Food is Love Made Edible

Food is Love Made Edible

Seafood

193 Seafood

BBQ Redfish on the Half Shell

At many of the higher end restaurants in New Orleans you’ll find BBQ fish on the half shell on the menu.  BBQ fish? Huh? In fact what this is is a filet of fish with the skin and scales lefts on that is seasoned with lots of butter and herbs and grilled over open flame, and don’t worry there’s no BBQ sauce.  When it is served to you it will be served flesh side up; with the the hardened skin/flesh of the fish resting on the plate.

The recipe that follows is a variation of a recipe that one of my former bosses gave me. He is a serious outdoorsman, and after the numerous times I’d ordered at lunch with him and a successful fishing trip in the marshes of Port Fourchon, LA he shared with me how to make BBQ redfish on the half shell myself.

Print

BBQ Redfish on the Half Shell

Prep

Cook

Total

Yield 2 servings

  1. Prepare your grill to to a high heat.
  2. Filet redfish while leaving skin and scales on.
  3. Make a marinade of olive oil, cayenne pepper, smoked paprika, dried thyme, garlic salt, and juice of 4 lemons.
  4. Rub the marinade into the flesh side of the filets.
  5. Melt the butter until it's soft and mix in the juice of the remaining lemons and the chopped parsley.
  6. Once the grill is up to a high heat place the filets flesh side down over direct flame and cook for 4-5 minutes.
  7. After the filets have cooked flesh side down for 4-5 minutes flip them over and baste with the butter made earlier while cooking the filets for another 2 minutes.

Ingredients

  • 2 Red fish filets, skin and scales left on
  • 1 tsp Worcestershire sauce
  • 1 tbsp smoked paprika
  • 1 tbsp cayenne
  • 2 tsp dried thyme
  • 2 tbsp garlic salt
  • 6-8 lemons
  • 1/4 cup olive oil
  • 1/2 cup chopped parsley
  • 1 cup butter

Instructions

  1. Mix together the smoked paprika, cayenne, dried thyme, and garlic salt.
  2. Generously rub the flesh side of the filets down with Worcestershire sauce and seasoning mix.  Juice a few a few of the lemons over the filets.    (You can do this while the fish are on the grill if you'd like to.)
  3. Drizzle olive oil over filets and rub all the ingredients into the flesh of the fish.
  4. Melt butter in a small sauce pan over medium low heat.  Remove the pan from heat and stir in parsley, juice of 2 lemons, and 1 tbsp garlic salt.  (If you have a small cast iron pot/pan you can do this on the grill.  It will really impress your guests!)
  5. Fire up your grill and get a good high heat going.
  6. Place the fish flesh side down directly over the heat.  Now you just have to be patient, don't touch the filets for 7-8 minutes.  
  7. Serve fish with garlic butter sauce and ENJOY!

Notes

Make sure that you use enough olive oil on the flesh of the fish.  If you do not it will cause the the flesh of the fish to stick to the grill.

If it is hard to find redfish (red drum) you can substitute red snapper or black drum

Courses Main

As always thank you for taking a few moments from your day to read over this and I hope that you are able to try this recipe sometime and that you enjoy it.  Feedback is always welcome and appreciated.

Have a blessed day,

Benjamin

28 Seafood

Baked Blackened Salmon

Cajun preparation of a cold-water fish?  Sure, why not?

I’d be lying if I told y’all that I am a massive fan of salmon.  Outside of sushi or poke I often find myself to not be amazed by salmon when I eat it.  I have often blamed the salmon itself for this, but I believe now that I have been strongly mistaken in doing this.  The recipe you see here and some salmon hot dogs and hamburgers I will discuss a bit later have helped to open my mind up to giving salmon a second chance and eating it more often.

…

Read More

20 Seafood

Crawfish Eétouffée

If there was one bite of food that immediately brings me back to sitting on the kitchen counter watching my mom cook it’s a spoonful of crawfish étouffeé and rice.  The smell of the simmering pan of étouffeé is a smell that is so ingrained into my head just sitting here typing this blog post now I can smell it.  This meal is a part of me.  It is a part of my family.  And I hope that you appreciate that spoonful of crawfish étouffeé as much as I do.

