Shrimp Scampi Pasta a la Todd

Here is a Shrimp Scampi recipe I saw in Gourmet magazine and added my own twist. It turned out pretty good!

SCHRIMP SCAMPI PASTA a la TODD

INGREDIENTS:
1/4 cup of oil
1 lb of peeled, deveined large shrimp (I like them as big as you can get)
4-5 large garlic cloves forced through a garlic press
1/2 teaspoon dried hot red pepper flakes
1/2 cup dry white wine
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
4-5 tablespoons unsalted butter
3/4 lb spaghetti
1/2 cup chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley
juice from half of a small lemon and maybe some zest.
15-20 grape tomatoes cut in half


PREPARATION
Bring a 6-8 quart pot of salted water to a boil.

Heat oil in a large skillet over moderately high heat. Saute the shrimp, sprinkle with a little lemon juice, turning over once, until just cooked though, about 2 minutes and transfer with a slotted spoon to a large bowl. Add garlic to the remaining oil along with red pepper flakes, wine, salt and pepper and cook over high heat for around 1 minute. Add the tomatoes to the mixture and cook for 30 seconds. Add butter to the skillet, stirring until melted, and stir in shrimp. Remove from heat.

Hopefully half way through the last step you had your water bowling and added your pasta. If not get the pasta in now. Cook pasta in boiling water until just tender (the article says 5 minutes but up here in Denver it is more like 10-15). Reserve 1 cup pasta cooking water, then drain pasta in a colander. Toss pasta well with the shrimp mixture and parsley in a large bowl, adding some of the reserved cooking water if necessary to keep moist.

Todd's notes - I added the tomatoes, lemon and Parmigiano-Reggiano to this recipe. It says to use 1/4 cup of olive oil but I used about half of that. Other comments, maybe use some greens (beans, asparagus, spinach????) I like mine topped with a little grated Parmigiano-Reggiano.

Don't over cook the shrimp. They are better a little under cooked then overcooked. If you have waited to take them out until they are hard and crispy. Then they are overcooked. They will continue to cook a little after they have been taken out of the pan. If you are a little nervous take them out early the first time you cook them and when you add them back in the end keep them in there a little longer (but not much).

T

Funniest video ever!

So, Morhéa loves to take pictures with our digital camera. She is also very good at taking those pictures. People often see her with the camera taking our picture and ask if we need help. We usually respond with "no she is just fine." Today Morhéa got her hands on the camera and also figured out the video recording button. The result is one of the funniest movies ever. The resolution decreased a lot when I downloaded the video but you will get the point. This was also her first time bowling! If you have a 3 year old then you can relate. If not here is what you are in for!! Enjoy!

T

Happy New Year 2009!

Kim seems to be out doing me with the pictures these days so I haven't had the need to write lately. I'll keep it short. I would like to start by congratulating Kim on starting a new job this week. She has taken a job with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and started last week. Ironically she now works in the same building as me!! It is a little interesting to have you wife work a couple of walls away. Her section has even higher security then my area so I can't just stop by. She can stop by my area but hasn't come by yet. We now both work less then a mile from where we live. Congrats to Kim!!

Thanksgiving was great with Dad and Carolyn coming out for the Holidays. It was a big family event. My cousin Ellie moved out here this past summer and she hosted Thanksgiving. We had a blast. Five Hoefen's were there, 7 Camann's and a few of Ellie's very nice friends. The weather held up for a couple of days and we got a good hike in. A great visit for sure.

Then the Buytaert's came out for a week during Christmas. Again the weather held up for a few days. They got to get a good hike in at Red Rock State Park. The Buytaert's got to see their condo and go swimming in the community pool. I think the went to the museum of nature and science as well. As usual I got cook a lot while everyone was here which I love to do. I cooked a family style meal for us on Christmas Eve. On Christmas Morhea had a blast opening all of her presents. This is the first year she REALLY understood what was going on and she loved every minute of it. She actually woke up around 9:30 or 10:00 AM which was nice. After presents at our house we went over to the Camann's in the afternoon. Morhea and her cousins get along so well. Her and Isabelle played for hours. I didn't even see her for most of the night. Janya and her mother made dueling roasts and we all pitched in on the fixings.





New Year's was good. Morhea was a little sick earlier in the week and so we didn't want to do too much. We ended up going to the Zoo Lights. The Denver Zoo always does a great job lighting up the zoo around Christmas. We spent the early part of the night walking around the zoo. We came home and I made some clams steamed in a white wine, onion and parsley sauce. Then I made some shrimp cocktails, crab stuffed mushrooms and finished it off with some fine deserts. Morhea easily made it to midnight and then some.



