badseed1980 | Thing Thirty-One: Asian Shrimp

As you all know, my cooking tends to be a "make it up as you go along" venture. I do a lot without ever looking at a recipe. Sometimes, this results in a more successful dish than other times. Last night's was pretty darn good. I decided to do some sort of stir-fried shrimp with brown rice and a salad for dinner. I have, at this point, pretty much solidified my Asian stir fry technique, and it results in flavorful, tender stir-fry. I tend to mix up my sauce ingredients first (including some cornstarch as a thickener), and if I'm using chicken or beef, I'll marinate the sliced meat in it. This time, I used shrimp, so I didn't bother with a marinade. The sauce I used last night consisted of seafood broth (made from Penzey's base), a little sherry, hoisin sauce, a little low-sodium tamari sauce, and some chili paste, along with the aforementioned cornstarch. I also minced up some garlic and fresh ginger to be my aromatics. I heated up the wok over medium-high heat, added some canola oil, and stir-fried the garlic and ginger until they were golden and fragrant. Then, I put the peeled shrimp in. When they were curling up and turning opaque, but weren't yet fully cooked, I added the sauce. I let it come to a boil, and then added some Eggbeaters to give it an almost egg drop soup-like texture. A whole beaten egg would have been fine too. When the egg was cooked, so were the shrimp. It tasted REALLY good over the brown rice.

I think that at some point in the not-too-distant future, I'm going to want to do some kind of orange flavored beef or chicken, though not breaded, and probably using a lot less sugar and fat than some of the recipes out there.