Notes from Stella's Kitchen
Summer is a really great time of the year here in south Mississippi even though the temperatures are high and the humidity higher. As transplanted Yankees, Paul and I have finally adjusted to and have learned to love the long, hot summers. The summers are also nice because we tend to get visitors from up North and we thoroughly enjoy having them come and enjoy our part of the country.
Recently, my cousin Helen and her husband Bob from Pennsylvania made their first trip to Mississippi to visit us. Their children are now grown and out of the nest so they now can do a little traveling.
In sharing the local splendors with them, we decided to have a shrimp boil. We traveled over the bridge to Pass Christian to the harbor to find a shrimper to find some shrimp to cook. There were many boats in the harbor as not too many shrimpers are working the waters of the Mississippi Sound. It has been a bad year for shrimp and Shrimping and the cost of gasoline has made it difficult for them to go out and make a profit. However, we got some beautiful shrimp at a very reasonable price and came home to boil them.
We had all the necessary ingredients - the shrimp, the potatoes, the corn, some Old Bay seasoning and we cooked them to our delight; however, we had plenty of leftovers. So we decided that we would make a salad for the next day. Hence, the shrimp boil salad.
All the ingredients have already been cooked and seasoned nicely. All you have to do is to add a few other fresh ingredients and a binder (mayonnaise of course-if you were in Pennsylvania, you would use Miracle Whip Salad dressing). We quartered the potatoes, shelled the shrimp and cut the corn off the cob. Add the ingredients to a bowl and fold in the fresh ingredients and other seasonings. You end up with a wonderful potato salad enhanced by shrimp and fresh corn. It was very, very good and it disappeared the next day at lunch.
Helen and Bob decided that Mississippi isn’t a bad place to live and the food is just great, even leftovers!
Try the salad the next time you have a shrimp boil - if you have leftovers. If you don’t have the leftovers, start from scratch and get the full, rich flavors of the boil anyway. The seasonings will even be better when left overnight. The flavors have a chance to permeate the corn, potatoes and shrimp.
Bon Appetit!
