Easy ad good: Nigella's fried shrimp balls

There's a myth about frying food. It's supposed to be difficult, dangerous, not healthy for you. Wait, that's three, I guess, huh?
Well, all of them CAN be true if you do it incorrectly. Fried things are never going to be something that a doctor recommends for a diet (although, you know, if you can train yourself to eat a little of something like that, and then stay away from other stuff. Annalena does not have that restraint). Dangerous, yes, if you aren't careful, but what kitchen action , what action in general is not dangerous if you aren't careful? Difficult? Again, yes, if you do it wrong. But if you are mindful of what you're doing, frying things can make delicious food, without much work. And you'll be very happy with the result.
In preparation for a dinner party , I was looking for a "cocktail snack" kind of food. I had shrimp in the freezer, and I was remembering Asian style fried shrimp balls. As you are thinking now, I was considering that they HAD to be difficult. I started searching for recipes and, whilst I did not wind up with an Asian recipe, I did wind up with something really easy and really good.
I have written about Nigella Lawson before. She is one of my favorite TV cooks. She never pretends to be a chef, and what is clear is how "HONEST" she is about her food. She gets her hands into it, she makes a bit of a mess of the food and herself, but her enjoyment at all phases of cooking and eating is palpable. There is almost a childlike quality about her work, and that's a compliment. I said "childlike," not childish. I think we should all be aspiring to be more childlike, to get back a sense of simplicity and wonder that we've lost.
I found her recipe for fried shrimp balls. She said it took five minutes to make, and she was right. Sort of... As you'll see in the recipe which follows, there's a wait period of an hour, but in that hour, you can do something else. And, honestly, given her recipe and my experience, I don't think you need that hour.

You start with a pound of shelled shrimp. Please be careful when you are buying shrimp. Ask. Just about all shrimp that you buy today is farmed, some of it using practices that are extremely harmful to the environment. It's very unlikely you're going to find wild shrimp and if you do, don't use them for this recipe. Serve them as they are. And when you buy the shrimp, buy the medium sized ones. Shrimp are not inexpensive, and we're going to chop them up, so getting the big ones, which really don't taste that good anyway, is a waste of your time. So get the medium ones. You can probably get them shelled and deveined too. Save yourself the time.

You need to chop these. I used the pulser on my food processor, but if you have a big knife and you're handy, you can use that, too. You'll probably get a nice, uneven texture, that brings you back to homemade.

What you'll find, in this process, is that the proteins released by this action are somewhat glutinous and gummy and that allows you to do something great: you don't have to add eggs to this recipe. What you WILL have to do is season it. A big pitfall of cooking seafood, in my opinion, is people assume that, because the product came from salt water, it's seasoned already. Actually, most of these critters have less salt in them than land food does. Very few things can live with an internal saline environment for very long, so the filtration system on fish and shellfish is a thing of engineering beauty, and their salt content is very low (Can you tell I used to be a biologist?). So season this stuff. At this point, you should add what spices you want . Nigella's recipe was pushing it toward a mediterranean type of dish, which is fine. I had fresh ginger in the fridge, though, so I grated about a tablespoon of it and added it, with salt, to the shrimp.

Now, here's the part where I'm just not sure. You add and mix together a cup of flour and the shrimp stuff. This gives you a very stiff sticky product that is going to be very easy to fry. I'm not sure that flour is necessary and I may try this recipe again without it, and see how it works. Once you do this, season everything again. Now, let it sit for an hour. As I said above, I'm not sure you need to do this.

When you're ready to cook, get about an inch of oil in a big frying pan. Nigella was using olive oil, but since I was moving away from mediterranean, I stuck to plain old vegetable oil. With a spoon, an ice cream scoop, or your hands, make small balls of the stuff, about a heaping tablespoons worth. You WILL get sticky hands and you will probably have to wet them. Try one shrimp ball to see if your oil is hot enough. You'll know from the hissing. If your oil is hot enough and the balls are small enough, one minute on a side is sufficient time. It really is. Turn them for another minute, then scoop them out and let them drain.

Your total cooking time here IS about five minutes and again, add up the work time. It ain't much.

Now, there are some of you out there who are probably thinking "where's the sauce?" and yes, you do want one here. Mine was homemade mayonnaise with jalapeno peppers chopped into it. Tartar sauce would work, so would soy sauce, and I was looking very hard at a cranberry mustard I have on the countertop. Play with it. Shrimp have a very amenable flavor.

Nigella had suggested making these as a dinner for four people. (Her recipe was actually half of this, and served two). I put them out with drinks for snacks. I got 28 of them from the recipe. Alright, I'll fess up. I got 31, but I ate three in the kitchen. It's great finger food, and I'm sure that it would make a lovely dinner with rice and vegetables, but this is the kind of thing that just yells to me that you should serve it with cocktails. You make the call. I bet you'll like them