White Wine Shrimp Scampi

Hello all,

    Interesting day at work today! I had a... different agenda today than usual; the store I work at had a wine tasting today, at which I got to help with some of the hors d'oeuvres using ingredients from the store. So, about 5 minutes after finding out what I was doing, I decided that the hors d'oeuvres should include some of the wines that we were selling. So, with some large shrimp, a beautiful 2007 dry Riesling by Pacific Rim from the Columbia Valley, and loads of butter readily available, I quickly decided on doing a scampi including the wine.

    So, I went online and found a recipe online on Cooks.com, (I'm not the biggest fan of this website, but hey, it's what came up first.) I couldn't find an original source or the name of a poster, but here's the Cooks.com link. However, I made a couple of modifications to it.

So, here's the original recipe:

24 large shrimp, peeled, deveined
1 cup dry white wine
1/2 stick butter
1/2 cup olive oil
4 large, diced garlic cloves
1 Tablespoon fresh chopped parsley
Lemon wedges for garnish.

    Now, I am a firm believer that the garnish needs to be IN the food... parsley is not acceptable as a garnish in dishes that don't, in fact, contain parsley... But, I was lucky enough to also have red pepper flake and freshly roasted garlic at my disposal, which I made very quick use of. So I added the following ingredients to the recipes:

1 Teaspoon red pepper flake
5 roasted garlic cloves
The juice of half of a lemon
A pinch of salt and a pinch of pepper

So, as it goes, the instructions are as follows:

-Pour the wine into a container, adding the lemon juice and the roasted garlic clove. Make sure the garlic cloves are pasted thoroughly.
-Take the shrimp and butterfly them, this way they open up finely for presentation. Then put them in the marinade anywhere half an hour to two hours ahead of cooking time. You could marinade them longer than that, but by two hours, they were already starting to look like ceviche...
-Melt the butter in the olive oil on medium heat, adding the raw garlic and sauteing til just firm, NOT til browned!
-Now add everything from the marinade: the shrimp AND the marinade, it becomes part of the sauce.
-Saute the shrimp on one side, turning them when they become pink. Turn them again when the other side turns pink.
-If properly butterflied, and especially with bigger shrimp, place the shrimp cut side down in the saute liquid, cooking just another minute.
-Remove the shrimp from the heat, adding just a pinch of salt and pepper.

    If you are making these for a party, place them on the cut side, with the tails over the top. If they are butterflied correctly, the cooking should make this placement easy to make.

    And that's it! Super easy, very good, and all completely in the store! I had a lot of fun doing, compared to many other days, seemingly nothing! I actually started asking around for things to do because I was so bored.

Well, I hope you enjoy this recipe, please respond or comment on your attempts or my recipe.

Thank you, and enjoy,

Forrest.