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.

Calamari-esque Citrus Shrimp Salad

We had all the right ingredients for a light seafood citrus salad in the fridge...mixed greens, olive oil, real Florida Oranges (courtesy of my boss who brought back gifts from vacation) and a bottle of Pinot Grigio except one thing...no decent seafood.



We headed out to Whole Foods and found ourselves standing in front of the seafood display, pondering the next move. Normally we like to use a seared scallops or some flash-sauteed calamari tentacles, but WFM doesn't do fresh calamari w/ tentacles and the scallops were super-expensive.

Elizabeth had the idea to buy some less expensive wild-caught shrimp and try cutting them into thirds to mimic the curly legs of calamari. I saw something similar in Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's The River Cottage Meat Book where he sliced pork tenderloin medallions in such a way that they resembled calamari tentacles when pan-fried.



Here you see the three steps of how we turned the shrimp into calamari 'tentacles'.

I basically halved these 16-26 shrimp and then, if they were plump enough, cut each half into two 'legs'. Sometimes the shrimp were a little too small to cut four legs, so I'd split the larger of the two.



Next, we seared off the shrimp in an olive oil & garlic mix...as soon as the hot pan hit those little guys, they began to curl up nicely...Elizabeth had her 'calamari' all ready to go.



The salad was a simple arrangement of frise & arugula greens, supremed orange sections and a viniagrette made with the reserved orange juice, red wine vinegar, olive oil, black pepper, sea salt and some ground fennel & tarragon.