bet you can’t eat just one … Red Curry Firecracker Shrimp with Sweet Chile Dipping Sauce

I have a lot of favorite foods and would be hard pressed to pick just one. If challenged, and it really depends on the day you catch me, I might say fried shrimp. I’ve often said, usually while polishing off an order, if there was a professional eating contest for fried shrimp I could easily take the grand prize. Easily. Breaded, wrapped, battered; I love them all. But my love has a very rigid disclaimer: no crap fried shrimp and certainly none of that frozen garbage and most definitely not those fried in bad oil. That right there should be a prosecutable crime. My latest crush is from a Vietnamese restaurant that wraps the shrimp in a paper thin wrapper and fries them until nice and crispy. Oh my! A quick dunk in a sweet and spicy sauce and I start thinking about ordering another. And another. They go by many names, depending on the restaurant: shrimp spring rolls, fried shrimp wraps or maybe firecracker shrimp. I call them all delicious.

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duck fat and Chinese food … Scallion Pancakes

Sometimes you just want something quick and easy for dinner.  No fuss, no muss.  It’s much better if someone else makes it for you but that’s not always an option, especially if you live alone or the rest of your family is asleep on the couch.  While working in Southwest France for my friend Kate last summer, I often spent the day cooking, working around the property and running errands.  By dinnertime, we were all hungry, dirty, tired and pretty much mentally over being in the kitchen.  It didn’t take Kate and her trusty Guy Friday, Felix, long to introduce me to the perfect solution for  these situations:  scallion pancakes.

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