15-Minute Citrus Shrimp Perfect For Leftover Rice

We're doing fast, we're not doing perfect.

This isn't perfect minute meals.

[upbeat music]

[timer dinging]

So today we're gonna be making shrimp

and crispy rice with citrus.

This is a really great sort of year round, friendly,

quick dinner that relies on you having leftover rice.

If you have rice leftover from ordering in last night,

or you made a double batch

and you have some sitting in your fridge,

this is a super easy way to use that up

in a delicious manner that doesn't feel like leftovers.

Pull everything that you need and put it on your workstation

before you start going so you're not, like,

running to all the cabinets as you go.

That'll help you cook quickly.

So many citrus.

Are you ready?

On my mark,

Get set, go!

[pans clanging] Oh no.

Okay, this is a garbage bowl.

You've gotta have a garbage bowl.

It just means everything can go in there

that you are working with

and you don't have to keep going back and forth

to the garbage can, which can really slow you down.

So first thing we're gonna do

is we're gonna take one of our oranges.

We're gonna squeeze her into a bowl.

I'm doing this over a strainer so I can catch any seeds.

We're gonna wait to dress the salad at the end

because you don't want it to get soggy.

We've got our orange juice,

and that plus a little bit of lime juice

is gonna be the base of our dressing.

Orange juice and lime juice is like a classic combo

because the orange is providing more sweetness

and the lime is providing more tartness.

So you really have a nice balance here.

This is a Cara Cara orange.

We're gonna zest it first.

Just a little bit of zest to provide more citrus flavor.

In this recipe we're using citrus three ways,

the zest, the juice, and the flesh of the fruit itself.

So really citrus-forward,

which is great in these winter months

when food has the tendency to be a bummer

because there's not a lot of fun freshness

that you're working with.

Citrus is a great cheat.

And then we're gonna use garlic

that we're gonna grate right into the dressing.

You kind of want just this paste

that whisks into the dressing

and you get the flavor without any of the texture.

This is also a speed assist.

It can happen quite fast, like,

mere seconds.

We're gonna add, actually,

a little bit of a Aleppo-style pepper too.

This is one of my faves.

It's just a mild chili flake.

I like it because it provides that flavor

and it also provides nice color

without making anything overwhelmingly spicy.

We're gonna do a little bit of oil as well.

Okay, so this is our gorgeous dressing.

Needs a little bit of salt, as everything does.

So we're a couple minutes down, our dressing's done,

and now we're gonna get into the prep of our other produce.

First thing we're gonna do is suprême our citrus.

It sounds like a fancy technique

but it's really not that hard at all.

You are gonna lop off both ends of your citrus,

and then you're gonna take your knife

and follow the curve of the orange, or grapefruit,

or whatever you have around the edge

to sort of, like, maintain the shape of the original fruit.

So once you've cut the edges,

and now you have this, like, very clean round of citrus

where you see these lines,

you're just gonna cut between them to get those wedges out.

And what you're left with

is this really gorgeous piece of fruit

that has no pith, no skin, no nothing.

So this is just more of the same.

It's usually easier with a bigger fruit

'cause you have a little bit more to work with.

So if you wanna start with your grapefruit,

that might be a good way to, like, get your bearings

in terms of this technique.

So the other thing you can do here

if you don't wanna go as far

as cutting these beautiful little wedges,

you can get to the point where you're cutting

all the outside off,

and then just cut your citrus into wheels.

If you want to spend a little more time,

you can make a, like, cutie little suprême with your citrus.

If you want to go a little bit faster,

you can just cut your wheels or half moons

and you'll get the same result.

So this is the other half of the orange that we halved

to make our juice.

I just don't want that bad boy going to waste.

So you can just do the same thing that you would

on the whole orange,

but because you already have a cut side,

you're just putting the cut side down

and operating with that as the bottom.

And then I'm gonna go the easy route here,

trim off our top, and then slice.

Our citrus is prepped.

Two things down.

Now the last move is we're gonna prep

the remaining salad ingredients,

which are red onion and an avocado.

And if you have just a tiny onion,

this is a good use for that.

I think we'll only use about half here,

and then our avocado.

And you can really cut your avocado however you please.

Do you like cubes?

Do you like slices?

Live your life.

She's pretty.

So if your avocado is ripe enough, yeah,

you should be able to peel the skin right off.

And then you don't have to work with, like,

unearthing, excavating your beautiful slices

from, like, within this cup,

which can be hard to do and maintain the shape.

We did it, we did prep.

We're so good.

For this, I feel like I just wanna be

working with my fork and shoveling this delicious meal

into my mouth,

and I don't really wanna be futzing with tails

so I'm gonna remove them before I cook the shrimp.

And there's a really easy way to do that.

You just hold the body of the shrimp in one hand

and then the, like, little sort of connector

between the top of the tail and the taily part of the tail

in your other hand, and pinch and pull.

If you know you don't wanna deal with tails,

you can just seek out peeled, deveined, and tail-off shrimp

and you can zoom right through.

And now you're ready to roll.

So what we're gonna do is pat our shrimp dry

just as you would any protein.

You gotta pat your protein dry because

otherwise all that liquid is just gonna steam in the pan.

If you really want a nice sear on your protein,

you have to make sure that it's nice and dry.

And then we're just gonna do a quick season.

I love to have shrimp on hand at all times in my freezer.

Shrimp is great frozen.

You really don't lose a lot of the texture or the flavor

by freezing and then thawing out your shrimp.

And it thaws very quickly.

And the actual cook time is minutes.

