How To Make A Quick Shrimp Dinner With Flavored Rice

February 24, 2017

A Quick Shrimp Dinner With Flavored Rice has been on my mind for over a week now. I watched an episode of The Kitchen. Sunny Anderson, one of the ladies on the show, wrapped shrimp, compound butter, and some chopped onion into Reynold’s Wrap and baked it in the oven for 8 minutes. Wow!

How To Make A Quick Shrimp Dinner With Flavored Rice — Quick Shrimp Dinner

Last night, the timing was right. Dave was off on another of his fishing excursions and dinner would only be for the two of us. I took the shrimp from the freezer and placed two dozen in a bowl of cold water to thaw.

The last time I went to Sam’s Club, I found this bag of uncooked Jumbo Shrimp. There are 31-40 shelled and deveined shrimp per pound and this is a 2-pound package found in the freezer section. (Love this! You can remove what you need, zip it shut, and put the remainder back in the freezer.)

In the past, I have always used the shell on shrimp found in the meat department. They are bigger and that is what I always use for the ‘Baked Shrimp Scampi’.

Compound Butter for the Shrimp Dinner

First, prepare to make the compound butter. Leave a stick of butter on the counter to come to room temperature. It makes it easy to combine the ingredients.

Place the butter in a small bowl. For this compound butter, chop up about 1/4 cup of fresh parsley. Mince 4 garlic cloves add. Add the juice from half a lemon and 2 teaspoons of lemon zest. Add salt and fresh pepper and stir well to combine the ingredients.

Place the compound butter in the fridge to firm up a little before it’s needed. Compound butter can be kept in the fridge for a week or two or frozen for a couple of months. If you freeze this, wrap the plastic in foil and it will be better protected.

We had a little leftover and wrapped it up for use later. Be sure you write on it what it is!

Place twelve shrimp in the center of two pieces of heavy-duty Reynold’s Wrap. Then sprinkle sliced green onions on top of the shrimp.

Top the shrimp with a good-sized dollop of compound butter. Then, add salt and fresh pepper.

Next, pull the two sides of the wrap together, fold over three times, and seal tight.

Fold the two open ends up and seal the packets. Now, they are ready to go into a preheated 450° oven for 8 minutes. (It actually took this size shrimp 10 minutes to cook. I checked at 8 minutes and they weren’t quite done.)

Could it get any easier than this? Yes, the flavored rice is. Sunny served the shrimp with grits. Yummm! Yes, but David doesn’t like grits. So I decided to make some flavored rice with this shrimp dish.

Lemon Parsley Rice

1 cup long-grain white rice
1 cup chicken broth
1 cup water
1/2 tsp. salt
1 tsp. compound butter
2 Tablespoons chopped fresh parsley
1 teaspoon grated lemon peel*

In a saucepan, heat rice, chicken broth, water, salt, and compound butter to boil over high heat. Lower heat and simmer for 18 – 20 minutes, until the liquid is absorbed and the rice is tender.

Remove from the heat and add the chopped parsley and the lemon peel. Stir to combine.

After the rice has been cooking for 10 minutes, place the foil packets with the shrimp in them in the preheated oven. (As I said before, they actually took 10 minutes to cook through.)

With 2 minutes of cooking time left, I popped some baby peas in the microwave to cook.

Let me tell you when these packets are opened, the smell is amazing! To serve, spoon a generous portion of rice on the plates and then top with shrimp and all of the butter goodness. Spoon baby peas to the side of the rice.

Dave and I both thoroughly enjoyed this simple and easy dish! Quick Shrimp Dinner with Rice, we will have it again, soon!