Quick Shrimp Dinner With Flavored Rice
A Quick Shrimp Dinner With Flavored Rice has been on my mind for over a week now. I saw on an episode of The Kitchen how Sunny Anderson, one of the ladies on the show, had wrapped shrimp, compound butter, and some chopped onion into Reynold's Wrap and baked it in the oven for 8 minutes. Wow!
Last night, the timing was right. Dave was off on another of his fishing excursions and dinner would only be for the two of us. I took the shrimp from the freezer and placed two dozen in a bowl of cold water to thaw.
The last time I went to Sam's Club, I found this bag of uncooked Jumbo Shrimp. There are 31-40 shelled and deveined shrimp per pound and this is a 2-pound package found in the freezer section. (Love this! You can remove what you need, zip it shut, and put the remainder back in the freezer.)
In the past, I have always used the shell on shrimp found in the meat department. They are bigger and that is what is always used for the 'Baked Shrimp Scampi'.
Then, I began to make the compound butter. I had left a stick of butter on the counter earlier to come to room temperature, making it easy to combine the ingredients. For this compound butter, I chopped up about 1/4 cup of fresh parsley. 4 garlic cloves were minced and added. The juice from half a lemon was added and 2 tsp. of lemon zest. Salt and fresh pepper were then added and it was all stirred well to combine the ingredients.
The compound butter was then placed in the fridge to firm up a little before it was needed. Compound butter can be kept in the fridge for a week or two or frozen for a couple of months. If you freeze this, wrap the plastic in foil and it will be better protected. There was some leftover and it was wrapped up for use later. Be sure you write on it what it is!
Twelve shrimp were placed in the center of two pieces of heavy duty Reynold's Wrap. Then sliced green onions were sprinkled on top of the shrimp.
A good sized dollop of the compound butter was placed on top of the shrimp. Then, salt and fresh pepper were added.
Then, two sides of the wrap were pulled together, folded over three times and sealed tight.
The two open ends were folded up and sealed and the packets were ready to go into a preheated 450° oven for 8 minutes. (It actually took this size shrimp 10 minutes to cook. I checked at 8 minutes and they weren't quite done.)
Could it get any easier than this? Yes, the flavored rice is. Sunny served the shrimp with grits. Yummm! Yes, but David doesn't like grits. So I decided to make some flavored rice with this shrimp dish.
Lemon Parsley Rice
1 cup long grain white rice
1 cup chicken broth
1 cup water
1/2 tsp. salt
1 tsp. compound butter
2 Tblsp. chopped fresh parsley
1 tsp. grated lemon peel*
In a saucepan, heat rice, chicken broth, water, salt, and compound butter to boiling over high heat. Lower heat and simmer for 18 - 20 minutes, until the liquid is absorbed and the rice is tender.
Remove from the heat and add the chopped parsley and the lemon peel. Stir to combine.
After the rice had been cooking for 10 minutes, the foil packets with the shrimp in them were placed in the preheated oven. (As I said before, they actually took 10 minutes to cook through.)
With 2 minutes of cooking time left, I popped some baby peas in the microwave to cook.
Let me tell you when these packets were opened, the smell was amazing! To serve, a generous portion of rice was placed on the plates and that was topped with shrimp and all of the butter goodness. Baby peas were spooned to the side of the rice.
Dave and I both thoroughly enjoyed this simple and easy dish! Quick Shrimp Dinner with Rice, we will have it again, soon!
