Sunday Gravy with yeah right: Cajun Shrimp Boil! And by boil I mean foil.

Good morning early risers!

Welcome back to another edition of Sunday Gravy.

As we enter the home stretch of the off season shit gets real.

This is the time of year when I help you start girding your loins for the upcoming NFL season.

You do “gird your loins” yes?

These last few episodes of Sunday Gravy will give you an idea or two for food that you can serve on an NFL Sunday. Emphasis will be on “easy to prepare” and “goes great with beer.” Cuz that’s what standard NFL Sunday food should be all about.

Can I get an “Amen?”

Fuckin’ A.

Here we sit right in the middle of pre-season week 2. In fact my boys will be playing later on today, at least for a quarter or two and the drumbeat for the new season is all loud and rowdy.

Almost there folks, almost there.

Inspired by last week’s recipe of red beans and rice, I decided to continue cooking in my now all too familiar Southern style.

The inspiration for this meal goes back to my visits to New Orleans. Holy shit, do I love New Orleans. You can wander the French Quarter and as you step over the puddles of various bodily fluids you will also catch a whiff of something incredibly tasty in the air. A spicy, briny, enticing aroma of creole seasonings, seafood and garlic.

Crawfish boil!

Right there on Bourbon Street they have restaurants that bring their boil outside. They’ll fire up a big ass pot of water, dump in the seasonings, add some potatoes, corn on the cob, some sausage and then finally your mud bugs. They get dumped in live and if you listen very closely, you will hear the little bastards screaming as they are boiled alive!

All for your culinary pleasure.

They do some shrimp boil too and you can get a big styrofoam container of all the tasty bits served right to you on the street. You just need to find a place to sit, get yourself a “to go” beer from one of the many walk up bar windows – fucking awesome invention – then sit down and throw down.

Hell, there are restaurants all over the country that do that shit now. We have these guys out here in Southern California. Same concept but these motherfuckers will charge you something like 60 bucks for that shit.

We can do better than that!

At home! A hell of a lot cheaper! And goddamn easy as FUCK to do!

Let’s do that!

This meal is the very nexus of super easy to prepare and super damn delicious to consume. It is so easy that I guarantee it will be made on more than one upcoming NFL Sunday in the “right” house.

Cajun Shrimp Boil! (Foil) Packs

1/2 pound of large or jumbo shrimp per person

Some sausage about 1/3 to 1/2 pound per person

2 red or white potatoes per person. Peeling optional

1 ear of corn on the cob per person

1/4 cup of melted butter – divided

1 tablespoon of olive oil per pack

Salt and pepper to taste

1 1/2 teaspoons of Creole/Cajun seasoning per pack – Essence again

1 teaspoon of Old Bay per pack

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Sounds simple? It is simple.

Let’s do this shit.

Preheat your oven to 400 degrees.

Get yourself some shrimp.

That’s a pound and a half of jumbo shrimp since I made 3 foil packs today. Why yes, we DID do shrimp a couple of weeks ago.

That’s our shrimp scampi right there. Ain’t it a beaut?

Please refer to that scampi recipe for the proper cleaning technique for your raw shrimp. Because we’re gonna do that right now.

The best way to keep your shrimp fresh and ready is to put them in an ice bath while you prep the rest of the ingredients.

Now let’s get to the potato action. Procure yourself some potatoes.

These are white potatoes, you can use red potatoes or even Yukon Gold. We need a waxy potato for this application and russets would be a little too mealy for this dish. You also have the option of peeling or not peeling your potatoes.

We peeled ours today.

Now all you need to do is cut them in quarters.

After extensive testing in the Sunday Gravy test kitchen it was determined that the core ingredients of today’s menu may not all cook to proper done-ness at the same time and temperature. Therefor prior to assembling your foil packet we will need to nuke the bejesus out of the potatoes first. Microwave will be fine. Just give them 6 minutes on “high” and everything will cook and play together nicely.

Next grab yourselves some fresh corn on the cob.

Yep, this is the proper time of year for what I call “California” corn.

Check this shit out.

While indeed fresh and tasty, as a former resident of Iowa I can tell you that this type of corn would be fed to the hogs. You simply CAN NOT get deep, rich all yellow corn out here and it’s definitely a source of aggravation to me.

Fuck it, it’s fresh and still pretty damn tasty.

Let’s cut that shit into chunks OK?

Confession time: that shit was a whole lot harder to do than expected. I’ve got a very sharp, big ass butcher knife that you’ve probably noticed in the background of more photos than I can count and it took a serious amount of pound feet of effort to hack that fucker. It made a “chunk” sound that must have been very similar to the sound the guillotine made when it lopped off the head of Marie Antoinette’s entitled ass.

It’s doable but expect a little more effort than expected.

Know what was easy to chunk up?

That sausage. Refer back to the linked recipe for the red beans and rice for sausage discussion. Again in New Orleans this would be andouille sausage but we can’t get that here. This is a spicy smoked sausage but Kielbasa would work out too. Cut the sausage into chunks. That rope of sausage went into the 3 foil packs today.

Before assembly go ahead and melt the butter.

I really don’t know why I feel compelled to show you photos of butter every time I use it but here we are.

The ingredients are all prepped and ready.

When the oven is ready it’s time to assemble.

Get yourself a sheet of heavy duty aluminum foil and tear off a good length, 14-16 inches or so and let’s get the ingredients on there. It really doesn’t matter the order of the ingredients but I’ll show you what I did.

There’s our peeled, quartered and nuked potatoes.

Then we have our shrimp up next. There’s no specific art and science to this, just disperse them evenly about.

There’s our chunks of corn getting to the party.

There’s the hot spicy, sexy sausage action. Quick note here: even if you aren’t a fan of sausage and feel like you can skip this part, do yourself a favor and cook with it anyway. We really need to have that pork fat to make the dish complete. What kind of reprobate doesn’t eat sausage anyway?

Next we season everything.

This is where you can adjust your spice level to match individual taste. If you’ve got someone who’s not a fan of too much heat – remember there’s a good amount of cayenne in that “essence” – then just season lightly with the essence and give it a little more Old Bay. I dig the heat and added a bit more essence to my foil pack. Be sure to use a good amount of the salt and pepper since potatoes and corn are just begging for that shit.

Next pour on some of the melted butter and a drizzle of olive oil. Don’t be timid, get some on everything.

Now all we have to do is seal that fucker up tightly in the foil.

Take a gander right there. We want to bake these packs on baking sheets lest any of the juices spill out.

Into the 400 degree oven the packs go for just 30 minutes of cooking time.

Some of the many cool things about today’s dish include; you can pre-make them and maybe take along when you go camping or to the beach. You can grill these outdoors on your gas or charcoal grill instead of heating up the house. These are portable and the foil can be used as a serving dish AND can be used to wrap up the waste. Super fucking easy clean up.

Let’s take another look at the finished product.

Fuck yes. Briny shrimp, spicy sausage, rich dense potatoes and the crisp corn all covered with Cajun/Creole seasonings. The beauty about combining these ingredients together, along with the butter and olive oil, is the juice that they make. The juices will cook from the shrimp and the sausage, even the corn will impart some juice and you absolutely MUST have a piece of crusty bread to sop those juices up with. Shit man, you’ll probably eat about 4-5 pieces of bread.

So. Fucking. Delicious.

So. Fucking. Easy.

Absolutely customizable and absolutely ANYONE can make this.

Serve with copious amounts of beer.

Hell yes this is going on the menu this NFL season!

You are always appreciated around these parts folks, and it’s always a pleasure to have you here.

Two more episodes to go.

Football soon come.

Have a great day and I’ll see you next week.

PEACE!