Last Spring I made a recipe for pork, tomatoes, and tomatillos and we really liked it. On a recent trip to Portland we went to the abundant Saturday Farmers Market that they have at the PSU campus, and bought all kinds of chiles, tomatillos, and cilantro for some of our Mexican cooking. I thought I'd be making the pork recipe again soon - after all, it's attached to the front of our refrigerator with a magnet!
The other day, this recipe for Shrimp and Tomatillos came up on my i-google screen where I receive a new recipe every day. I had just made a huge batch of green tomatillo salsa, but still had a few left, and decided to try this recipe rather than repeating the pork dish. We had just the right amount of everything after our trip to the Farmers Market except for the queso cotija which we had to run out and purchase. Cotija is a much drier cheese than queso fresco or panela, and some compare it to feta cheese. It goes very nicely on top of enchiladas, casseroles, and in soups.
The whole recipe only has a couple of ingredients: camarones, cebollas, ajo, chiles y tomatillos. It calls for a minimal amount of water to simmer these ingredients in, but you can also use clam juice. I had some vegetable broth on hand and used that. First you cook the onions and garlic for a few moments, and then you add the chiles (serranos, but jalapeños would work, too), and finally the liquid and the tomatillos. When these cook into a nice sauce - and not too mushy - you pour them over the raw shrimp, which have been cleaned, and are waiting for their sauce in a casserole dish. You then break up the queso cotija over the shrimp and tomatillos in the casserole dish and bake it for 20 minutes while the shrimp turn pink. Before serving, you can garnish it with a little chopped cilantro and a mighty squeeze of lime.
We enjoyed this new shrimp dish out on the back patio. Temperatures here in Oregon are getting cooler and we may not be able to eat outdoors much longer. We ate it with some warm corn tortillas and a bowl of guacamole. It was very good and we enjoyed eating something different - something that used some fresh ingredients from the Farmer's Market!
