Creole Shrimp Ala Mary

As you know, we brought back some good stuff for Cajun/Creole dishes from NOLA and I’ve been pouring over the blogs of my two gulf coast sources - Katherine at Smoky Mountain Café and Mary at Deep Dish South. I figure I’ll try all of theirs, and a few from Chez, before I bother to look elsewhere. Since this was tomato processing and canning day and we had all of the other ingredients on hand, we decided to go with Mary’s Shrimp Creole - check her site for the complete recipe and lots of pictures. The tomatoes worked out perfectly as we had 7 quarts for a full canner and a quart left. For a refresher on our juice making process, click the link. It’s been a hard year for maters and we’ve canned less than half the juice as normal and no tomatoes – we’ll just have to use the juice for special occasions, like breakfast.

Since we know nothing about this style of cooking we followed her recipe pretty closely, except for the canned tomatoes - we used our tomato juice, as mentioned above. If you follow Mary’s blog, you know she puts Slap Ya Mama Seasoning in just about everything – my guess would be she even puts it on popcorn and ice cream :-). At any rate, we bought some in NOLA (haven’t seen it around here) and ended up with sprinkling it a little lighter than the look in her blog picture and for hot sauce, we used Tabasco. This is the sauce cooking, but my peppers aren't visable as we had an orange one on hand and used it.


This is the shrimp ready for the pot - these smaller ones worked real well for this type dish.


This is my plate ready to dig in.


We sided it with a nice salad with choice of dressing and homemade croutons and figured we didn't need anything else. Everyone really liked the shrimp dish as it was full of flavor and had just the right amount of heat for the normal eater - we had crushed red pepper and Tabasco on the table for the fire breathers. Growing up in the North and on a lot of Italian food, it's going to take me a while to adjust to the Cajun/Creole flavors and rice, but I'm expanding my horizons and looking forward to the next dish - already have it selected. Thanks Mary for a great recipe.

Have a great day and thanks for stopping by.

Larry