Full English & Shrimp Etouffee

Good morning! Another sunny day in Salt Lake. I am a happy girl again! Watching the French Open final at the moment and multi-tasking to upload my blog. This is the first full weekend I can take a rest after all those intense trips I took in the past several weeks. Due to unexpected delay of my New Orleans trip, I worked full Saturday & Sunday of the Memorial Day weekend to make up my time loss. That one-day Memorial Day weekend was truly not enough. But I used my time well and rewarded myself with some good food.

For me, the fun part after a trip is to cook the yummy food I had. You can buy many souvenirs you want to remember your trip but you can never buy the taste of the food you had or the "mind picture" you took on all the things you saw. The process of finding the right ingredients and recipe might be a difficult task, but the bite of the correct taste to recall the memory of your trip is priceless! So, here are what I made last Monday to remember two of my previous trips:

Full English 

First time having a Full English was during my UK trip last fall. I remember I had it in a pub on the Portoballo Street at the Notting Hill right before I headed to the market. The mushrooms, half tomato, baked beans and blood pudding make this simple breakfast so much different than the traditional American breakfast. You don't need a recipe for this, just the right ingredients. The only things you probably couldn't find in a regular U.S. market are the blooding pudding and British baked beans. I easily found them in a local English market. I am sure you can find a similar place at your city.

Ingredients: bacon, sausage, blood pudding, mushroom, baked beans, two eggs, half tomato and a slide of toast. I even make it better this time with a cup of french roast coffee of Cafe Du Monde from my New Orleans trip.

Full English I had at Notting Hill

Full English I made at home

Baked beans & blood pudding

Shrimp Etouffee

I had this dish less than a week before I made it at home. I still had fresh memory on the taste, which is prefect. Ingredients weren't hard to find except the Creole Seasoning, a seasoning used by the French & Spanish colonist settlers in Louisiana. I end up making my own. The recipe itself was hard to find. Just by looking at the ingredients and the picture of some of the recipes I found, they are just not right. Good thing of making something you had before is you know what you are looking for and you know what to expect. You will never ask yourself, "Is this suppose to look like this?" or "Is this what it suppose to taste like?".

After spending some time to search for the right recipe, I found this awesome Nola Cuisine blog. I've believe the blog owner is a local of New Orleans. His blog provides many New Orleans cuisine recipes. If you are like me and want to have some taste of New Orleans, I highly recommend you to check out his blog. So, I am not going to take credits of his recipe. I used his Shrimp Etouffee recipe. I did make some adjustments on his recipes by substituting 1 lb of shrimp with 2 tilapia fillets and the fresh parsley with the dried one. It was just because I don't have enough shrimp at home and I forgot to buy the fresh parsley. As for the taste? It was very close to the Crawfish Etouffee I had at Acme. I might adjust the Creole Seasoning a bit next time as it was a bit too "peppery". I would have make a Crawfish Etouffee instead if I could find fresh crawfish here in Salt Lake. But this is good enough. I was very happy for the results. Can't wait to make it again!

Crawfish Etouffee at Acme, New Orleans

Shrimp Etoufee I made at home

Homemade Creole Seasoning

Happy blogging - Vee