Too hot to cook! Shrimp with Arugula, Pea Pesto

When the weather is sweaty and your AC is in the basement turning on the oven is not an option. Grilled shrimp, grilled polenta and a no-cook pea and arugula puree seemed like the perfect dinner to not heat up my kitchen and use the quickly wilting spicy greens in my fridge!

Before I get into the how-to let me tell you that, yes, I understand that what looks like pureed green mush might not appeal to everyone. But this isn't mush - the spicy arugula, sweet peas, and walnuts when properly seasoned with a good pinch of salt and fresh cracked pepper and whirled in the food processor with a drizzle of olive oil turn into something YUMMY.

The shrimp was simply grilled with salt and pepper. I made the polenta last night and spread it on a small pan to chill so I could grill it today. If your shrimp and peas are defrosted this meal could come together in 20 minutes flat.

Glass Noodles!

This recipe is a variation of Jaden's recipe over at Steamy Kitchen. I've never used glass noodles before and I had a little bit of trouble finding them in the noodle isle of my Asian Market. None of the labels were in english but, luckily, the ingredients were. In Jaden's post she says that glass noodles are made from potato starch so I just searched for that in the ingredient lists!

See - tricky huh?

I sauteed thinly sliced onions and carrots with chopped garlic, red chile, and ginger. Once the onions and carrots where soft I added the sliced bok choy, de-stringed snap peas, raw shrimp, cooked noodles (just boil them for 5 minutes) some soy, honey and chopped mint. Just stir everything together until the vegetables are heated through and the shrimp are light pink and that's it!

I was hungry and scarfed this down but probably should have followed the recipe more closely. You're supposed to toss the cooked noodles with some sesame oil before you mix them into the veggie. I wish I had done this - it would have made the noodles less sticky.

Check out this neat trick! My julienning skills are less than great but I wanted my carrots sliced really thin for this dish. After peeling the outside of the carrot I continued to peel fat strips with a vegetable peeler - so thin you could see through them - see?

Side note: what do I do with all that sage in the background? It seems like a winter herb to me and I can only think to use it with roast chicken or something involving pumpkin - but it's so full now! What's a summer sage dish?

Anyway, I just cut the strips into thin pieces so they cooked quickly. They ended up being sort of noodle-like in the dish. I use peeler slices of carrot and zucchini like this as a healthy way to bulk up pasta dishes.

This was an easy dish, it just took some time to chop, slice and dice all of the ingredients. It's a great dish to use up all of the about-to-go-bad veggies in your fridge. You could even add leftover chicken or beef instead of the shrimp.