…

Read More

45 Appetizer

Prosciutto Wrapped Tequila Lime Shrimp with Avocado Crema

I first made this dish last year sometime last year and I really wasn’t too much of a fan of it.  I had kind of set the recipe aside and then I saw a tweet from Nola.com about an amateur cooking competition where you could win your weight in shrimp from Rouses.   The competition calls for an original recipe that is centered around shrimp.  When I started thinking about what recipe I could enter into the competition I didn’t think of this one at first, but when going through my older Instagram posts I saw the picture I posted of the first time I made prosciutto wrapped shrimp and I knew that this would be the right recipe to enter.

Summertime is BBQ and grilling time!  Sunny weekends are the perfect time to invite a bunch of friends and family member over and light up the grill.  The majority of our grills will be occupied with the usual burgers, sausages, and chicken wings.  If you’re in Southern Louisiana you may get lucky and find some charbroiled oysters.  Make some room though!  Cause these prosciutto wrapped tequila lime shrimp need to find their way to your grill.  From the grill they should head over to the avocado crema for a quick dip and then straight to your mouth.

Like many of my recipes this one came from me walking through the grocery store and grabbing random ingredients.  I got a couple pounds of shrimp and then had to figure out what to do with them.  Bacon? No.  But, I want some bacon wrapped shrimp… What about prosciutto?  Yep! That sounds good.  Then of course I had to figure out what to season them with.  Remembering I had a bottle of tequila I figured why not grab a couple of lime and some cilantro and throw it all together in a marinade.  Over a couple iterations of making the dish I added ground coriander and red chili pepper flake and badaboom baba bam we had a winner!

They’re really not a winner until you wrap them in the prosciutto though.

The first time that I made this dish I did it in my cast iron pan on the stove.  I ended up switching over to my charcoal grill outside in the yard and it made the texture of the prosciutto and shrimp much better, and it’s really just easier to cook over an open flame (in my personal opinion).

Thinking of what I could do to take the recipe to the next level my first thought was to come up with some sort of dipping sauce.  I wanted a light cool sauce that would compliment the heat and saltiness of the grilled prosciutto wrapped shrimp.  The first time that I made the avocado crema it was missing something.  I wasn’t sure what it was, but something just wasn’t there.  Then I added a blistered jalapeño to the mix and let me tell you what!  It was awesome!  I guarantee!  (Justin Wilson voice)

The crema goes great so many other things like chimicurri flank steak and salsa chips.

When you combine the prosciutto wrapped tequila lime shrimp with the avocado crema you get the perfect little bite!

Print

Prosciutto Wrapped Tequila Lime Shrimp with Avocado Crema

Prep

Cook

Inactive

Total

Ingredients

  • 2 lb. jumbo shrimp, peeled and deveined
  • 6 oz. Prosciutto
  • Juice of 3 limes
  • 1/4 cup tequila
  • 1 tbsp red chili pepper
  • 1 tsp ground coriander
  • 1/2 cup cilantro, minced

Avocado Crema

  • 1 avocado
  • 1 cup whole-milk Greek yogurt
  • Juice of 2 limes
  • 1 jalapeño, blistered and seeds removed
  • 1/4 cup cilantro
  • 1 tsp salt
  • 1/2 tsp black pepper

Instructions

  1. If you buy whole shrimp remove the heads, peal the shrimp, and remove the back vein.
  2. In a small bowl mix the shrimp together with the tequila, lime juice, coriander, red chili pepper, and cilantro.  Set the shrimp and let them marinade for about 20-30 minutes.  (During this time make the avocado creme, recipe below.)
  3. Halve each of the pieces of the prosciutto longways and wrap each of the shrimp with one prosciutto half. 
  4. Skewer 4 shrimp onto a skewer.  Repeat until you have skewered all the shrimp.
  5. Heat your grill to high heat.  (I get my charcoal grill to about 400F.)
  6. Place the shrimp skewers onto the grill directly over the heat source and cook for about 10 minutes.  Flipping the skewers every couple of minutes.  Once the shrimp are firm and the prosciutto has become crispy they are done.

Avocado Crema

  1. Blister the jalapeño.  This can be done over an open flame such as a gas stovetop, grill, or in the oven.
  2. Slice the jalapeño in half and remove the seeds.
  3. In a food processor mix together all of the ingredients until smooth.
  4. It's as simple as that.  Enjoy!