Like, less than five minutes until they're opaque,

and pink, and curled and ready to eat.

So if you want a quick protein to sort of, like,

bulk it up and make it a full dinner,

shrimp is absolutely the way to go.

We are ready.

Prep completely complete.

A hundred percent.

So we're gonna take our shrimp

and we're gonna take our day-old rice

and we're gonna head to the stove.

So we're gonna heat our non-stick skillet

over,, like, medium high and put a little bit of oil

in the pan and let that heat up.

Because I have both rice and shrimp happening in this pan,

a non-stick skillet is the move.

And we are gonna toss in our shrimp.

Basically what we're gonna do

is let our shrimp cook on one side for a couple of minutes

so you really get a nice sear on them,

in as even a layer as possible.

You don't need to have, like, perfect contact

with the pan for everybody, but as much as you can get.

You can see here that it's starting to come up the sides.

Shrimp cooks super quickly and it's easy to overcook,

so do not leave.

This is where you live right now.

For the next three minutes, you're here.

Oh yeah, see that nice sear that we've got going on here?

That's because we've pat it dry really nicely,

and it's getting that nice golden browning on it.

So now you're just gonna tip these bad boys around,

make sure both sides are getting some pan time.

We've just been at medium high the whole time.

You want that little bit of pinkness

and you want this really nice sort of browning sear.

All right, we're done.

We're gonna toss them on the side plate here.

And then you've got this really nice sort of

shrimpy, oily flavor in there,

which we're not gonna let go to waste.

Usually that would be someplace

where you would build a sauce.

And instead we're gonna use that to flavor our crispy rice.

So we're gonna heat our pan back up to medium high.

And this is our day-old rice.

So the number one tip I have for cooking rice

is cook too much, every single time.

Always cook too much.

It's really nice to have leftovers

because rice can become so many things,

especially by applying a little bit of heat.

You can transform rice in a really delightful way.

[oil sizzling]

So we're gonna pop that in.

If your rice is, like, in a container like this,

it might be all stuck together.

So it's good to get in there first

and make sure your grains are loosened.

Then you can pat your rice into this nice level puck.

And something else I like to do

is just add a little bit of oil at the edges,

just a little bit.

It'll sink in from the sides

and it'll help make this a nice golden brown puck.

You'll see in a lot of recipes for fried rice

it actually calls for day-old rice

because that time that it has spent,

sort of, like, chilling out,

and losing a little bit of its fluffy edge

is actually key to making an amazing fried rice.

So we're gonna let this go for a couple of minutes,

like, six-ish, to really provide

a nice crispy layer underneath.

So our rice is ready.

If you can flip it nicely onto your plate,

it's worth it to try.

Oh, look at that.

Is it perfect?

No, it's not.

But guess what?

It's exactly as crispy as we want.

Look at that, so nice.

And when we break it up into pieces on the plate,

it's gonna be delicious.

All right, we're heading back to our station

and we're gonna make our salad and plate everything up.

Can you hear it?

It's really crispy.

So for our finished plate,

we're gonna get some of that on the bottom here.

And you'll see that the top layer is crispy,

but underneath is still fluffy and nice, right?

And that's great because having that

variety of texture makes for a lovely meal.

So we're at like 13, 14 minutes.

You're in your final minute here,

getting your dish plated.

We've got our crispy rice.

And then we're gonna build ourselves our little salad.

We're gonna use a little bit of arugula.

This is baby arugula.

It's the stuff you can find most commonly.

So we've got our delicious citrus

and any juices that accumulated in the bowl.

We're gonna throw a little bit of the shrimp in here.

They're still warm, which is delightful,

and they're gonna take on this dressing really nicely.

Then we're gonna add some of our red onion,

break apart the sections.

Now we have our delicious dressing.

Gonna pour a little bit of that over.

Gonna toss in a little bit of our arugula,

and then we'll toss in our avocado slices.

We'll just very gently toss that bad boy

to make sure everything gets nicely dressed.

Add a little bit of salt to that as well

so that all of the ingredients are seasoned.

You just don't wanna break apart your avocado too much

and you wanna keep your arugula nice and fresh,

and not soggy or crushed.

We can just plate our salad on top of our crispy rice.

It's a delightful looking finished product.

That matters to me.

I'm gonna take a little spoonful of our dressing

and just do a little drizzle over the rice too,

so I make sure that it's all over the place.

And then I'm gonna finish with a little bit more

of our Aleppo-style pepper.

This took 15 minutes. [bell dinging]

Can you believe?

it's so exciting, and delicious,

and wonderful, and alluring, and I wanna dive in right now.

Hold on.

Mmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

It's so good.

The citrus is doing God's work here.

Having the mixture that the Cara Cara oranges

plus the grapefruit,

really enlivens the whole thing.

But had it only been oranges throughout,

it would be just as delightful.

The shrimp is providing the protein and the bulk here.

And the crispy rice is just, to me,

like, I need one, like, texturally and fun,

interesting thing in any meal I make

or else I'm bored by it.

And this rice is what's keeping me coming back for it,

bite after bite.

And this happened so quickly

because we had the leftover rice,

and we had that shrimp in our freezer,

which you can thaw really quickly

and throw together this delicious dinner.

So 15 minute meals?

It's possible.

It can be something as elevated as this.

If you plan, if you have a stocked pantry,

if you help future you

by putting things in the freezer, making a little extra,

you can have dinner in 15 minutes.

No problem. [timer dinging]

[jazzy music]

Don't put a whole shrimp in your mouth

while you're on camera.

We learn something new every day.