Romantic Dinner - Shrimp Scampi

Javier Quiroga: Hello! My name is Javier Quiroga and I am with To Your Taste Catering. Today, I am showing how to make a romantic dinner for two. Right now, I am showing you how to make an appetizer, shrimp scampi. What you are going to need for this wonderful appetizer is going to be two slices of either French bread or an Italian bread. You are going to need a couple of tablespoons of flat leaf parsley. You will need a tablespoon of garlic chopped or minced. You will need probably two tablespoons of butter and then you are going to need some shrimps. These are the U-15 meaning that you get 15 shrimps to each pound and when you buy these you want to make sure that you get them peeled and deveined and you can get them at any specialty store or just your regular supermarket. You are also going to need a little salt and little pepper. The tools you are going to be needing to make this appetizer are going to be a nice cutting board, a serrated knife for the bread and a sharp chef's knife or a cooking Knife. We also going to need a small saute pan to saute the shrimp. We are going to put a little bit of butter here, as I mentioned it before, probably about a little bit a butter -- like a tablespoon or a little bit more of butter until that melts and you want set heat here, put it at about medium on your stove-top because you do not want to burn the butter either. We are also going to put about a teaspoon of garlic so that can brown and what's going to happen here, we are going saute the shrimp and we are going to use the same butter to coat the bread to finish off the scamping. While we are waiting for that, we can start cutting our bread and you want to cut it in an angle here. This first piece, we don't want to use. Alright, and you want to do just two pieces, this is dinner for two, and you do not want to make them too big either. This is a nice, crusted bread. This is exactly where you want your garlic to be, when it is bubbling like that, alright, it is almost browning here that's exactly how you want your butter to be. Okay, let me just get ready for the shrimp and then you can just go ahead and just lay your shrimp in the butter. Alright, this is going to be a delicious appetizer, and the thing with shrimp they cook very, very fast and as soon as they turn a little bit pink, that means they are ready to go. You do not want to overcook the shrimp because they will become rubbery and not very tasty.

Probably about two minutes per side for the shrimp to cook and be ready. See, when they turn little bit pink like this one here that's the color we are looking for right there. Once the shrimp have that color as they are right now, that's when we add a little bit of salt, and a little bit of fine ground pepper and we are done. Now at this point, the shrimp are ready to go. You want to turn your heat off. As you can see again, once the color and the way they are way, they curl up like that, that means they are ready to go.

I am going to come and pick the these off the pan and I am going to leave the butter in there. Right before you serve your appetizer you want to go ahead and reheat the butter, reheat the butter and then soak the butter on one end. Alright, get some of the browned garlic on it like that, we will put it like that and again, do the same with the other one, alright. Just soak it in only on one side and get a little bit of the butter on there. One really neat trick to do with the shrimp is, when they are like this you want to just put them together like this, kind of like they are married, like that and then maybe you want to add just one extra one here, like that, make it look really nice. I am sure that he/she will love you once you are done with that. So you want to set that up right there and you want to put a little bit of the flat leaf parsley that we have here. You can do just a quick rough chop on it, just a little bit of parsley on top of that. That's how you make this great simple appetizer of shrimp scampi.