Shrimp and Orange Salad

One of my favorite dishes that I ate in Hong Kong over the summer was this Pomelo Salad with Prawns at a nearby Thai restaurant.  A pomelo is a citrus fruit that's bigger than a grapefruit but sweet like an orange.  Here is a previous post on the pomelo.

Anyway, the salad was so unique.  It had grilled spicy prawns tossed over pieces of pomelo and dressed with various yums, the most memorable of which was garlic chips.  Ohhh ho ho ho!  Now you see how this all ties in with yesterday!  Tricky tricky!

In my attempt to recreate or reinvent this lovely dish I was so fond of, I had to improvise a bit.  The garlic chips i could do.  Check.  But where am I going to buy a pomelo in Central Indiana?  And even if i did, it would be darn expensive and I wouldn't be able to afford socks in the winter.  Eh.  That's why I decided to use oranges.  It's close enough.  I could have gone grapefruit, but I think it's the sweetness of the pomelo that made this work so well, and oranges are sweeter than grapefruit.  See how clever i be?

The prawns.  Ah yes.  No seafood in this part of the country can rival even the crappiest of seafood in HK.  There's just no way.  So i decided to go with normal large shrimp for this endeavor.

"He's the guy," as Monk would say.  "And here's what happened."

Ingredients:
-3 oz raw shrimp, cleaned
-1 orange
-1 tbsp olive oil
-1 tsp hot pepper flakes
-1/4 tsp salt
-some garlic chips (see here to learn how to make them)

1.  Clean shrimp.  The best way to do it is to pull off the legs first, and peel the back shell off along with it.

2.  In a small pan drizzled with olive oil, saute shrimp lightly until no longer translucent.  I used the same oil that i used to make garlic chips in.  This way, there's a lovely garlic flavor involved as well.

Don't overcook the shrimp!  They turn to rubber otherwise.  Yes, they will turn into little rectangular pink erasers.

3.  Remove from heat and sprinkle with salt and hot pepper flakes.

4.  Meanwhile, cut the top and bottom off the orange.  Then cut the sides off, downward, in a banana-way.

Expose the fleshy-pulpy part of the orange.

5.  Use a sharp knife to take out sections of the orange.  You will get orange juice everywhere.  It's okay.

6.  Put orange sections in bowl.  Add cooked shrimp. 

Top with garlic chips!

7.  Serve as a side or as a meal with half a whole wheat pita.

I loved this salad, and I devoured it in about 3 seconds flat.  It is a complex mix of sweet, savory, spicy, and garlic (4th flavor), but it somehow all works together wonderfully.

And even though using the actual ingredients to make a pomelo and prawn salad may have cost a fortune, this was really no big cost at all!  The shrimp was just in the frozen seafood section of the local grocery store, and orange and garlic is found almost anywhere.  So there you have it!

Enjoy my little re-creation!  Have a happy Friday :)

For a printable version of this recipe, please click here.