Hello and welcome back to It’s Only Cooking. My name is John Ruska and this is my kitchen. Not a TV studio, not a TV station, not a fake kitchen. So, it is summertime. You might hear the neighbors mowing their lawn, but we’ll try to keep that down and we’ll try and keep the bright sunlight from ruining the shots. Right, Miss Producer? So, here we go. Today, we’re going to make a dish that is a little bit of a twist on shrimp scampy. And today, instead of making a pasta with this traditional flour and egg, we’re going to make zucchini fetuccini. And we’re going to use a few little tools that normally I don’t use a lot of tools because it’s only cooking is about simplicity as well. Um, but you you can use a few tools to make it easier. One’s a spiralizer to make your uh to make your zucchini fetuccini more easily or a device I had which is a uh a food a food cutter out of that you use with your multimixer. So let’s get started with what we have as our misen plas. Of course we’re going to have the fetuccini which is the star of the show. In this case it’s zucchini. Next then we have uh the parsley butter and of course garlic. We’re gonna get that question. How much garlic? As much as you like. It’s only cooking. Uh lemon zest and lemon juice. And of course shrimp because it is a shrimp uh fetuccini. And then we’re going to also have uh some white wine about a/4 cup. We’re going to carefully measure I’m sure. So So this dish is not only healthy, not only can you make it dairyf free, but it is also low low carb and gluten-free. So there we go. We’ll we’ll get started on this now. First thing uh we’ll do is we have to make our zucchini fetuccini. Okay. So there’s a couple different ways. If you don’t have a spiralizer, that’s the easiest way to do these. Um another way would be to use one of uh these objects here, a little a little u peeler, and you would peel and get long strips of the of the zucchini, long nice thin strips. And then you would just slice them and you would get that. We’re going for a little more of a fetuccini look here. So, we’re going to cut the ends off. I don’t have my junk bucket. I don’t normally recommend products unless they’re useful you need, but this product, the KitchenAid mixer, I highly recommend. Um, these things last forever. I say that. And then we bought a reconditioned one and we’ve given it to the producer and so we have a new one because we like the bigger. Bigger is better. So, pardon the volume and the loud. Works so much easier when you do it right, doesn’t it? And what we have here is a plate of beautiful, beautiful fetuccini or zucchini fetuccini. Now, don’t don’t worry if you have a machine like this about the waste from having too big of a core. We can put um you can bake them or you can deep fry them. So, real nice little They’ve even you can see even got little marks to give you a guide so you can cut out nice little discs like this. And again, you can bake them or fry them. What we’re using today are Gulf shrimp um made in the US or farmed in the US or harvested in the US, whatever you want to say. I prefer those over the Indonesian or the Chinese. Uh just there’s some more controls in my mind. But I also like the pink color of these shrimp. Now, a lot of people buy them de vained and cleaned already. You can do that. That’s fine. It’ll work great for this recipe, but I want to show you here. It’s how simple it is to to peel these. Now, these are raw and the the shell comes right off. I like to have a thin stream of running water just to keep my hands kind of, you know, clean and everything. Um, then you just pull the where the feet are, you kind of pull it apart and wrap around and you pull the uh skin right off. Now I want to save the skins because you can use those later to make gumbo make shrimp boufet. You basically put these shells in a stock chicken stock or a broth and uh you boil them for an hour and you’ll get a nice shrimp broth for those recipes. Once you’ve cleaned these shrimp and we’ve cleaned them all, what you’re going to do then I like to de vain them. People eat them whole all the time. It’s not a problem when you get peel and eat shrimp, you do this, but it’s an aesthetic thing that I like. And some people just it gives them an unsettled feeling to be eating the vein. Um, so take a nice sharp knife, hold it with the backside of the the outside curve of the shrimp up, run your knife, and you got to have your knife real sharp. I showed you about the knife sharpener. So, you use this little knife sharpener, and you’re going to get a great sharp blade on your pairing knife. run it right down the back all the way right to where the skin of the tail starts. Then you just pull it apart and reach in there and with running water it works a little easier because it kind of dislodges it and just pull it out. It’s waste. Don’t throw it in with your shells. Just throw it away. And then you just throw these in here. Let them dry a little bit before you cook them cuz you know water’s our enemy. So just leave these in the strainer for a few minutes and they’ll be ready to go once you’re ready to cook. So, first thing we’re going to do is we’re going to get a little parsley. Now, one of the things I I have been a little bit negligent to talk about in past shows is plating and making it look pretty. So, let’s pick a couple of nice parsley’s here to uh to to put on our plate. H we’ll just hold that one aside. So, that one’s going to get