Tomorrow Kim and Morhea head off for their first skiing adventure of the year. They are very excited. Happy New Year!!

Todd

October 2008

It has been a while since I wrote anything in the blog. I guess I have been pretty busy with work and everything else going on. Morhéa is getting bigger by the day. She is a little girl for sure. No longer our little baby! It is amazing to see her develop. Last night she was jumping on the bed singing as loud as she could. She was even free styling lyrics to songs. She was rhyming words and dancing like a superstar or the dreaded Hannah Montana. In fact most of the words she was using had to do with Hannah Montana and the Jonas Brothers.

Morhéa started taking gymnastics again but this time we signed her up at a real gymnastics center. It is pretty cool there. They have everything a gymnast would want. They even have babysitting on Friday nights!

Halloween has been crazy and it hasn’t even come yet. I think Morhéa has been to about 4 or 5 parties or events for Halloween already. Kim is losing it because Morhéa’s Cinderella costume has to be hand washed and she seems to get very dirty at every event. She also likes to eat about half of her candy as she goes trick or treating. That results in a grumpy, hyper, tired child by the end of the day. It will all culminate with an evening of trick or treating with her two of her friends from school.

What else has happened over the past 2 months? Aunt Stephanie came out for a girls weekend in Vail. The girls had a wonderful time in the mountains and enjoyed the last days of summer. I think it was Octoberfest in Vail so there was lots to do. We also went to the circus again this year which was a big hit. Other then $15 lemonades and $12 snow cones it was a fairly cheap night out. Kimberley also ran the Denver Marathon a few weeks ago. She had great weather and did a great job.

Cousin Ellie moved out to Denver and happens to live and work around the corner. She took a job as the department head of Geology at Red Rocks Community College. It sounds like it has all of the challenges of being a teacher and then some. Lucky for her, her cousin works at the USGS and can give out tours.

I got the chance to drive to Madison, WI last week for work which also gave me the opportunity to meet baby Parker. It was a crazy 2.5 days. We started our drive from Denver at around 4:00PM on Wednesday night. Of course it started raining as soon as we left. Of coarse the rain turned to snow about 3 hours later. We had 40 mph winds with tons of snow. Lucky for is it only lasted about 2 hours and then turned back into rain. We must of hit some a plateau or something in Nebraska. We made it to Omaha that night. We got a room and a few hours of sleep before hitting the road again. We were headed to the University of Wisconsin to meet some colleagues of ours that were making a sample for us so that we can further our knowledge of the makeup of Titan (a moon of Saturn). John and I ended up giving a 2 hour presentation to faculty and students of UofW about spectroscopy and Titan. As soon as I was done I ran off to meet Jeff, Heather and Parker. We went out for Italian. Parker was an angel! It seems like so long ago that Morhéa was that small. After dinner we headed back to Jeff’s house and relaxed for the rest of the night. The next morning we left Madison and drove all the way back to Denver.

Halloween has come and gone since I started writing this and it was crazy. The girls had a blast and got tons of candy. It reminded me of when I was a kid and my grandmother’s house where we got bags full of candy. The next day was followed by gymnastics and then Morgan’s birthday party.

While we barely got out of the 50’s 2 weeks ago this past week we were in the 70’s all week. Today it got up into the high 70’s. We took the opportunity to go for a hike. It was a wonderful day. We are looking forward to the holidays. Grammy and Grandpa are coming out for Thanksgiving.

T

Welcome Parker Lande Hoefen

Welcome to the world Parker Lande Hoefen!! She is a very cute little girl. Parker was born Tuesday, August 19^th at 2:00PM. She weighed 5 lbs, 13 oz and is 17.5 inches long. Mom and Parker are now back at home and everything is going well. We are all very happy for them!!





On another note, Jeff finally gets to fulfill his life long dream of becoming a fireman. He graduates this Friday, the 22nd. You are never too old to fulfill you dreams. You have worked long and hard to get here and we are proud of you.

The Hoefen's

Fire hits too close to home!

Well, it is 7:15 pm and our house is pretty smoky but I just returned from viewing the fire on Green Mountain and I think we should be okay. Unfortunately, the smoke is still bad and we are just downwind of the active fire. They have evacuated homes about 2 blocks west of us. That is the perimeter. It is farther away then that though so we are safe. Pretty scary for a little while though! This seemed like deja vu having done this already in Southern California. This was a little too close to home. The winds were really bad earlier and I was watching the fire tear across the grass fields of Green Mountain. I hope the winds die down and then they might be able to get it under control. The picture above shows the aftermath of the fire. You can see how close we are. If that field, in the middle of the picture, had caught on fire that would have lead straight to our house! Flames were reported to be 20-30 feet at times.