Notes

You can make this recipe on the stove in a pan (preferably cast iron) over medium high heat.  There's no need to skewer the shrimp to cook them in a pan.

Courses Appetizer

As always thank you for taking a few moments from your day to read over this and I hope that you are able to try this recipe sometime and that you enjoy it.  Feedback is always welcome and appreciated.

Have a blessed day,

Benjamin

154 Seafood

Red Snapper with Lemon Cream Sauce

So many of my dishes come together from me walking around Whole Foods trying to figure out what I want for dinner.  On the particular day that I first made this dish I was walking through the grocery store and saw a beautiful red snapper filet staring me in the face.  That red snapper filet reminded me of a blackened snapper and asparagus dish that I used to make when I was in college.  I used to make an aioli to go with the the snapper, but decided to swap it up with a lemon cream sauce for this dish.

Sauces when done right can really make a dish, and this is very simple lemon cream sauce is one that i am pretty proud of.  Over the course of the four years I have been seriously cooking I have found sauces to be the most difficult cooking skill to learn.  I’ve looked into taking cooking classes before, but I’ve made it this far without every taking one so why start now?  If I can teach myself how to make my own cocktail syrups I can teach myself how to make my own sauces.

This sauce goes really well with my Garlic & Herb Asparagus  recipe.

2 votes

Print

Red Snapper with Lemon Cream Sauce

Prep

Cook

Total

Yield 2 servings

Ingredients

Red Snapper

  • 2 6-8 oz. red snapper filets, skin removed
  • 1 tbsp dried oregano
  • 1 tbsp dried parsley
  • 1/2 tbsp dried rosemary
  • 1/2 tbsp dried thyme
  • Salt & pepper
  • 2 tbsp butter
  • Olive oil

Sauce

  • 1 pint heavy whipping cream
  • 4 cloves garlic, minced
  • 2 tbsp butter
  • Juice of 4 lemons
  • Salt & pepper

Instructions

  1. Preheat oven to 350 F.
  2. Melt 2 tbsp of butter in a small sauce pan over medium heat.
  3. Add minced garlic to the pan and cook until garlic begins to brown and becomes fragrant.  Reduce heat to low and add heavy whipping cream.  Stir often to make sure that the cream doesn't burn at the bottom of the pan.
  4. Season fish filets on both sides with oregano, parsley, rosemary, thyme, and salt and pepper.
  5. Heat a couple tbsp of olive oil in a skillet (non-stick if you have one) over medium high heat.
  6. Add the filets to the pan, what would be skin side down, and cook for 3 minutes.  Flip the filets and cook for another 2 minutes.  Transfer the pan to the oven.
  7. Juice the lemons in the sauce pan and continue to stir the cream.  After 10-12 minutes the cream should begin to thicken as the water evaporates out.  Your sauce should get to point where 
  8. After 5 minutes remove the fish from the oven and add 2 tbsp of butter to the pan.  Tilting the pan towards you over medium heat baste the fish filets for a couple minutes with the butter.
  9. Serve the filets with lemon cream sauce and enjoy!

Courses Main

As always thank you for taking a few moments from your day to read over this and I hope that you are able to try this recipe sometime and that you enjoy it.  Feedback is always welcome and appreciated.

Have a blessed day,

Benjamin

11 Seafood

Ginger Soy Shrimp

I eat a lot of shrimp, and I east a lot of sushi.  The crossroads of which being a shrimp and avocado appetizer that one of my regular lunch spots had on special a few months back.  The unfortunate thing about restaurant specials is that they don’t always make it onto the regular menu.  The best solution to this problem I’ve found is to experiment making it on your own.

One of the reasons I eat so much shrimp is because can do many things with it.  Just like Bubba said:

On this particular occasion I guess you could say that we are going to sauté it.  I’m no professional chef so I am often unaware of the exact terminology of the methods of cooking that I am doing.  As long as the food you’re cooking comes out good does it really matter what you call what you did to make it?

This dish is really all about the sauce.  The shrimp themselves are seasoned fairly moderately so the sauce controls much of the flavor of the dish.  From my experience the shrimp will pick up some of the sauce from finishing cooking in the pan.  To really get the full effect I recommend pouring the remainder of the sauce over (after running it through a fine strainer).

This recipe is one that I genuinely feel like anyone and everyone can make on their own.

