Restaurant Redux - Crunchy Shrimp & Avocado Salad Stack

Here we have a take on one of the dishes we enjoyed during our trip to Maine this summer - a stack of avocado & shrimp, served on a bed of seaweed salad and crispy puffed rice paper wrappers.



This is a lousy picture, but you can get the gist of the seafood & avocado stack. We decided to forgo the Marie Rose dressing that accompanied the original from The Burning Tree and downgrade from lobster to shrimp.



We don't have a clue when it comes to making seaweed salad, so we picked this up at the sushi place Gaja Gaja on South...tasted great - perfect balance of crunch and chew with sesame oil throughout



Avocados getting sliced for the stack.



This was the 'fun' element...if you drop pieces of the rice paper into hot oil, they will puff up like vermicelli or a pork skin, creating a light and crispy cracker.


Tthe shrimp in Maine seemed to be smaller in general, so we bought something in the 30-40 range; butter poached and peeled, they were OK, but looking back we probably should have chopped them a bit, mixed in some diced avocado and placed them on the crisps to marry the flavors a little tighter.

Summer Scallops w/Sauteed Corn, Pepper & Avacado

One last go around for the summer combo of corn & scallops. This time we added a slight mash of avocado beneath each scallop to fix them in place on the bed of summer corn.

These avocado were a little less ripe than we would have liked, but the stronger 'green' flavor that an under-ripened avocado has worked well with the peppers in the corn.

The avocado was slightly seasoned with a bit of salt and a touch of olive oil to give it some smoothness.

Here's a shot of the black peppers that we picked up from Savoie Farms at Headhouse Market. The flesh of the black pepper was a little thicker and had a pronounced crunch, which worked well to marry the green-ish tinge of the avocado to the corn.

The corn was sliced off the cob and then added to the diced pepper.

Sauteed with a touch of butter and olive oil, we didn't overseason the corn.

Final step was to create little lillypads for the scallops to rest upon.

This is starting to become a habit - more seared scallops.