A couple of weekends ago, Daniel and I had dinner with a friend at a new-ish Greek restaurant called Thea, down in Santana Row. I had a dish described as "roasted prawns pressed in Greek spices", which was really yummy - the shrimp had an interesting smoky flavor, and were just generally nice and tasty.

It was good enough that I decided to try to recreate the recipe. What I came up with was not an exact clone, but it was quite nice.

Herb-Crusted Roasted Shrimp
Ingredients:
12 o.z. bag frozen peeled and deveined medium shrimp.
A fairly large quantity (a few tablespoons?) of mixed dried herbs and spices - I used herbes de Provence and fresh ground pepper, but I think you could use almost anything that you think would taste good on shrimp. I also added a bit of salt to my mix, which proved to be entirely unnecessary - I think the frozen shrimp were fairly salty to begin with.

The process:

1. Preheat the oven to 450 degrees F. Thaw the shrimp.


2. Lightly coat a baking sheet with cooking spray.


3. Put your herb/spice mixture in a shallow bowl or dish.


4. Pat each shrimp dry on a paper towel, then press each side lightly into the herb/spice mixture so that it picks up a coating of herbs. Then place the shrimp onto the baking sheet.


5. Put the baking sheet into the oven and roast the shrimp for 5 minutes.

I served these on a bed of beluga lentils with a side of baby bok choy sauteed with garlic and balsamic vinegar. Yum. (Now I just need to come up with something creative to do with a bunch of baby bok choy. I got a 2 lb. bag of the stuff for 59 cents a pound at one of the local Asian markets. Too good to pass up. Only problem is, I haven't found a way to cook it so that Daniel will eat it, so I've either got to polish it all off myself, or find a way to make it Daniel-palatable. Sounds like a job for Epicurious.)