Shrimp & Corncakes and Chocolate White Chip Cookies

2008.07.18 in fooding

We had some frozen shrimp in the freezer that needed to be eaten, so Tim and I took that on as our next cooking challenge. We found a recipe for Ancho Shrimp with Smoked Gouda Corncakes that would use up the shrimp, and be something other than chicken, which seems to be all we make. We also baked some chocolate white chip cookies and made a Orange Cream Punch as our drink.

After searching for ancho peppers, ancho chile pepper or some spice that could be a substitute, we struck gold at Shaw's. We walked into the store, picked up lettuce for salad and basically walked into the pepper section, which just happened to have dried ancho peppers. With that most important ingredient, we set to work.

We started with our cookies, so that they could chill in the fridge because, apparently, that makes them better. We combined all of the ingredients, and even let Tim use the mixer—yikes! It was quite simple, besides the poofing chocolate and flour.

The first, and most important step in dinner was to make the corncakes that would accompany the shrimp. After mixing together all of the ingredients (and shredding our own Gouda cheese), I attempted to "spoon batter into oil by 1/4 cupfuls," but that really didn't work well. It was incredibly hard to know when the cakes were cooked, and how to flip them and just everything about them was painful. In addition, the corn was always exploding and releasing little spurts of hot oil, which always seemed to hit someone. So I gave that job to Tim, which may sound mean, but he did a really great job [ed.: lolno] making sure they were round and cooked. I was quite impressed. While he was doing that, I was de-tailing the shrimp and getting everything ready for making the shrimp sauce.

Once Tim was done, and I had done a set of dishes, we cooked the ancho peppers in butter. We let the oils, or whatever, seep out and we added the garlic. It smelled absolutely great—the ancho peppers had an "earthy" smell, and mixed with the garlic, it's difficult to explain. The shrimp was added—and it looked like we could have stopped there. But we added the tomatoes and it looked even better. The peppers were removed, and we poured some of the shrimp and tomatoes over two corncakes on each plate.

Our drink for the night was orange sherbet, vanilla ice cream, Sprite and milk. I combined it all in a big bowl, and it turned out to be smoothie-like. It was actually quite great, but it didn't really fit in with our dinner.

After we ate, we cooked the cookies, which turned out to be very good. They didn't even burn—like the last chocolate cookies I made.

In the end, a really awesome meal that was a little difficult in places, but well worth the effort. It was questionable along the way, in my opinion any way, but it turned out to be a good choice of recipes. I think I would make all of these again, but maybe we should learn about corncakes and cooking things like that before we attempt it again—as that was very chaotic.