I have a bad habit of getting Spanish and Tapas cookbooks and never cooking out of them (I probably have about 6 of them). Curate is the first of the bunch, which I got when I was experimenting with mussels escabeche for a winter solstice celebration at Fortnight. The “Chilled Mussels in Escabeche Sauce” was my least favorite of the ones I tried and set the stage for my reluctance to try many of the simple small plates of these books.

Fast forward 3 years and I’m ready to start experimenting with some of these again. The situation is we have bean-corn-cheese-avacodo quesadillas with a cabbage-lime salad on the side, and we want to make something small and tasty to compliment this. Sounds like a perfect plate to add some sautéed shrimp with garlic!

This recipe is rather large, serving 10 as a small plate. Even so, the 24 cloves of garlic it calls if is a whole lot; I definitely smelled of garlic in the days following this meal and I wondered if the other diners restrained themselves from eating more due to the amount. Regardless, the shrimp were excellent, if a bit simple.

Cooking Notes: Try using a bit less oil than suggested. Also, you need to use very very high heat for this to work. 2 lbs of shrimp is a lot to brown, and the amount of sherry added will almost necessarily take longer than 1 minute to reduce sufficiently for my liking. I would even consider using a separate cast iron for the shrimp and preheat it in the oven on max, then put over the highest heat and dump the shrimp and garlic-oil in (or use a wok burner.) Also, butterflying shrimp just means going almost through to the other side when you devein them and then spreading them open. Serve with crusty bread to mop up the garlic juices.

Joe’s Rating: 6

Difficulty: 4.5