Can you really make a tasty, gourmet dish with just five ingredients? Cooks can get carried away with layers of flavors and a page of ingredients when sometimes simplicity is the best thing to offer family and guests. In this new column, we’ll share recipes for refined and delicious dishes foodies will be proud to call their own. The best part? Each will be made with – you guessed it – just five ingredients, excluding butter, oil, salt and pepper, as we’re hoping all home cooks have these close at hand. There’s just one rule of thumb: Always choose the highest quality ingredients, as each will stand out in the recipes we feature.

Shortly after we were married, my husband and I went to Spain for two weeks. After mornings filled with walking the oldest streets I’d ever seen, we would go to lunch, split a bottle of Rioja wine and eat olives, cheese, Tortilla Española and Gambas Al Ajillo, shrimp in garlic sauce. After every last juicy, spicy shrimp had been devoured, we would attack the golden oil with plenty of bread. Serve this dish with a simple green salad, plenty of crusty bread, and a good bottle of red.

Spanish-Style Shrimp

Adapted from a recipe by Mark Bittman originally published in How To Cook Everything.

Serves 6

1/3 cup extra-virgin olive oil
4 to 5 large garlic cloves, cut into thin slivers
2 tsp. ground cumin
2 tsp. smoked Spanish paprika
1 tsp. red pepper flakes
2 lbs. shrimp, 15 to 20 per pound
Salt to taste

• Combine the oil and garlic in a skillet over medium heat, stirring just until the garlic begins to sizzle, about 1 minute.
• Add the cumin, paprika and red pepper flakes and stir.
• Raise the heat to medium-high and add the shrimp and a pinch of salt.
• Toss the shrimp in the oil until they are just pink, 2 to 3 minutes, and remove from heat.

More shrimp recipes

By Dee Ryan

Tags: Cooking, How to Cook Everything, Just Five, Mark Bittman, recipes, shrimp

This entry was posted on Monday, January 10th, 2011 at 4:19 pm and is filed under Cooking, Just Five. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.