Baked Stuffed Shrimp

Baked Stuffed Shrimp is one of my mother's recipes, and she loves it. She always talks about her amazing Baked Stuffed Shrimp like it is a Peruvian delicacy. She gets real excited about it.

I am wagering to guess this is because it requires so much butter you could die just looking at it. Seriously, I'm not sure it's even safe to handle this much butter without a hazmat suit. It's verging on ridiculous. Like her scrambled eggs (read: the only scrambled eggs in the world I will eat), this is what I think makes the Baked Stuffed Shrimp taste good. But it should be borne in mind (not that you can't deduce this yourself), that, like many of my mother's best recipes--and most good Jewish recipes for that matter--the distance between it and healthy is pretty vast.

I would say for the butter, breading, and shellfish addicts, this is a decadent treat to be broken out on special occasions - along with the alka seltzer you will undoubtedly need after eating the equivalent of half a cow's worth of butter. It was also pointed out by a test subject that one could make it less guilt-inducing by serving it as an appetizer, which I think is smart. After all, one Baked Stuffed Shrimp can be a bunch of sinful fun, whereas a whole plate of them is just asking for it.

The upshot is Baked Stuff Shrimp is pretty simple to make. For example, I haven't ever made it before, and yet I didn't screw it up--which you probably are starting to gather is a major coup. Basically, you mix two types of bread crumbs with a shit-ton of butter* and then stuff it into the asscrack split of a butterflied shrimp. Then you dump yet more butter on it for good measure and bake it. Then you eat it and watch your life expectancy go down before your eyes. My mother, being my mother, is fond of giving excruciatingly elaborate, ridiculously painstaking directions on how you do this that make me consider alcoholism as a valid path (First, go to the store. Then look for the 'seafood aisle'. Etc.), but that's the gist.

Please note: my mother specifies two types of bread crumbs - Progresso Italian Style bread crumbs and Pepperidge Farm herb seasoned bread crumbs. My mother also has slavish brand loyalty like no one I have met before. She is the consumer that advertiser dreams of, and will go to her grave telling you how Hellman's mayonnaise (or whatever) is the reason why something is good and if you had to use Kraft then it will simply be inedible. I have a feeling that if you get any Italian Style breadcrumbs (or rather any seasoned bread crumbs), the sky will not fall in on your shrimp.

Also: I'm pretty sure that by the "Pepperidge Farm herb seasoned bread crumbs," she actually means the stuffing mix. If I'm wrong, then she's just specifying two types of seasoned bread crumbs, which are virtually the very same thing, in which case I'm just going to grow a wild hair and say you can probably play with this and use whatever bread crumb/seasoning mix you would like and it will be fine. If I am right, then the fact that you are mixing a stuffing and a bread crumb makes somewhat more sense. And is what I did. If I am wrong, I think no one here will be surprised.

The perhaps best part about the Baked Stuffed Shrimp is not that our friends came over and hoovered it up like a sinful treat, which they did. Or that Josh cleaned his plate, which is what he did. It was that the next morning, and I asked Josh if he liked the Baked Stuffed Shrimp and he said, 'No!' I said, 'But you ate them all.' He said, 'I was hungry.'

This, I think sums him up perfectly. As for myself, I nearly choked from laughing so hard. This is the first time I've heard an avowed 'no' from him on a recipe. In fact, I was so amused by the 'No', that I don't remember why he didn't like it. I think it had to do with the fact that he wasn't a fan of the breading. I happen to like it fine, so here's a point for role reversal.

*this is a metric measure

Objects in photo not for the faint of heart

Rechelle's Artery-Busting Baked Stuffed Shrimp
7-8 jumbo shrimp - butterflied & de-veined
Pepperidge Farm herb-seasoned bread crumbs (stuffing?)
Progresso bread crumbs (Italian style)
Butter

Pre-heat oven to 400 F.

In a medium-size mixing bowl, add 1 heaping tbsp of each type of bread crumbs for each shrimp to be stuffed. Hope the fact that you were not able to find Pepperidge Farm herb-seasoned bread crumbs and instead found Marie Callender's herb-seasoned stuffing does not break the space-time continuum. Assume that the fact that you used 'gargantuan' shrimp or 'very hefty' shrimp or whatever the store called them in lieu of 'jumbo' means they were slightly smaller and therefore accounts for the enormous abount of leftover stuffing you had.

Melt 1/2 stick of butter in 1/4 cup water. Double that because you have 15 shrimp. Also, realize, while typing this, you COMPLETELY FORGOT the water, which would explain why you knew while eating them that your mother's shrimp were more juicy/buttery seeming than yours.

Add to bread crumbs. If bread crumbs are not moist enough, melt more butter and add to mixture. Realize the bread crumbs weren't moist enough BECAUSE YOU FORGOT THE WATER YOU DOLT.

Before stuffing shrimp, place them on the baking pan you will use for cooking them. Even a cookie sheet will do.

Using a large soup spoon, mound stuffing onto it and press it tightly with your hand, which is a fairly futile effort since YOU FORGOT THE WATER. Place spoon with stuffing close to a shrimp and quickly turn stuffing onto shrimp--as opposed to obviously dropping it from a great height and hoping for the best. Repeat until all shrimp are stuffed, then stare mournfully at your bowl of left-over stuffing and contemplate saving it and making up something else to stuff/bread.

Melt 1/2 to 3/4 stick butter or margarine. Pour over shrimp. Know you should also double this to about 1 stick, but be unable to find it in your heart to actually do it to that capacity. Admit here, to your friends who ate dinner on Saturday night, the shrimp should have been WAY butterier.

Bake in 400 F oven for 20 minutes. Get fancy and decide to squeeze some lemon on the shrimp. Eat. Have palpitations. Resolve to exercise more. Move on with life.