Thursday: Chipotle Shrimp, Red Beans and Rice

On Wednesday I developed a craving for chipotle, specifically chipotle with shrimp. I'm not sure where that came from, but it was easy enough to satisfy: there's a good chipotle shrimp recipe in BittmanWorld. My only mod to the recipe was to use a couple canned tomatoes (+ juice) instead of fresh tomatoes since at this time of year fresh tomatoes aren't worth eating. Bittman leaves the chipotle quantity open, I used half a small can of chipotles. The resulting sauce is hot, but not deathly hot.

Since something like chipotle shrimp craves rice, but we've been eating a lot of rice already this week, I jazzed it up by making coconut rice. There's a recipe for Red Beans and Rice (West Indies style) in Jay Solomon's Taste of the Tropics that I based from. I didn't muck around with the red beans recipe, but I wanted strongly coconutty rice, so this is what I did there:

1 cup long-grain rice
2 cups coconut milk
1/2 cup finely diced onion
4 small cloves garlic, minced
fresh thyme
crushed allspice, ground cumin
salt and black pepper

Combine all the ingredients in a heavy pan, cover, and bring to a boil over medium-high heat. Reduce heat to low and simmer until the rice is mostly tender, about 15 minutes. Check it occasionally to make sure stuff isn't sticking to the bottom of the pan. Turn off the heat and let the rice rest for 5-10 minutes.

Jay suggests mixing the beans into the rice, I did not do this.

We had these two delights with a green salad and were very happy with the results.