Paprika Glazed Shrimp & Sausage Skewers

The June edition of BACC sneaked up on us: not only have we been busy moving, we haven't even received our June edition of Bon Appetit. Fortunately there's Fluffy White Icing to remind us about it, and the original recipe available at the Bon Appetit website.

As always, a few modifications were made:

• We didn't want to buy a bottle of sherry vinegar just to use 4 tsp of it for this dish, so we used instead a combination of red wine vinegar and actual sherry.
• I thought (as often before) the amount of oil suggested sounded excessive, so I cut it in half - this did mean that there was only enough glazing for the initial glazing and nothing left over for serving, but I didn't really feel I was missing any.
• We couldn't get the suggested sausages at the store we went to. It was hard to tell if any of the sausages at the store were in fact fully cooked or not. We ended up picking up a couple of beef/lamb merguez, which may have been a slight mistake (see below), and slicing them so thinly that we thought they had a chance of getting cooked during the broiling.
• Yes, that's right: we used the oven broiler instead of a grill.

Ingredients:
- ~ 20 shrimp, peeled
- 300 g (²/₃ lb) beef/lamb merguez
- 1 red onion, cut in wedges
- 8 small tomatoes
- bamboo skewers
glazing:
- 1 dL (²/₅ cup) olive oil
- 5 tsp sherry
- 2 tsp red wine vinegar
- 2 cloves garlic, crushed
- ¹/₂ tsp salt
- ¹/₂ tsp pepper
- 3 tsp smoked paprika
- bunch of fresh thyme
to serve:
- asparagus, broiled
- lettuce on the side

The glazing was made by stirring all the ingredients together.

Shrimp, sausage slices, onion wedges and small tomatoes were skewed, placed on a foil-lined baking sheet and glazed with the glazing.

After 8 minutes under the broiler, they came out and were allowed to stand while broiling the asparagus (which took another 10 minutes).

Then served. The glazing worked really well on the shrimp, but the merguez were too spicy in themselves for the glazing to really make a difference, so in that sense I think another sausage would have been more interesting.

And in writing this, I've just realised that we've ended up using asparagus for every single BACC we've entered into so far... honestly, I swear we don't eat asparagus as often as that might make you think.

Salami & Pesto Pasta

Being out to lunch one day I noticed on the menu that a special of the day was pasta with pesto and salami - I didn't order it, but I thought it sounded pretty good so I made a mental note of it. By the time I got round to trying it I had decided that it would work nicely to add some rocket to the mixture. I've been using Milanese salami for it so far, but that's hardly essential.

Ingredients:
- wholegrain linguine
- pesto
- fresh rocket
- Milanese salami

The pasta was boiled in lightly salted water, the rocket was rinsed and the salami was cut in strips - everything was stirred together with some pesto. Served immediately..