It is now 9:00PM and it looks like the fire is contained. That just shows you how dry we are in Colorado this year. I think they said on the news we are 7 or 8 inches below our annual rainfall averages between January and July.

For those of us in the heath related field, I have included a picture of the smoke blowing out over the city.

Todd

Evergreen, upstate NY for the 4th of July

It has been well over a month since my last update!! I probably can’t even remember all of the things we have done. Let’s see ………. Our good friends Brian, Theresa, Ella and Sylvia moved up to Evergreen. They have a beautiful house up there with trees and all. They aren’t around the corner anymore but they are close enough to hang out with. We made a little day trip up there in late June and had a picnic on Evergreen Lake. The girls had a blast playing in the park and my buddy Brian brought his canoe so we could do some fishing. After setting up base camp Brian and I tried to bring Ella and Morhéa for a little canoe trip around the lake but Morhéa was a little scared.

Side story – Growing up in upstate NY one of my best friends, Karl, and I would go fishing every day of our summer vacations. I would ride my bike down to his house and we would fish the same stretch of a creek that ran between his and mine every day for the entire summer. We fished it so much that we would know where the fish were before they knew we were even there. We would net for minnows and spend our days looking under rocks for crayfish and then sell them for 5 cents a piece to the local bait shop. I can’t even remember when that started but we had to be around 8 or 10. Karl’s dad was also a VERY good fisherman and hunter who taught us the tricks of the trade. He had all of these really cool canoes. He had aluminum ones, plastic ones and even one he built by hand. We were never allowed to use the hand made one because we would surely sink it. When we turned 16 (and got our drivers licenses) he and I pooled our money and bought our very own canoe. Being young and athletic we opted for durability over a streamline canoe. We got a Coleman canoe. There was no stopping us after that!! We took that thing everywhere. Karl built a rack for his car and truck and we traveled near and far with that thing. Since it was durable we would take it white water canoeing. Every year we would get a warm spring day that would melt all of the winter snow we used to get back home. The temperatures might have been in the 60’s but the water would be in the high 30’s or 40’s and the creeks were several feet high. That was when we excelled!! Nothing could stop us. We would drop in with Karl in the back and me in the front. We would hit rapids, waterfalls and ice but it would never fail that we would have just made it through a fast rapid and as we rounded a bend at top speed that a tree branch that used to be 3 feet over our heads would now be just clearing the canoe. I could always bail back into the canoe but we always seemed to end up with Karl taking one in the chest and both of us ending up in the water and into the 30 something degree water!! We would both swim to shore and get out cold as a salmon in Alaska. We would stay there long enough to look at each other, then the canoe (which was both sinking and floating away) and then have to dive back into the water and save our canoe!! It was worth it though. We brought our canoe everywhere. We brought it to our creek, Oak Orchard, the Britt’s camp (near Redfield, NY and if you know where that is I am impressed), Black Lake, Canadice Lake, Hemlock Lake and many others. We did this crazy backpacking trip in the Five Pond Wilderness Area (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Ponds_Wilderness_Area) in the Adirondack Mountains. We would paddle upstream for a day or 2 then hide our canoes and backpack into the hills for 3 or 4 days to these lakes in the middle of nowhere and then back out. Other times we would bring no food or money to the camp and try and live off the land survivor style for a week. We would catch pan fish to start and then fillet them and tie the remains to some fishing line and throw that into a stream while we went out for the day doing things. If we didn’t catch or kill some kind of food during the day our backup plan would always be that our string of dead fish would usually attract lots of crayfish. If we were careful we could slowly pull in our line and have 50+ crayfish. Then we would have a crayfish boil. We didn’t know the sucking the meat out of the tail trick though and would usually use toothpicks and thus it would take us 3 hours plus to eat that many but it was worth it. When we went to college we stored the canoe in my parent’s barn. When I moved to Colorado my parents brought me out the canoe. It still resides under my deck but I haven’t busted it out in over 12 years!!!

But I digress ……… I am thrilled that Brian asked me to go canoeing and I even dusted off my spinner reel as I hear there are muskie in Lake Evergreen.

