I’ve never been one to spend hours in the kitchen to develop a sophisticated dish. You won’t catch me perfecting the minutia of spice mixing, or sharpening my knives to get the perfect julienne. And frankly, I lack the inner peace of a Buddhist monk to spend hours intricately crafting something beautiful that I’m just going to eat. Lucky for me, the 80-20 rule is a thing even in the food world. I’ve managed to come to a few recipes that hit a good spot for my preferences when considering taste, health, yield, cost, waste, repeatability, and effort.
This is one such recipe.
You’ll notice that I buy frozen peeled deveined shell off shrimp because I will not be bothered. Purists might point out a couple of things which I address:
- Where’s your chicken? You may add chicken if you like, I often do. More and more I’ve left it out because I like the ratios of the ingredients I get with this. Plus cutting raw chicken adds a pain point. While I’m not strictly optimizing for ‘minimal level of brain activity’, I don’t think the inclusion of chicken adds enough to warrant the hassle. I find that when I eat with the chicken and get a bite my thought is often ‘Ah man, that one was a chicken bite. Hope the next one has sausage or shrimp’. Hence its removal.
- Celery? Yeah, celery fine too, and I’ve been meaning to give it another chance in the dish I just forget while I’m at the store. My issue historically is that I would always buy way more celery than would go in here and it would go to waste.
- Is that BASMATI rice?? Look, I married a brown girl. We have basmati rice. It’s fine.
Yeah, we sauté in the instant pot here. Add some oil, onions go in first for about 2 minutes until softened a bit.
On the left is the onions when the sausage goes in. Sausage hangs out for a bit until you see that you’ve started building up the brown goodness on the bottom, then toss in the peppers.
Just dump in some spices, like DUMP. large volume here so we’re not too worried about a heavy pour unless its the paprika or if you accidentally drop half a thing of red pepper flakes (which I may have done a few weeks ago)…
Anyway, let the veggies cook for a bit while you measure out a bit more than a cup of broth. I normally use salted chicken stock but this is what I had and I’m convinced it makes 0 difference. You want to turn the pot off to stop the sautéing. But you gotta pour the broth in while its still hot cus you have to deglaze ie scrape the carmelized burny bits off the bottom with your spoon so it goes into the water.
Next we measure out about 1.5 cups of rice and put that in the pot with the liquid. Push down with spoon so all the rice is wet. The volume should work out that it all sits in line with the liquid. Aside: this pushing down action with the heavy meats etc, plus the next step does lead to rice that is a little softer than you may find desirable. Like it wont expand to get super nice plumpy stiff grains, but I think this works for the dish.
Anway last step here is to open a can of crushed red tomatoes and layer it on top. Cook under high pressure for 3 minutes. You’re going to let it depressurize itself so it’s going to take it like 20 minutes. While that’s happening you get to prep the shrimp.
Cooking from frozen is totally fine, but depending on the brand some times the frozen shrimp are in like an actual brick of ice. that’s not good. Thaw them enough that they aren’t literally insulating each other. Some brands also have higher water content than others so strain them or be careful. a little water is unavoidable since they’re covered in ice but you don’t want a pool. We’re trying to sauté not poach. Other than that, dump in the whole pound bag and season as you did the pot. They’re done cooking when the thickest part of the shrimp turns opaque.
When they’re done, turn the heat off, strain again, and set the shrimp aside while you wait for the pot to de-pressure. If you cooked from a solid brick of shrimp ice, then they’ll cook at different times and you’ll have to pull them out individually.
Hey look at that it turned out okay. Stir it up, toss the shrimp in, stir it up some more and you’re good to go.
