grilled shrimp with Romesco sauce

One of the Food Network programs that I have set up for series recoding is Valerie’s Home Cooking. If you remember Valerie Bertinelli from One Day at a Time, which ran from 1975 to 1984, she is every bit as cute and charming today as she was back then. A much younger me had quite the crush on Valerie, or at least her character Barbara Cooper. The me of today loves watching Valerie share her cooking skills and learning new recipes from her.

One recipe that she demonstrated was Grilled Shrimp Skewers with Romesco Sauce. I saved the recipe to my database and tried it on a recent Saturday. The Romesco sauce comes from the Catalonia area of Spain and is based on roasted red peppers. I made it generally according to Valerie’s instructions, although I used pine nuts instead of almonds since I had pine nuts on hand and no almonds. I tossed the shrimp as directed and grilled them on our outdoor gas grill. I served a garlic-butter rice mix on the side.

The Romesco sauce made the meal. It was absolutely delicious. Terry gave it her highest praise, which is “We can make this again.”

Not only that, there was plenty of sauce left over, which I later used on grilled chicken.