The Lee Bros. Simple Fresh Southern_ Knockout Dishes With Down-Home Flavor - Matt Lee [61]
5 Slice the flank steak as thin as you can across the grain, and serve with the sauce.
EASY SHRIMP CREOLE
serves 4 • TIME: 12 minutes preparation, 30 minutes cooking
The Creole cuisine of Louisiana gets its vigor and flavor from the rich stew of cooking traditions—African, French, and Spanish—from which it emerged. The canon of Creole dishes is astoundingly delicious and has a deserved reputation for being a challenge to master: think gumbos, jambalayas, etouffées. Our take on the classic shrimp creole—a spicy tomato-based shrimp stew—uses about half as many ingredients as most recipes we’ve seen, yet scrimps not a bit on flavor: We begin building flavor with a quick shrimp stock, and we finish the stew with a pinch of smoked paprika and a dash of vinegar that draw an intense, almost ovenroasted flavor from the tomatoes. We serve this shrimp creole over hot white rice or grits—a simple family-style meal that would dazzle your boss, and her fancy friends, too.
1 pound headless large shell-on shrimp (26 to 30 per pound; see Notes on Deveining Shrimp, and Shrimp Shopping Notes)
1¼ teaspoons kosher salt
1¾ pounds vine-ripened tomatoes (about 5 tomatoes)
6 ounces fresh hot pork sausage, casings removed
1 large white or yellow onion, chopped
3 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1 large poblano chile, seeded and diced (about 1 cup)
½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
½ teaspoon smoked paprika
½ teaspoon crushed dried red chile flakes
1 tablespoon red wine vinegar
1 Peel the shrimp and throw the shells into a small saucepan set over medium heat. Add 1 cup water and ¼ teaspoon of the salt, and simmer until reduced by half, 5 to 6 minutes.
2 While the shrimp stock simmers, core the tomatoes: Set a strainer over a medium bowl. Cut the tomatoes in half crosswise and, using your pinkie finger, tease the seeds out of the cavities of each half, letting them fall into the strainer. Tap the rim of the strainer against your palm for 30 seconds, until most of the flavorful gel clinging to the seeds dissolves and drips into the bowl. Discard the seeds. Chop the tomatoes; you should have 2 cups. Add them to the bowl with the tomato water.
3 Pitch the sausage into a heavy-bottomed 4-quart Dutch oven or pot set over medium-high heat, and cook, stirring and breaking up the sausage with a wooden spoon, until the pork is just browned and has rendered some fat, about 6 minutes. Add the onion, garlic, poblano, remaining 1 teaspoon salt, the black pepper, paprika, and chile flakes. Cook, stirring and scraping up the browned bits on the bottom of the pan as the peppers and onions release their liquid, until the peppers and onions have softened, about 6 minutes.
4 Add the tomatoes and their juice and the strained shrimp broth, turn the heat to high, and cook until the tomatoes have completely collapsed into a red, bubbling stew, 6 to 8 minutes. Remove the pot from the heat and stir in the shrimp and vinegar. Cover and let stand for 3 minutes, until the shrimp are cooked through.
PORK TENDERLOINS WITH MADEIRA AND FIG GRAVY
serves 4 • TIME: 1 hour marination, 28 minutes cooking, 5 minutes resting
Sugar fig trees in Charleston ripen their soft, sublime fruit in late July, and you have to rush to harvest them before the birds and the squirrels swoop in. We’ve even met dogs that love the mellow, sweet flavor of ripe figs.
Thanks to the miracles of modern produce marketing, we can get fresh California figs almost year-round. They tend to be a bit more costly than the ones we plunder from neighborhood trees in downtown Charleston, but we’re grateful to be able to prepare recipes like this one any time of the year. This dish looks best with purple-skinned varieties, but it’s delicious with any kind of fresh fig you can find.
Pork tenderloin performs beautifully in simple recipes because it takes readily to marinades, sears willingly, and cooks quickly