Throw Another Shrimp on the 100-Watt Incandescent

G’day mates and matettes. Today marks the first stop on our Easy Bake tour of the world. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, please read this prior post.

So anyway, January 26 marks Australia Day, the official national day of Australia. And what food is more Australian than “shrimp on the barbie?” Well, maybe a koala burger, but my local grocery store didn’t have any koala meat, plus my daughters would probably never speak to me again if I ate a koala.

I used this recipe for the sauce, with a few changes. First of all, I used pre-cooked shrimp. I wasn’t in the mood for sushi and didn’t know how well it would cook them. Along with koala meat, my grocery store didn’t have shallots, so I substituted half a small sweet onion. It was easy to make, but it took a long time to chop everything up. We’ll blame that on below average knife skills.

Shrimp marinating for an hour, which just about gives the Easy Bake time to warm up.

The recipe called for grilling the whole batch at once for about two minutes per side. That, if my math is correct, is roughly four minutes total cooking time. I didn’t have a nice hot grill, however, I had an Easy Bake Oven. That means that instead of cooking them all at once, I could only do three at a time in my little three-inch round pan.

Three shrimp, fresh out of the Easy Bake. Now for three more.

After a few tries (and, of course, having to snack on all the early attempts), I decided to give the shrimp a good ten minutes. Maybe it was overkill, especially considering that the shrimp was pre-cooked, but they seemed better nice and hot. The downside of this was that, to make a plate with four servings, it took forty minutes. That gave most of them plenty of time to get back down to room temperature. So the only workarounds would be to either eat them as soon as they come out or keep your room temperature at about three hundred degrees.

Forty minutes to cook, forty seconds to eat.

So is this an effective way of preparing shrimp? No. Would I do this again? I doubt it. Did I have fun doing this? Absolutely. It’s a great recipe that I’ll try again once my outdoor grill is no longer under two feet of snow.

But for now, Australia, shrimp, and light-based technologies, I salute you.