Wednesday, September 28, 2011

End of Summer Tomato & Zucchini with Shrimp Bake

It's an end of summer tradition, all the tomatoes in the garden decide to become ripe at once. So I've been eating a lot of tomatoes and zucchini. I was looking for a new recipe and had some frozen shrimp in the refrigerator. A quick internet search brought up a few recipes so I combined them here and there, substituted for a cheese I prefer, added the garlic because I'm a garlic fiend, and gave it a shot. I have to say it turned out really tasty!

Here's what I did:
  •  Diced one zucchini and 8 tomatoes into approx. 1 inch chunks and combined them in a large bowl.
  • Sprinkled them with cayenne pepper, minced garlic and salt and stirred them all up. 
  • Rubbed a baking pan with butter and poured the mixture into it. 
  • Covered the pan with foil and baked at 350 for 30 minutes. 
  • While the  mixture was cooking I thawed frozen shrimp under cool water and peeled it. 
  • Took the pan out of the oven and heated the oven to 400 degrees while I mixed in the shrimp to the zucchini and tomato mix. 
  • Covered the dish with monterey jack cheese and put it back in the oven for another 30 minutes. 
  • After 30 minutes I turned off the oven and uncovered the pan letting it stay in for another few minutes until the cheese had a nice brown, but not burnt.
Thoughts for next time:
I might try to leave the pan uncovered after adding the shrimp next time because it came out with a lot of liquid. This might be partly because I had used very ripe, juicy tomatoes from the garden.
But overall results.... YUMM!