Shrimp Soup, Adventures in Food

Shrimp Soup

Most people who know me know that I like to cook, and I like to experiment with food. Recently, I made Shrimp Soup, a personal favorite of mine for a cold and otherwise miserable day. It’s simple, delicious, and can just sit and simmer in a crock pot all day. Read along and follow these easy steps to make your own little batch of comfort.

Ingredients

To start off, you will need to gather some ingredients. The recipe is fairly straightforward and easily modified. As with anything I make, the main thing to remember is that cooking is an art, not a science. I give approximate amounts of ingredients here because the amount I use changes each time I make it depending on my mood or if I have more or less of a particular item on hand.

You will need :

• A small pack of 2-4 shallots
• 2-3 tbsp of minced garlic, or more depending on your tastes (you really cant have too much garlic, in my opinion!)
• 1 medium sized white or yellow onion
• A bunch of green onions
• Half a bunch of cilantro
• A few cans of diced or chopped tomatoes
• 3 or 4 bell peppers (red, yellow, orange, or mixed)
• A small package of mushrooms
• Cup or two of coconut milk
• A half pack or more of bacon. I use bacon ends to get bigger chunks of fat because who needs working arteries anyways?
• Shrimp or prawns, this should be obvious for shrimp soup. You will want the biggest and best quality you can find, but really any type works. For this particular batch I was lucky to have on hand some Argentinian Red Shrimp. They are like small lobster tails, and don’t show up locally very often.

 

Getting started

There is a little bit of prep work before throwing everything into the crock pot. For starters you need to pre-cook your bacon and shrimp. I use an appropriately sized pan and fry up my bacon ends until they are cooked, but not crispy. Once that’s done, I use the bacon grease to cook the shrimp. Only a couple minutes, keeping in mind they will still heat up and cook a bit in the crock pot with everything else. All we are doing at this point is getting them started, firming them up a bit so that they don’t turn mushy in the pot. With that done, set the shrimp aside with the bacon.

From this point on the rest of the cooking will be done in the pot, so it’s just a matter of adding things in the right order. Shrimp soup is not far off now!

 

Into the pot

Your first addition to the crock pot should be your shallots, onion, and garlic. Naturally, I use some of the bacon grease instead of oil. The goal here is to let these cook down a bit until the onions become translucent or start to brown. This will just help to release all the flavor and sugars from the onions and shallots in a way that doesn’t happen when they are mixed with everything else.

When that is done, then the rest of the fresh veggies can be added. Chop your bell peppers, green onion, cilantro and mushrooms up to whatever bite size you prefer and throw them in. You should end up with half or a little over half of your crock pot full by this point.

 

Cooking it down

Adding all the fresh ingredients to the pot will usually bring down the temperature in the crock pot a fair bit. For this reason, I usually wait to add my liquids and remaining ingredients until the fresh veggies have heated up and cooked down a little bit. Usually I find that this lets more of the natural flavors of the different vegetables seep out and mix into the whole.

 

Last Step, tying it all together

Lastly, we add the bacon, shrimp, coconut milk and tomatoes into the pot to round it all out. I prefer a nice thick soup so I don’t usually add any extra water or broth, but use extra tomatoes instead. If you need to thin it out a bit, you can add some water or broth to your desired consistency, but this soup is meant to be hearty.

Everything is now added, so put the lid on your pot and let it cook for at least a couple hours to really get the flavors blended. The combined sweetness of the bell peppers, onions, and coconut milk give a really unique taste that goes very well with nice big shrimp.

Salt and pepper to taste, and serve your shrimp soup up on a cold and miserable day to cheer yourself and your family up.