Another Tippens Kitchen Disaster

Hey, everyone! Missy here to share another cooking disaster with you. :) I guess I have no pride. LOL

First, I bought some beautiful wild caught North Carolina shrimp. I decided I wanted to make a curry dish. I started with a Ree Drummond recipe from Food Network. Coconut Curry Shrimp.

I started by peeling and de-veining the shrimp. I had a pot of water ready to heat for the boil-in-bag rice. But my hands were messy, so I asked hubby to turn on the burner.

WELL… he turned on the wrong burner. He turned on the one that had the bag of rice sitting on it! Which, I didn't notice immediately. But then I started smelling something bad and turned to find the plastic melting on our ceramic burner. I immediately reacted by grabbing the bag, which, of course, had a big hole in it by then so dumped the family sized bag of rice on the red hot burner. (Wish I had thought to get a photo!)

My poor husband felt awful as I quickly scraped the rice off the burner and tried to salvage most of it (except for the grains that were blackened or stuck to plastic). And if you thought burned food was hard to clean off a cook top, well, melted plastic is ten times worse!

Anyway, I rescued enough rice to add to the boiling water on the CORRECT burner. And I set about cooking the shrimp.

Melt 2 Tbs. butter in a skillet. Then add the shrimp (I had about ¾ pound). Cook 2-3 minutes, turning halfway through. Don't overcook it!

Beautiful!

Remove the shrimp to a bowl or plate. Add the onion (I used about half a sweet onion) to the skillet and cook until translucent. Then add a couple of cloves of chopped garlic. Then sprinkle on ½ to 1 TBS curry powder (to taste) and cook a couple of minutes.

Reduce heat to medium and add the coconut milk. I don't know how much I added since I used it from a carton rather than a can. But I probably used about 2 cups.

BUT (warning, there may be another kitchen disaster coming)…

But something smelled funny. So I tasted the sauce. And it was TERRIBLE. ICK.

I went looking for the cause, and my lime juice was way past expiration. Plus, the honey smelled off.

So, oh joy, I threw the sauce away and started over. I'm so, SO glad I hadn't added the shrimp yet.

BTW, if you're lucky, you can skip the step where you start all over again. LOL

Since I was starting over with NO lime juice and NO honey, I decided to wing it. I grabbed some cashews and an avocado I had been thinking of using anyway.

Remove the pit by slapping a knife into it and twisting. Then good luck getting the pit off the knife! :)

Quarter the avocado, and slice cubes right in the skin. Then once it's cubed, scoop it out of the skin. You have a nicely cubed avocado.

So I added the shrimp to my new batch of sauce, then added in the cashews and avocado.

Then I stirred in the almost-burned rice (and prayed there were no plastic chemicals in it!). :)

Believe it or not, it tasted pretty good! But boy, what an ordeal. I'm hoping my next cooking adventure doesn't involve melted plastic, burned rice grains or bad ingredients. :)

NOW, my PSA: Go check all the dates on your rarely used items!

And (adding to what Ruthy said yesterday): The contemporary novella collection, Coffee Shop Romances, has now released as well!!

www.missytippens.com