held aside. The rest of it we’re going to we’re going to chop up. So, we just want to cut it up so that it looks pretty good in the in the uh dish. You can also tear this up if you choose to, but again, you just get it so that it’s a nice little nice little cross cut of it. Don’t cut it too fine. We’re not mincing it. You want it to you want it to show off in the dish when you finally get it made. Uh the next thing we’re going to do, we’ll do the garlic. Okay. Again, I’ve got four cloves of garlic here. Three cloves, four cloves, five cloves. Um you can make as many as you want. This technique on this, let me just show you because I haven’t done this in a while either. So, there’s an unpeeled garlic. Um, I like to cut the end off just so it’s easier to peel. Um, and that end off. And then you can either take your hand and just push on it like that or you can take the knife and give it a little pound. Uh, once you do that, it comes right out. And and that way now you’ve got your all your that hard crusty part off then off the garlic and you’re ready to go. Now, what we’re going to do is we’re going to chop this. You know, you want to make it reasonably fine, but you don’t have to you don’t have to go fall full good fellas and get the razor blade out and uh cut it up like Paulie was in prison there. So, you can just have it have it be um a nice size. Okay. Oops. Nice nice shot. Okay. So, now we’ve got that. We want to now get a zest of the lemon. Now, here’s the thing about zesting a lemon, and I had always done this wrong. Um, the way it the way it should be done is with the lemon facing you, the zestester in between you and the lemon, because what you don’t want is any of the pith, which is the white part. So, when you take your zestester and you go across it like this, you can see you get nice yellow zest. You want none of the pith. See that? You’re getting close to it there. The reason is that’s bitter. And the lemon zest is what makes this dish along with the lemon juice what makes it lively. And this is going to be vibrant. And if you hold it down, you see people doing it this way on the on the zestester. That’s all bad because you can’t see what you’re doing. You can’t see if you’re getting the pith in there. All right. Now, we’ve got a nice little perfect amount there. Next thing we do is we want some juice from this same lemon. Again, another presentation thing I’m going to show you here that I’m going to do. I’m going to take a nice little slice of that. And I’ll probably take another one so I got two plates of food when I get done. And I’ll just take those and put those aside. We get out our lemon juicer. Put it in the lemon juicer. And we’re going to try and get a good amount of lemon juice here. This has a lot of seeds in it. And this little device also tries to keep out most of the seeds as you can see. So, it works pretty well. What we’ve got is those are all of our pieces ready to go. We’re going to take a real quick break and we’re going to get right back and we’re going to move the cameras over to the stove so we can start doing the cooking. Be right back. again. Come on. If you like to spend time them in the outdoors, then there’s a good chance you could come across a young fawn. And normally young fawns are found alone because their mothers place them there to be safe. A young fawn has very little scent. And the mother will only come in just a couple times a day in order to feed it and leaves quickly so that she doesn’t leave behind her scent. So if you find a young fawn curled up in the grass, that’s actually the safest place for it to be. Enjoy that moment. But don’t touch it or move it. The mother will be back soon. Only licensed rehabilitators can legally possess wildlife. So, please leave wildlife in the wild. For a list of licensed rehabilitators throughout the state, visit michigan.gov/w wildlife. Your Marine Corps’s way of life is to defend the American way of life. Every day, no matter where we serve, we take a stand for our nation, for each other for us all. The few, the proud, the Marines Hi, welcome back. We’ve moved over to the uh stove side. Now I’m using my stainless steel pan. You can use whatever you like if you prefer um cast iron wherever you want. Just be careful with the cast iron cuz this is going to have lemon juice in it. So, it could etch or mess up your um seasoning of your cast iron if you don’t get it kind of right out of there right away and rinse it out right away. So, anyway, um what I’m going to use is a little olive oil in this. Now, olive oil I’m using is it says olive oil there obviously. I like to use a good uh Moroccan coldressed olive oil. a lot of health benefits in it and it it it cooks really well. We’re not going to be at high temperature here and when we do get a little higher, it’s going to have some butter in it. It’s going to have the uh the zucchini in as well, so it’s got moisture. So, anyway, we got this pan about I think it’s about hot enough. You don’t want to do shrimp too hot and they don’t take long. So, we’ll put these guys in and we’re going to burn the daylights out of ourselves. So, we’re going to put these on and very quickly, sorry about that, Mr. Producer. We’re going to salt and pepper these guys to give them a little seasoning cuz there’s not much more to them. Now, the thing about um shrimp and we went through the whole process of how these were cleaned and how they’re prepared is they cook fast. So, we’ll