Tuesday Edition: Kitchen Tip



"Shrimp" uploaded to Flickr by Kevin H.



I love shrimp!  Do you?  What's your favorite way to eat it or make it?

Well, I could eat shrimp pretty much any way that someone prepared it - cocktail, scampi, fried, in a salad, in a stir fry... But unfortunately the Husband is allergic.  Thankfully not too allergic since we can still go to Red Lobster and he can get the steak and be fine.  But he can't eat it without having a reaction.  So I don't make it very often, and usually when I eat shrimp it is when I am out to lunch or dinner.

When I do make it, I typically buy already cleaned shrimp. You know - the kind without the shell and without the vein!  Bluck! That is the yucky part of shrimp that I could do without, so I am happy to pay a little extra to have that done already.

But just in case you buy shrimp that you need to clean by yourself, did you know that the "vein" - you know, that dark line down the curved side of the shrimp - is actually not a vein?  You wanna know what it is?  It's the shrimp's digestive tube!  Blech!

According to Bon Appetit magazine's prep school, you don't need to worry about deveining smaller shrimp, but for the larger one you should stick with this rule of thumb: if the tube is thick and black, take it out; if it's think and white, leave it in.

p.s. I've linked up to the blog hop at One More Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest