The theme for Week 8 of the 52 week challenge was TV show inspired. (I didn't skip weeks 6 and 7, just haven't finished writing those posts yet!) This was the first theme that really stumped me. You could either re-create a dish featured on a show or come up with something inspired by a show, but, even though I watch a ton of TV, I had a really hard time coming up with any ideas at all. All I could think of were chicken fingers (Community), something with pineapples or snack food (Psych), or chocolate pudding (Walking Dead - I was trying to figure this out on the night of Carl's 112 oz indulgence). I went through the list of every single show we watch and finally inspiration struck - Kamekona's!
Hawaii Five-0 is one of the few shows where you actually see people eating, and they are always indulging in shrimp dishes from Kamekona's shrimp truck (including some questionable combinations). The truck is based on the shrimp trucks that are popular in Oahu and one of the dishes that they specialize in is garlic butter shrimp (garlic scampi). We haven't been to Oahu together to visit the shrimp trucks, so we don't have anything to compare our creation with, but I'd like to believe it comes close since it was so delicious. I decided to pair the Hawaiian garlic butter shrimp with traditional sides of rice and mac salad.
Garlic Butter Shrimp
For the garlic butter shrimp, there were a lot of recipes online that I looked at to figure out how to tackle it (see here, here and here). Our recipe adaptation doesn't exactly match any of those, but it worked for us. A and I made this together and somehow it took us two hours (both prep and active time). But it was completely worth the time and effort!
The shrimp dish only required a few ingredients. It came out to about $12.75, which isn't bad at all for a seafood dish. Almost all of the cost is for the shrimp.
- 1 lb shrimp ($10)
- 3 heads of garlic ($0.50)
- 5 tbsp of olive oil (divided) ($0.95)
- 3 tbsp of clarified butter (divided) ($0.63)
- 1 tbsp lemon juice ($0.10)
- 1/2 cup flour ($0.30)
- 1/2 tsp salt ($0.05)
- 1/2 tsp pepper ($0.05)
- 1/2 tsp plus 1 tbsp paprika ($0.10)
- 1/2 tsp cayenne ($0.05)
Here's how we made our version of garlic butter shrimp:
1. Mince 3 heads of garlic. [You could always go lighter on the garlic but it's garlic shrimp! And we love garlic so much.]
2. Peel and devein shrimp (if they aren't already).
3. Mix the flour with 1/2 tsp cayenne and 1/2 tsp paprika in a shallow bowl. Lightly dust each shrimp in the flour mixture.
4. Heat a skillet over medium low heat. Add 4 tbsp olive oil and 2 tbsp clarified butter, and swirl it around the pan. Add all of the minced raw garlic and saute until tender and brown.
5. Add 1/2 tsp salt, 1/2 tsp pepper, 1 tbsp paprika, 1 tbsp olive oil, 1 tbsp clarified butter and the lemon juice.
6. Stir everything together and let the sauce develop.
7. Add shrimp in a single layer and let them cook for a few minutes.
8. Flip shrimp over and cook for a few minutes.
9. Remove from heat and stir the shrimp around in the garlic sauce to coat with more sauce. (Add the leftover sauce on top of the rice.)
The garlic shrimp were so good. We were completely in love with the garlic butter sauce. Not remotely healthy, so we can't eat this all the time, but this scampi sauce was so delicious. Really strong garlic flavor and also rich and buttery. So good.
Mac Salad
Although the shrimp from the shrimp trucks is often served just with two scoops of sticky white rice, I decided to go one step further and pay homage to the Hawaiian plate lunch. We've had this a few times in Maui and really enjoyed it. A plate lunch consists of a main dish with sides of sticky rice and mac salad. Hawaiians love their mac salad (and we do too). I found this recipe and followed it almost exactly (I added some more vegetables).
The mac salad ingredients were:
1 lb elbow macaroni ($0.99)
1/2 cup apple cider vinegar ($0.15)
2 cups 2% milk (divided) ($0.65)
2 cups mayonnaise (divided) ($1.98)
1 tbsp brown sugar ($0.05)
5 green onions ($0.40)
2 carrots ($0.38)
2 ribs of celery ($0.20)
Salt and pepper to taste ($0.10)
For detailed instructions, check out the inspiration recipe here, but the short version of the process is: cook elbow macaroni until very soft, add vinegar, prepare dressing (all non-vegetable ingredients except 1 cup mayo and 1/2 cup milk) while noodles cool, add dressing, cool, add remaining milk and mayo, add vegetables (which I prepped while noodles were cooking and cooling), mix it all up.
It wasn't exactly the same as the mac salad we had in Maui, but that might be because we didn't use the same mayo that they do in Hawaii. But we still enjoyed it. I especially liked all the vegetables as it gave it a healthy feel even though it isn't healthy at all with its 2 cups of mayonnaise. And $4.90 made a ton of salad.
Sticky Rice
No plate lunch is complete without sticky rice. I picked up a bag of Calrose rice from Whole Foods since we didn't have any Japanese sushi rice at home. 1 cup of dry rice made enough for both of us (and that portion cost $0.87). It was wonderfully sticky and soft. Love that rice texture.
Our total meal cost for our Hawaiian feast was $18.52 (which includes lots of leftover mac salad). We're pretty happy with that for a Friday night dinner. Not much more than a night out at Chipotle, but this was for shrimp and we have many meals of mac salad left.
We really loved this garlic butter shrimp. The entire apartment smells like garlic as I'm writing this and it's heavenly. We would definitely make this meal again.
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