Birthday Scampi...

happy birfday to moi! (cake from billy's bakery on 22nd & 8th--i lobe it!) 3 layer chocolate cake with vanilla buttercream in lavender (u can't tell but it's a pretty lavender :) with pastel green, white, and yellow sprinkles in a gradation of each color. u likey the comma splice no? ;)

so for bday dinner, I "made" shrimp scampi with my spin on garlic and oil pasta which is just with tomatoes and basil sauteed in garlic w/fish sauce. Yeah--u thought I was lying about using fish sauce in everything didn't you!! *shakes fist!*

I can't rave enough about using fresh basil (fresh dill, fresh herbs blahblah) enough garlic to stink for days. Basil rocks my socks. Basil and dill. SERIOUSLY. I also like arugula--I never took to bitter produce or spicy/hot foods, but man, u can really taste the diff and I eat spicy selectively now.

Back to the bday dinner food--I put "made" scampi in quotations because the scampi was frozen shrimp from Costco :) It used to be my fave b/c it was all seasoned and whatnot and just fantastically *salty* to my taste per se with a really robust flavor. (I also never understood that phrasing, robust, until lately anyway so it's just one of those things that you can't fully get conceptually until you really experience that taste.)

ANYWAY, I have to drain crazy amounts of butter every time I made it. Either way, it was a little disappointing that they altered the scampi to be so bland and buttery but great in that it made the tomato-basil-fish-sauce aspect really pop out more. I was sparing in the fish sauce. :P