So this weekend we celebrated Mother's Day on the grill with kabobs, and shrimp and as I was trying to find inspiration I perused thought Mario Batali's Italian Grill cookbook and I came across several recipes that were prepared
Alla Piastra. Which according to Batali is a popular method in Friuli and along the Adriatic coast of Italy. Basically this means cooking on a flat griddle over a fire, in Greece it's a metal sheet called a
Satz, and in Spain its called cooking
ala plancha.
I started thinking to myself, I said self, you cook pizzas, bread, and all manners of flatbreads on the firebricks in your grill, why not cook the shrimp
alla piastra ? So that's what I did.
O.k. so not the greatest photo but I had a hungry mother-in-law waiting for food !
The recipe was quick and easy and delicious
Put your firebricks on the grill and crank that sucker up! Let it get hot while you are doing the marinade.
1 lb raw shrimp(16-20 count) peeled, deveined, and butterflied
( if you don't know what that means, shame on you, look it up)
1/4 cup olive oil
the juice and zest of one orange ( I actually used a tangelo as that is what I had)
1 tblsp each of fresh chopped parsley, mint, and basil
1 clove garlic - smushed
2 twists of fresh ground pepper
put every thing in a large ziploc bag, seal, and shake the blazing bejeezus out of it to mix it all up, unseal the ziploc and squeeze out the air, reseal.
let sit for 20 minutes.
Take the shrimp out of the bag and throw them on the firebrick( throw away the marinade) cook them until they just turn pink, pull'em off and eat them
By the way, turn the firebricks on the side and they make a great stand for kabobs - see below
