At the farmers market on tuesday I found $5/lbs head-on gigantor-prawns and Erin, a college friend of mine.  I got two pounds from the former, an RSVP from the latter, a few heads of garlic, and headed straight home!

My mom used to make this spectacularly showy and delicious dish as an appetizer for parties and such.  With sufficiently many, it made a great light (ha!) dinner along with some tabbouleh we made for lunches during the week.

This meal has an interesting mathematical property, there have to be more heads of garlic than heads to feed, or else there’s just not enough to go around.  I actually got comments the next day that I smelled like garlic…  We joke about this around the house, but apparently it actually happens.

The recipe couldn’t be simpler, fry some (1.5 heads per head) garlic (don’t burn it, please…) in peanut oil, coat the shrimp in corn starch and fry them.  Toss it all together with some salt, and enjoy the whole damn animal.  Yes, you eat the eyeballs, and the juicy, creamy gutsies.

Make sure you don’t get shot in the eye with the peanut oil!

We loved having Erin’s company, and it was cool to have someone dive into a big crunchy sea-creature with as little hesitation and as much enjoyment as Erik and I.  She also helped out with the final plate-up and photography.  Here’s her rendition:

The tabbouleh & hummus are something special as well, and we’ll get a full writeup of that later.

As far as quantities, we did the following:

• 3 heads garlic, chopped finely
• 1/3 cup peanut oil for frying
• 1 lb head-on shrimp with the pokey nose cut off
• A lot of corn starch
• 1 tablespoon salt

Fry garlic slowly separately, fry prawns coated in corn starch pretty hard in more oil, toss together with salt and garlic, EAT!