We eat fried food here only once or twice a month. It isn’t the healthiest fare, but as my friend and clinical contemporary, AD Smith, says (I paraphrase), “It isn’t your unhealthy indulgences that you have 5% of the time that will kill you; it’s what you eat the other 95% of the time.” I don’t go overboard on fried foods except when we are visiting the Texas coast; I am one known to schlep from one coastal town to another indulging in fried shrimp, fried oysters, and fried fish. Well, it’s only a few days a year.
My dinner plan last night was to visit the Fiesta Mart in the early morning today to get live blue crabs, some shrimp, potatoes and corn to make Frogmore Stew. Like so many plans, that one fell by the wayside. I went online to search for “air fryer shrimp” recipes and found one on the Allrecipes site. Susan had bought us an air fryer earlier this year, and the only thing that we have cooked in it is fried pickles. The pickles were passable but nothing compared to the pickles at the Alamo Draft house where we go to see blockbuster movies.
It turns out that we had some frozen shrimp, U-10s I think, in the freezer. Susan subjected them to the recipe that I had found. She adjusted the cooking time to adhere to this machine’s recommendations. It’s an Instant Pot Duo unit.
Susan thawed and deveined the shrimp. She dried them, dipped them in an egg wash and crusted them with Panko (rather than the fish fry mix suggested in the recipe). The result was superb. We had a salad of pickled vegetables, basil pesto on crostini, and air-fryer shrimp. The dip was a Heinz cocktail sauce fortified with shredded horseradish.