1 vote

Print

Ginger Soy Shrimp

Prep

Cook

Total

Yield 2 servings

Ingredients

  • 1 lb. shrimp, peeled and deveined
  • 2 tbsp Creole seasoning
  • 2 garlic cloves, minced
  • 1/4 cup ginger, minced
  • 1 cup soy sauce
  • 2 tbsp balsamic vinegar
  • 2 tbsp olive oil

Instructions

  1. Mince garlic and garlic and set to the side.
  2. Heat olive olive oil over medium heat in a small sauté pan.
  3. Add shrimp to the sauté pan and cook for two minutes.  Flip shrimp, cook for another two minutes, and remove shrimp from pan.  Reduce heat to medium low.
  4. Add soy sauce and balsamic vinegar to the pan and cook for 10 minutes.
  5. Add garlic and ginger to the pan and cook for another 5 minutes.
  6. When the sauce begins to thicken add shrimp back to pan to coat shrimp in the sauce; 30 seconds or so on each side.
  7. Remove shrimp from the pan and serve with extra sauce pored over top.

Courses Appetizer

As always thank you for taking a few moments from your day to read over this and I hope that you are able to try this recipe sometime and that you enjoy it.  Feedback is always welcome and appreciated.

Have a blessed day,

Benjamin

112 Seafood

Cod with Caper Brown Butter

What do you do when you want to cook dinner, you don’t want to go get groceries, and you don’t want to order from Uber Eats?  You experiment.  I must say that some experiments come out better than others, and in this case my grabbing of ingredients that I had in my kitchen worked out pretty damn good.

…

Read More

7 Seafood

Shrimp & Grits

There are certain dishes that just scream Southern and Creole.  One of those dishes, as well as one of my favorite dishes, is shrimp and grits.  It just warms the body and the soul.  Feeling cold or down?  Make a quick run to the grocery store pick up the ingredients (listed a little further down) and whip yourself up some shrimp & grits.

…

Read More

5 Seafood

Garlic & Parmesan Fish

Working in an industry where the welfare of so many countless people is reliant in a large part upon me is very stressful at times.  Then when you add in the fact that so much of my work scope is out of my control I ended up pulling up to my house ever day in more disarray a fish as it’s pulled out of water with a hook in its mouth.  So where do I go to get myself back from chaos to order?  Well if you’re reading this I am sure that you know the answer to that but I’ll answer it anyway… My kitchen.

…

Read More

11 Seafood

Cajun Catfish Lettuce Wraps

This recipe comes from a YouTube video I came across a couple years ago which has turned into one of my favorite recipes.  Besides being delicious it’s extremely simple and anyone can make it!  I’ve never seen the recipe posted anywhere online so I have taken it upon myself to type it out and post it here for y’all to enjoy.

…

Read More

3 Seafood

Fish & Grits

One of my favorite thing to eat is shrimp and grits! It screams southern and hardy. It’s the type of meal you eat when you want to feel good all over. I know many people are allergic to shell fish, so i substituted the shrimp with fish. My fish of choice is red snapper, which is a personal preference but any white fish will do.

I have chosen to use red snapper for this recipe purely do to personal preference but any white fish (i.e. catfish, tilapia, etc.) can be substituted if you prefer.

…

Read More

1 Seafood

Blackened Fish with Shrimp Creole over Zucchini Noodles

OK, time to get into something just a tad more advanced! Instead of using just one pot, we are going to work our way to two. Timing is everything with this dish, so let’s turn the heat up and get it started. This dish has to be one of the better meals I have made for myself, plus it’s a sure way to catch the ladies! If there is one thing that hold true when it comes to dinner dates and chicks, it’s that chicks love seafood and noodles!

This recipe is a master mix of several recipes in which i adapted to make my own. You can make it as spicy as you like or mild if you want to ensure your date doesn’t run off on you to a not so pleasant place.

…

Read More

4 Seafood

Blackening Seasoning & Fish

Before any sort of blackening make sure that you have your vent on above your stove and good circulation in your kitchen.  Smoke is going to occur.  It’s inevitable with such a technique.  If you have the ability to cook outside it is highly recommended but for those of us who don’t, including myself in my one bedroom apartment we must take the proper precautions.  Have candles ready to be lit, a door ready to be opened if necessary (always is for me), and an acceptance that your gonna make a little smoke while cooking.  The end result is well worth the trouble.

…

Read More