Emeril's Barbequed Shrimp with Mini Buttermilk Biscuits (Page 325)

• Date: Wednesday, December 13, 2006 -- 9:30pm
• Location: Somerville, MA
• Kitchen: My Apartment
• Fellow Chefs: Ronen, Glen, Matty, Matt, and Ana
• Dining Companion: Jessie
  
• Recipe Rating: B-

I chose this recipe for dinner last Wednesday because it was on my list of 12 recipes that the random number generator created. It was ok. As mentioned in the previous post, we had a little mishap making the sauce, so it would be unfair to really grade the sauce that we ended up with. Ronen and I did manage to salvage it with large quantities of heavy cream and yogurt. After our creative doctoring, the sauce was not only edible, but tasted pretty good. This recipe was fine. We started with good shrimp, and they tasted good once cooked. We couldn't coat them in creole seasoning before searing them, as we were supposed to, since all the seasoning had been added to the sauce. Nonetheless, the shrimp were pretty tasty. The main complaint about this dish was that it wasn't cohesive. The biscuits were fine (a little dry in my opinion) but they didn't seem to fit in well with the dish. Further, there was no point in having the biscuits be so small. As Ana pointed out, they were cute, but larger biscuits, with higher ratios of soft interior to crusty exterior, would have absorbed the sauce better. Overall this dish was fine but I wouldn't make it again.

My mother has an amazing ability to do things with the TV on. For instance, she can read a novel sitting right in front of the TV and it doesn't distract her. I, on the other hand, do not have these skills. I rarely turn on the TV in my apartment, and when I do it's because there is something I really want to watch on it, so I don't try to multitask. At some point in my life I was accustomed to being in a room with a TV on while trying to do something else -- my senior year in college one of my roommates really liked to watch TV in the same room where the rest of us had our desks. Now though, I find the TV really distracting. My parents don't watch an unusual amount of television, but they do have the TV on a large percentage of the time. Emilee told me once that she thought it was the flickering lights from the television that she found distracting, so as long as she couldn't see it, it was possible to ignore it. For me it is definitely the noise, which is worse because the noise travels further. Right now, for instance, I certainly can't see the TV, but I can still hear the news anchor reporting the exciting local Wisconsin news! Maybe I should shut the door...