Bon Appetit Shrimp Po' Boy

As I've stated too many times to count, my oldest son is obsessed with seafood. Whenever I take him grocery shopping, he runs to the seafood counter and points out all the food that I need to make him for the week. His absolute favorite seafood item is shrimp. Meals that claim to feed 6 people, feed barely four when my five year old gets his hand on the shrimp portion of the dish. I make a lot of stir-fry dishes using shrimp, since they are delicious and low in fat. However, my entire family also loves homemade fried shrimp, so I am always on the look-out for new fried shrimp recipes. Recently, the June issue of Bon Appetit magazine had a recipe for Shrimp Po' Boys that looked easy and like something that my family would enjoy.

The longest part of this recipe is the deveining and shelling of the shrimp. I enlisted the help of my five year old with this task for the first time, and he did great. Of course, I used the knife to devein, but he was able to very successfully shell the shrimp with little help. It took us about 35 minutes to prepare the 1 1/2 pounds of shrimp, but without little kitchen helpers the task could be completed in a much shorter amount of time. This recipe has 13 ingredients, not counting the toppings. I had the majority of the spices already in my pantry cupboard and was able to get the remainder at my local grocery store, with one exception. I was unable to find any French rolls, so I had to substitute sub rolls. I know that this substitution changes the authenticity of the recipe, but as a home cook with two kids, I use what I have available. I used homemade dill pickle spears that I had made a couple of weeks back and left off the tomatoes because of my family's preference against raw tomatoes on sandwiches. Make sure to use plenty of oil to fry the shrimp or they won't crisp up effectively.

The shrimp in this recipe turned out delicious. The one change that I wish that I would have done, was to make the remoulade recipe available on Bon Appetit's website. Instead, I used mayonnaise and I felt that the dish would have been even better with a traditional remoulade. Overall, the recipe was delicious and I preferred the shrimp batter in this recipe to any of the others that I have tried. This was a very popular dish with my two kids, and would be a kid friendly way to introduce little ones to seafood.

For the recipe go to Bon Appetit Shrimp Po Boy.