Red Curry Seafood

Well it’s been a while since I last posted a recipe. It’s not that I haven’t been cooking (in fact I have a large backlog or recipes that I have to post), but I’ve been busy with hosting the family for the Holidays, planning for travel in the USA and Canada, and then taking the trip with my girlfriend from Korea. So posting recipes took a backseat to other more important tasks.

I choose this recipe to start this year’s postings because I prepared this dish for Valentine’s Day. It’s really a very simple recipe and it doesn’t take long to prepare. My usual habit for posting recipes is to prepare a dish and then take pictures, recounting and recording the recipe at a later date. In the meantime, while taking pictures, the dish gets cold. In this case, it didn’t seem very practical or particularly romantic to tell my girlfriend to wait and not eat until I took pictures while the dish gets cold. So we ate and I took the pictures of the leftovers the next day. Luckily we didn’t devour everything or there wouldn’t be anything left to take a picture of.

Enjoy!

Seafood Pasta Salad

 

This recipe was updated on 11 July 2013. Some instructions and ingredient quantities were changed, and metric measurements added.

I was thinking about making a pasta salad with seafood, and low and behold, shrimp came on sale. So my timing was good since you can really use any available seafood to make this salad. I decided to add two “fake” seafood ingredients, imitation crab flakes and imitation shark’s fin. Most people are familiar with imitation crab flakes, but probably not with imitation shark’s fin. I’ve always used imitation shark’s fin in soup, so this is the first time I’ve used it in a salad.

Imitation shark’s fin is a gelatin-based product that is made to resemble the real shark’s fin long transparent cartilage strands. Both the real and imitation shark’s fin have no taste, but it’s the texture that makes it an interesting ingredient. The imitation version comes packaged frozen and when defrosted, look like transparent brown noodles. I prefer to use the imitation given how the real version is obtained.

Another interesting ingredient is fresh seaweed. You can get fresh seaweed (and the imitation shark’s fin) at your local Asian market and it comes as long strips or tied into bow-ties. I used the bow-tie version in this dish and it gives an added crunch to the dish, as well as a distinct flavor.

Enjoy!