrimp to make sure it’s evenly cooked. Cook for another 3 minutes, then remove from heat.

  3. Once the water is boiling, add the gnocchi and cook for 3 minutes. Don’t overcook the gnocchi! Drain the gnocchi and leave a bit of water leftover (about 1-2 ounces).

  4. In the large pot add the cooked shrimp, tomatoes, butter, Mascarpone, pesto, and Parmesan to the gnocchi. Feel free to add in a pinch of extra salt if necessary.

Unfortunately, I didn’t take photos of my results. Here’s Blue Apron’s photo, however. Just pretend the corn isn’t there.

0827_FPF_Shrimp-Gnocchi_13248_WEB_SQ_hi_res.jpg

Seafood Pasta with Tuscan Hot Oil

In Chicago, people refer to the subway system as the "L". Today, I did not take the L to work, but I sure took an L.

Let's start from the beginning. I found myself at Trader Joe's after work, wondering what to make for dinner, when I glanced at a bag with various frozen pieces of seafood - shrimp, scallops, and calamari rings. I wasn't sure what I would do with it, but eight bucks for a pound of seafood seemed worth a shot. Three minutes of Google-fu later, I found my recipe: Seafood Pasta with Tuscan Hot Oil.

I won't sugarcoat this. Tonight's dinner was a hot mess. It was tasty, and the end result looked damn fine, but the process itself was chaotic, messy, and confusing. I'm learning to thrive, smile, and laugh off the craziness. Let's walk through what went wrong.

Pardon the poor photo quality - lighting in the kitchen is subpar, and I didn't want to hold my phone too tightly with my garlicky hands.

Step 0: Finely chop a medium-sized onion and mince a clove of garlic. I actually forgot to buy the onion, and chose to use half a head of garlic instead of a single clove. I managed to mince it finely without chopping off any fingers, which was a plus.

Step 1: Combine olive oil with parsley, crushed red pepper, and sea salt. The only real issue here was that I forgot to add the parsley at this stage.

Step 2: The fun begins. I heated up some olive oil in a skillet and added the minced garlic. I had something good going. So what if I was supposed to add an onion? You can't cry if the onion isn't there.

When life takes away your can opener, start engineering.

At this stage, I was supposed to add a can of tomato sauce to the skillet. The only problem: I hadn't bought a can opener. So I took my pocketknife, the one tool I had that could do the trick, and proceeded to stab a can of tomato paste for the next three minutes. After a few dents, I pried a larger hole using a spoon, and managed to get a sizeable gap such that I could pour the tomato paste into the pan. So all that was left was to add the tomato sauce, then let that boil. I got to work on the pasta (in a separate pot), and once everything started boiling, I added the seafood (and the parsley from step 1) to the skillet.

It looks tasty, but the stovetop around it demands cleaning.

"Bigger is better" is the unofficial motto of most Texans. The simple fact is that a bigger skillet would have been able to better contain a boiling-to-the-brim mix of garlic, hot oil, and tomato sauce. The stovetop was covered in spots of hot oil and tomato sauce. Our kitchen towel turned red, along with the bottom half of my shirt.

The rest of the story is pretty straightforward. Once the pasta was done, I drained it thoroughly and added in all of the sauce. The end result was beautiful and delicious (apologies for the steam in the camera lens in the plate shot).

If I've learned one thing, it's that it's okay to not know what's going on, and for things to not be proceeding according to plan. Just laugh it off, crank up the music, and visualize the goal.

You Learn Best from Failure

I hadn't really mastered pasta aglio e olio just yet, but I had made it twice. Apparently, this was enough experience for me to convince myself to try cooking a salmon in the pan. Whoops. Today I attempted not only to cook two dishes simultaneously, but to also do so with a brand new dish that I had never gathered any experience with. Cooking has allowed me to be quite introspective, so here it goes: it's only a failure if you don't learn.

The idea behind pan-seared salmon was simple. I didn't want to buy any new utensils, I wanted to learn how to cook a protein, and I didn't think that salmon could be too hard. It probably wasn't even that hard, but trying to cook two dishes at once prevented me from thinking properly. So, let's begin by listing off mistakes.

