It was easy to get my husband fed tonight as he had a leftover catfish fillet. I baked some frozen onion rings and reheated the filet for the last 12 minutes. He also had some cantaloupe.
Then it was time for the fun part. I made salt and pepper shrimp from this recipe with a couple ideas borrowed from this recipe from the epicurious site. I used only enough oil to come a bit over halfway up the shrimp and flipped them over to cook the other side, and I used salt and pepper seasoned cornstarch to dredge the shrimp before cooking. I also did not have cilantro, but did have flat leaf parsley so that's what I used. I'm sure it would have been even more delicious with cilantro, but these were GOOD!
The heads, legs and tails just shattered in my mouth, so it more a case of crunching up the entire head rather than sucking anything out of them. If you do make this with head on shrimp, make sure you do not skip the instruction to snip off the horns and antennae. This is pretty easy with a pair of kitchen scissors, but it is critical. Those suckers are sharp!
I found the shells from the body section were not crisp enough to crunch up enough, so I started peeling off that parted after devouring the heads, legs and tails. Next time I might peel the bodies first, as they were harder to shell after frying than raw shrimp is. Hmmph. That would mean losing the legs, which were one of the best parts, so maybe not.
I had exactly one pound of shrimp, and there were twenty-six of them. One time when we brought back head on shrimp from New Orleans, I weighed them before and after beheaded and shelling, and the shelled shrimp was only half of the before weight. While 26 per pound sounds like largish medium shrimp, when you are talking about headless ones, I think these were sufficiently small for the recipe.
I also fried the last two cremini mushrooms and one of the green tomatoes and had some cantaloupe. I was only able to eat a little less than half the shrimp, so I hope they will be good tomorrow.
An entire roll of Dollar Store paper towels bravely gave their lives in the preparation of this dinner between blotting the shrimp dry before dredging and then blotting the oil from the finished fried food.
Edit: I forgot to add that since I was using less oil in a deep 12"/30 cm skillet, I split the shrimp in two batches to keep from dropping the oil temp, as suggested in the epicurious method.