My Spicy Noodles with Mairlyn Smith’s Garlic Shrimp

With the whole roof fiasco and then holidays and then holidays suddenly being cancelled, my recipe testing for cookbooks temporarily went out the window. But I am trying to get back on track now!

Here we have my favourite easy dinner: my spicy noodles. If you follow me on Facebook you will know I make these all the time. Lately I have been making them with shiitake mushrooms, spinach and whatever seafood is on sale.

In Mairlyn Smith‘s cookbook Healthy Starts Here published by Whitecap Books she has a recipe for grilled garlic shrimp that I thought would accompany this tasty dish perfectly.

Now my regular readers know I am not a huge fan of lemon in savoury recipes. This one calls for a pound of cleaned shrimp put into a bag and stopped with the zest of a lime and a lemon. I decided just to use lime since I do love lime. Since I was only cooking for me I used much less marinade but will write the recipe out in full for the full 1 lb of shrimp.

For the marinade whisk together 1/2 cup of lemon juice and 3 tbsp of lime juice. (Yes, I just used lime.) Add 6 large cloves of minced garlic, 1 tbsp of canola oil and 1/4 to 1/2 tsp of red pepper flakes. Whisk together and add to the bag of shrimp. Marinate in the fridge for 45 minutes to 1 hour.

Mairlyn says you can find crushed garlic cubes or garlic in the frozen food section. She think it is better than bottled. I always find this weird. I have no issues with mincing fresh garlic but apparently other people despise it.

I do not have a barbecue so I just added the shrimp to the frying pan with some olive oil that was over medium high heat, discarding the marinade. Mairlyn does not mention seasoning the shrimp but I did, I find shrimp really needs it and I just do it automatically.

I cooked the shrimp around 4 minutes per side and added them to my spicy noodles.

Wow! Did the marinade ever make the shrimp juicy and pop with flavour! The lime was so lovely, it really made these taste fresh and zesty.

Mairlyn’s recipe was very simple but there was a lot of text to it. I get the feeling that the writing is really for the new cook (reminding you to wash your hands, how to get juice out of lemons and limes…) which is great for the newbie foodie but for me, I got lost in the text as I was cooking. Although helpful, for someone who knows how to cook it took a very basic recipe and turned it into two pages.

Regardless, once again her flavours were spot on! It took one of my favourite easy dinners and took it to a whole new level! I will be using this technique again. I give this recipe four and a half out of five wooden spoons.