need about a minute on this side. We don’t want to overdo them cuz then they get a little tough. So now we got them all separated so they’re not steaming. You want to get a nice color on them. A little temperature there. All right, let’s give these all a little quick turn. Yeah, those look pretty good. Again, you don’t want to make the fire too hot because what’ll happen is your olive oil will get will start burning and smoking and burning and it won’t taste good. I’ll show you the bottom line. It might get smoke in here because I don’t want to turn my fan on and blow it right away. Now, we’re going to put the uh garlic on that just so that can get uh you want to cook this until it gets a little bit fragrant. Keep it moving, though. Just cook till it gets a little bit fragrant cuz we’re not going to take a long time. Okay, we’re going to take the shrimp off when they’re about ready and they’re very close. Shrimp don’t take long. This has been, let’s call it, 2 minutes. We’re probably done now, but again, when you’re cooking for when you’re cooking for everybody else, you got to make it good for the masses. So, some people like there’s a little more done and not quite as translucent. So, I think we’re looking pretty good. Sorry for the banging, Miss Producer. I should have brought the rubber spatulas or the rubber uh tongs. Okay, those look pretty good. We’re going to pull that out. Plate those up. They won’t they won’t be gone long, but we got to get the fetuccini cooking. And that only takes, like I mentioned before, it only takes about about a minute, minute and a half. We’re going to put a little butter. You can use butter, you can use ghee, you can use any of those things you want to use. Again, you want to get that melted in there. Um, I’m just going to put a little more olive oil just cuz it’s I want to make sure it has some suspense in there. I want to burn my garlic. Okay, now we’re going to get the zest. I’m going to turn my back on you just for a minute so I can get my zest. I’m going to throw that in. I’m going to throw my parsley in. Again, these are quick things we’re doing. I’m going to throw the lemon juice in. And then carefully measured about a/4 cup. Maybe a little more white wine. If you don’t like white wine or you’re not or you don’t want to use, you know, we got to put a little more in there. We got to we got to get some flavor in this. Um if you don’t want to put that in there, you can use uh vegetable stock, chicken stock. Um I have a episode making the beef stock. I’m going to do a chicken stock episode soon. Um you can also in this you can put um a pinch of red pepper flakes if you want to. It adds a little flavor. Um, again, my my wife’s not a fan, so I don’t tend to do it. Um, and then you just drop this this zucchini in here. Again, zucchini is about 99% water. It’s not that high, but it’s it’s got a lot of water in it. So, it will turn just like spinach does when you when you cook it. It’ll cook down a little bit. Let the flame up here so we can heat up. All we’re doing is warming this up. And you can see this is this is starting to pick up all if you were here you could smell it’s picking up all those great flavors and those great smells. I mean you got the lemon and that makes it bright. Lemon makes it bright. You got the parsley that gives a little of the earthiness to it and the um the zucchini is just is just that flavor. Now we throw the throw these guys back in there. Give them a toss around. Just let everything get melded together. for all those flavors. Okay, this is probably done just to perfection. We can put it right back on the plate it came from. I hate to do this over this oven I just cleaned. So, we’re going to take a quick break. I’m going to plate it and we’re going to come back and we’re going to taste it. Here’s to the things that can keep us safe. Those we use all the time with hardly a thought. Those that are silently standing by to save our lives. And now those that we carry with us everywhere we go. Many mobile devices will now bring you wireless emergency alerts. Real-time information directly from local sources you know and trust. With the unique sound and vibration, you’ll be in the know wherever you are. K9 Stray Rescue is Oxford’s own local dog rescue. Each year, they take in hundreds of dogs and bring them into suitable homes. A certified nonprofit organization, K9 Dog Rescue strives to give pound dogs a new leash on life. To donate, adopt, or even volunteer, call them at 248-6280435, or go to their website, dogsaver.org, and click on the K9 Stray Rescue League link. Okay. Hey, welcome back. We’ve flipped back around again during the commercial break here. Um have everything in its serving bowl and we’re going to just kind of go through the plating up process just like just like regular um linguini. You can you can take this out and give it a nice little twirl to get on a plate so it looks kind of pretty. Build a little build a little nest out of it there. And then throw a few of your best shrimp on top so the TV makes it look pretty and so your wife likes it or your husband likes it or your boyfriend or girlfriend or whoever. Hopefully not your dog. So at any rate, we put this on here. Nice couple of shrimp there. And then you remember our friend little Mr. Parsley and the lemon that we saved from earlier. And we put a nice little curl of lemon there. and put a piece of and there you have our dish. So, uh what