DG on the road: shrimp scampi

I blame it on the USA Network.

See, we had plans today. We were going to check out the beach (although, regretfully, it’s too cold for even a quick wade in the waves) and visit a little seafood place called Slightly Up the Creek. We woke up mid-morning, refreshed from our New Year’s Eve revelry, and settled into the couches to eat breakfast. That’s when we discovered that USA is running an all-day marathon of Law and Order: SVU. Some eight hours later, we’re both still parked where we were this morning, unable to tear ourselves away from this smorgasbord of interrogations and arrests and sick, sick characters. (Aside, of course, from the two hours that Maury Povich was running paternity tests and sending belligerent teenagers to jail for a day.)

Which is why we had to come up with something for dinner that didn’t involve leaving the apartment or the television. Since The Best Friend has been uber-hospitable this past week, I offered to make dinner. There were some leftover shrimp in the freezer, so she suggested shrimp scampi. Perfect! When I was working as a waitress in my aunt and uncle’s restaurant during high school, dinner was always either a patty melt or shrimp scampi, and I haven’t had either one since I went to college and, by default, quit working there. I found a recipe online that called for white wine, butter, garlic, breadcrumbs, and not much else, so I grabbed a slice of bread and set about mashing it into crumbs. That’s actually one of my favorite things to do, right behind mixing dough or meatloaf with my bare hands.

While the angel-hair pasta boiled on the stove, I set about making garlic bread out of some bratwurst buns.

The Virginia humidity claims yet another innocent spice.

After stabbing the garlic until it was powdery enough to sprinkle, I threw a stick of butter and loads of garlic into a saucepan with the shrimp. It. Smelled. Incredible.

Bubbly!

Then it was time to add the white wine, which as you may remember presents a bit of difficulty for me as I am absolutely hopeless with a corkscrew. The Best Friend was out investigating a residence hall issue, so I hunted around until I found a corkscrew and attempted to yoink the cork out of the bottle. It was a good thing TBF came back when she did, because I was about to smash the cursed bottle against the countertop. She extracted the cork for me and everything progressed smoothly from there on out. Some broccoli were steamed, our garlic bread came out of the toaster oven warm and garlicky, and the final product was just incredible:

The perfect complement to eight hours of onscreen depravity.

And so my week of seafood experimentation comes to a close, as I fly back to Kentucky in the morning to resume my regularly scheduled life. I hope everyone had a great holiday season!