Someone got the brilliant idea to stock a trout lake with a predator fish like a muskie!! Anyway, after pushing off the beach and a couple of wobbles I soon settled into my usual front seat of the canoe. I grabbed my fishing pole and off we went. We spent the next 45 minutes touring around the lake and even though I didn’t catch squat, I had the best time I have had on a lake in 12 years. Just like the good old days!!! Thanks Brian (and Karl)!!! When we got back the girls were ready for some food so we had a barbecue and played until the sun went down.

Then we were off to Rochester and Syracuse for the 4^th of July. A much needed break from the daily grind. As usual it was a non-stop party. We arrived in Rochester on the 3^rd of July and just missing my cousin Paul’s wedding. It was okay though because he hosts our annual 4^th of July Hoefen family reunion. All of the staples were there. We had white hot dogs, Kit’s meat hot sauce, Dan’s wilted cabbage salad, Dad’s German potato salad and everything else we have had as long as I can remember. Morhéa is old enough to go off and play with her cousins and she also enjoyed the fireworks on the beach with Grammy.

The next day we had a baby shower for Heather!! My brother Jeff and Heather are having a baby!! I think the Hoefen family met for 3 days in a row on that stretch. We had a great party for them at Dad’s house. The Hoefen’s, The Hagenbach’s and even the Parker side of the family were all there. It was nice to be home. Seeing my grandmothers sister, Aunt Millie, was especially nice!

After a quick 2 days we headed to Syracuse to see the Buytaert’s. Aunt Steph, Papy and Meme were all present. I missed the 1^st night as I got a hall pass to hang out with my brother. The next day we went to the Syracuse Zoo which has become a staple in our visit. It is a nice zoo and Morhéa was impressed with the elephants there.

The next day was one of the days I don’t miss back east. HOT and HUMID!! I think that there might not have been any wind as well. To make things better for me we decided to go to nearby Green Lake (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Lake_%28New_York%29) . It is really a green lake! For anyone interested Green Lake is a meromictic lake known for its euxinic conditions at the bottom of the lake. That along with its biochemistry make it green. Just read the link and you might understand. I went there once when I was young and again as a geology major at Binghamton University. We baked there for a few hours and everyone had a great time. As you all saw in my last blog Morhéa is a fish and loves the water. She played in the lake the entire time. I think we grilled something every night and as things cooled off we ate outside. André has his grilling techniques down pretty darn good!

The next day was hot and humid again but at least this time we had some wind. In the morning Kim, Morhéa and I decided to go to a local park we play at every year. Morhéa decided to try out the monkey bars and much to our amazement went across them like she had been doing it for 3 years. Later that afternoon we decided to go down to Cazenovia Lake. We played in the water there and visited the small town there where we went for ice cream.

Then we headed back to Rochester for the final 2 days to see Dad and Carolyn again. The farm was very nice. I think the two highlights of Morhéa’s time at the farm were the daily tractor rides and the giant tree swing grandpa put up in a tree in the back yard.

Dad planted winter wheat behind the house for the first time. Growing up we had alfalfa, corn, oats and soy beans but no wheat. My Dad mentioned how nice it was to see it grow, how golden it was and how fluid it flowed with the wind. After that I took a few moments to take it all in and he was right. It was straight out of a movie. You can never capture it in a picture as well. Anyway, Grandpa told Morhéa that wheat was used to make bread so every day she would go out back and pick some wheat, eat it and tell us she was eating bread. Very cute.

As usual we made our way to Brown’s Berry Patch (http://www.brownsberrypatch.com/). It is a “pick your own” farm that has all kinds of wonderful fruit and things for kids to do. Dad and I picked blueberries and cherries while the girls fed the goats, jumped on the Barnyard Jump (a giant jumping balloon buried in the ground) and played in the kids area.

After a wonderful trip I think we arrived home to one of the last 80 degree days Colorado has seen. Today we broke a record for most consecutive 90 degree days at 19 (a record held since 1901). Our forecast for the next 5 days is 102, 100, 98, 94 and 91 degrees!!!!!! I don’t think we have gotten any significant rain here in 2 months. It is one of the driest years I can remember. Usually we get monsoon rains from the south but this year we have had a high pressure system hanging out just to the east preventing moisture from coming our way. Great for vacation but bad for the yard.

Kim did another triathlon in boulder a week or so ago. It was an Olympic distance triathlon (1.5km swim, 40km bike and 10km run). Her next one is going to be a Half Ironman (1.9km swim, 90km bike and 21.09 km run). Absolutely nuts I say but we sure are proud of her and she does love them. It had to be near 100 degrees by the time she finished the Boulder one. Another climate that Todd doesn’t do well in. I don’t care if it is 100 degrees and no humidity. It is still HOT!!!

Happy Reading!!

T