  1. Olive oil. I clearly didn't learn my lesson from the first time I tried to make the aglio e olio, when I overheated the olive oil and cooked the garlic in about 8 seconds flat. This time, I ended up overheating the oil to the point where it started smoking, which is why the oil splattered everywhere around the kitchen when I placed the salmon in the pan. Also, I used too much olive oil for the pasta. Aglio e olio is supposed to be light, not greasy.
  2. Poor sequencing and understanding. The main reason that the oil started smoking is because I was too busy chopping parsley to pay attention to the oil. The main reason I chopped parsley when I did was because I hadn't truly understood the mechanics of the dishes I was making as well as I thought I did. The prep work - peeling and slicing garlic, chopping parsley, slicing lemons - could have been done before the time-critical, attention-necessary tasks.

My end goal is to be able to make a complete meal with the pan-seared salmon as an entree, served alongside a helping of pasta aglio e olio and a side of arugula. To get there, I'm going to work on mastering one thing at a time before combining all three.

For what it's worth, the salmon was neither overcooked nor undercooked. You can find the recipe here.

Pasta Aglio e Olio

Thanks to Caleb, I happened upon Binging with Babish, a channel on YouTube that I'll be visiting many times in the future (assuming I get the pronunciation down first). Today's dish was pasta aglio e olio, which made its theatrical appearance in the movie Chef (alas, I've never seen it). It's a light and simple dish, easy to make, and damn tasty. There are only 6 ingredients: olive oil, pepper, lemon juice, parsley, linguine, and garlic.

The end result.

Some things I learned over the course of making this:

  • Shit, I really need to buy a better knife for chopping parsley. The recipe calls for finely chopped parsley, and my knife wasn't sharp (plus, it was serrated).
  • I misread the recipe's instructions for olive oil: it says to heat it until it's shimmering, but I read that as bubbling and definitely overheated the oil. At some point, I decided to just add the sliced garlic anyways and proceeded to splatter hot oil over my arms and throughout the kitchen.

I need to improve my plating, but that's low priority.

Tomorrow, I buy a new kitchen knife.

Spaghetti "Alfredo"

Having decided to embark on my food journey, I wanted to start off with something simple and basic, and it's hard to beat Fettuccine Alfredo - it's (theoretically) novice-level stuff, and pasta is remarkably satisfying.

Here's the recipe I tried to follow: https://www.bonappetit.com/recipe/fettuccine-alfredo

Unfortunately, the Target in downtown Chicago didn't carry fettuccine. Seriously. They had gnocchi, farfalle, rotini, and the disgrace that is angel hair, but no fettuccine. So I adapted the recipe into Spaghetti Alfredo, and continued onward.

Having upboxed and unwrapped my cookware for the first time, I proceeded to spend 20 minutes wondering why the stove wouldn't turn on. As it turns out, University Center installs a device on the oven and stove to make sure people don't leave it running when they leave. Technical issues sorted out, I started by making the pasta.

The idealization of pasta is al dente - with some firmness to the pasta when you bite in. Overcooked pasta has too soft of a mouthfeel, and isn't my favorite in the world. I successfully managed to follow Gordon Ramsey's trick for getting all of the spaghetti into the pot without breaking it into shorter lengths - you just twist the pasta around in the boiling water until it all falls in:

Top tips on how to how to cook angel hair pasta - with principles that you can apply to cooking any shape. If you have any others, let us know - always keen to learn. Gordon Ramsay Ultimate Fit Food: http://amzn.to/2FznHtk Subscribe for weekly cooking videos.

So the good news is that I nailed the pasta. It was al dente and long and just an absolute delight. The trouble came from the sauce. Instructions from the recipe:

Transfer 1 cup pasta cooking liquid to a large skillet. Bring to a gentle simmer, then whisk in butter, a piece at a time, until melted. Whisking constantly, gradually add cheese, making sure it’s completely melted and incorporated before adding more.

While the butter did its job as planned, the cheese clumped together into a gooey, sticky mess. What's worse, it stuck to the pot, the plastic utensils, and (worst of all) the whisk. The final product was much more butter noodles with clumps of parmesan than true spaghetti with alfredo sauce. Truth be told, if I had left out the cheese entirely, I probably would have much more pleased.

Left: the photo from the recipe. Center: some pretty solid butter noodles. Right: a disgusting mess.

Next time, I'll try and repeat the same recipe, but without the cheese. I'll probably also add the butter directly to the pasta, after straining.