happens is when you’re cook when you’re cleaning the shrimp and you’re peeling the shrimp and you’re de veaining, uh sometimes the little tails like on this one here will fall off. In fact, we’ll probably use that one that way I don’t have to make a mess. But when you have your dish, it makes it prettier with the tail still on them, but they they don’t add anything flavor. I have a cousin. He eats them. He eats them with the tails on them. That’s for him, not for me. So, um, we’ll get a nice This Miss Producer, you’re going to hate me today cuz I’m putting this whole thing in my mouth with a piece of shrimp. So, the zucchini fetuccini has got it’s better than al dente. It’s got a nice crunchiness to it, but you can still taste the flavor. The butter or the ghee and the olive oil uh really transmits the flavor. The lemon just gives it that zest. It’s bright. It’s light. The shrimp are done perfectly. This dish is a total winner anytime you want to make it. And you can make this a night after work with no effort at all. You can actually make the zucchini ahead in the morning or the night before. just just cover it, put it in the fridge and it it should be fine. Might lose a little more water than normal, but it should be fine. The other thing is if you want to use a spiralizer like I talked about earlier and you do it, it’s going to heat up a lot faster than this does. So, just keep your eye on it so you don’t get mushy. Anyway, thanks again for stopping by to It’s Only Cooking and we’ll see you again next time. Oh, you know the movie’s over. You’re still there. No, we’re going to do a little bit extra here. A little bonus material. Um, remember I talked to you about the cores? Whether you use a spiralizer, uh, it’s going to be a little smaller. It’s going to be about the size of a large pencil. Or if you use this machine I used with uh with the KitchenAid mixer, uh they’re about the size of let’s call it a quarter, but and they got a little deformity hole in it. You know, it’s like it’s just what it is. So, what we’re going to try this is this is live experiment here. We’re going to try it right here. Let me whip those up a little bit better. We’re going to do a quick dip of these. This is good. We’re going to take and I’m just going to dump a bunch of these in there. This is going to be really This is really It’s only cooking. There is no recipe. There’s no formula and I’m not sure how this will work. Um normally when you make um a fried zucchini, you have the the uh outer skin because and they’re lengthwise because that that holds up really well in in frying. Normally you bake these but producer says, “Well, let’s try let’s try pan frying them. See what we get. Cuz who doesn’t like deep fried food? Well, people on diets, it’s probably who had a heart bypass. You might not like them so much, but we’re going to try it anyway. We’re going to see what happens. Get a nice little This is just panko bread. Um u it’s got a a garlic powder, onion powder, um some red pepper flakes just for fun, and a whole bunch of Italian seasoning. Now, we’re going to see if this even will stick. Probably make a giant mess, but we’re going to we’re going to have some fun with it. Ah, let’s put a few more in here. Why not? We’re going fast, so we don’t we don’t overrun our sponsors here and run out of air time. So, I think these are looking pretty good. We’re going to try and wipe our hands off real quick. And I’ll be and I’ll be right back. in there. I can probably fit one more. Oh yeah, look at that. Oh, these like tater tots, man. I bet these really good. Oh yeah. All right, we’re plating these up now. And we’re just trying to make them look pretty. They don’t have to be this this particular you can eat them right off the plate. Um but these be pretty good. I whipped them up just in a little pan um just to see how they are. My producer is going to be the uh acid test on these to see if they’re good. You can put but because the producer is going to eat these and doesn’t care for dairy much, uh you can put parmesan cheese in there. Either fresh grated, which would really be delicious and would kind of melt on it, make it a nice thing. Uh or you can put the uh the stuff that comes in the little jar, the dried stuff, and put that in your mix. Um just kind of coat them. It’s not science, that’s for sure. This stuff is This stuff was whipped up with a moment’s notice. So, throw them in your throw them in your pan and fry them and away you go. This is live cooking at its finest, but it is only cooking. This isn’t even a This isn’t even an unmanned shuttle here. This is just real easy stuff. So, let’s get a taste of this. They’re delicious. They’re delicious. They’re the I would probably if I were to do them, I would cook them just a short time shorter or I’d get them really cold so that they would stay crunchy cuz they’re uh they’re like they’re like hash browns right now. It tastes like a hash brown. A much lower calorie hash brown. Uh, my producer also says they they remind her a bit of calamari and thought maybe a little marinara would be very good with these these little morsels. I, you know, I’m old school. I think they taste like tater tots. So, very good. Nice little touch and a way to use up your scraps and leftovers. Anyway, thank you for staying through for this extra little bit here on It’s Only Cooking. And, uh, we’ll see what other things we can cook up for next time. See you then.
Dining and Cooking