Baked Langostino Tails with Tomatoes and Feta

We are currently working on cleaning out the refrigerator in preparation for the Christmas holidays, and one thing we needed to use up was the rest of our giant Costco container of expiring crumbled feta cheese. (Haven't made enough omelettes or salads recently, I suppose.) When I read about this Ellie Krieger recipe on the Food Network for baked shrimp with tomatoes and feta, I knew this was the perfect way to finish off the feta cheese. It reminded me of dishes that we had in Athens, so I definitely wanted to give it a try.

Ingredients:

We went shopping that day for shrimp and a second can of diced tomatoes, the only ingredients we didn't already have at home. Unfortunately by the time we got to Trader Joe's late on Sunday afternoon (the absolute worst time to ever go to TJ's), so many of the shelves were empty and the store was almost completely out of shrimp. No cooked shrimp, no raw shrimp, no large shrimp, no small shrimp. The only shrimp were in a seafood combo with calamari and scallops, which wouldn't be a great fit with the rest of the recipe (or prepared shrimp like the firecracker shrimp), so we decided to go with the next best alternative we could find - langostino tails. They weren't cheap, but getting shrimp elsewhere would have been even more expensive. The substitution worked out well.

The ingredients I used for this recipe were:

- olive oil for sauteing ($0.10)

- 1 yellow onion ($0.60)

- 5 garlic cloves ($0.10)

- 2 cans of diced tomatoes, 1 seasoned & 1 regular ($2.48)

- a few tbsp of dried parsley ($0.25)

- 1 tbsp of dried dill weed ($0.15)

- 12 oz of langostino tails, cooked and peeled ($11.99)

- salt to taste ($0.05)

- ground pepper to taste ($0.05)

- 1 cup of feta cheese ($3)

The total for the recipe was about $19, a lot more expensive than our homemade dinners usually are, but seafood is pricey. It did make enough for two large dinner portions plus leftovers for one meal. Shrimp (from TJ's anyway) would knock a few dollars off that total, as would getting diced tomatoes on sale, but fresh herbs (what the original recipe called for) would increase the price a little.

Process:

My method was a little different from the original recipe since I didn't just pop the skillet into the oven, but I think this worked well.

1.  Heat olive oil in skillet over medium high heat and add onions. Once onions are softened, add garlic. After about a minute, add both cans of tomatoes and bring to a boil. Reduce heat to medium low and simmer until tomato juices thicken (approximately 5 minutes).

2.  Remove skillet from heat. Add parsley, dill, salt, pepper and langostino tails (or shrimp). Mix everything together.

3.  Transfer combined mixture to a baking dish.

4.  Sprinkle feta cheese over the top of the dish.

5.   Bake at 425 degrees until everything is cooked and cheese begins to melt.

It's a pretty easy recipe to follow and shouldn't take too long to prep (just chopping onions and garlic). The recipe gives the cook time as 21 minutes, but it took closer to 45 minutes for me, for whatever reason.

Review:

We ate this dish with a side of potato wedges, and it was a fantastic dinner. We really loved the flavors of this dish as-is, although we were certainly able to think of several enhancements. One would be a couple pinches of red pepper flakes to add a little zing. The dill gave this a really unique flavor and we might try either more dried dill weed or some fresh dill. But that's about all we could come up with. In the comments on the Food Network site, reviewers made all sorts of other adjustments, but what I really loved about this dish was how much it reminded me of real Greek food (unlike this fish A made once before from a Greek cookbook). The flavor combination was spot-on and we enjoyed it so much that, although we would make small adjustments, we would mostly stick with the recipe itself. Really happy with how this turned out.