Bobó de Camarão - part 2

Sometimes I could just kick myself. Wednesday afternoon, Rosemary suffering a fit of boredom, suggested we use the recipe I posted several weeks ago to make Bobó de Camarão for our husbands. I took my camera along with half the required ingredients, (Rosemary supplied the cleaned shrimp) so I could take pictures; to put in our photo album for posterity and to show you'all two gringas cooking this very good dish. The camera never left my bag, so you will just have to just imagine.

I think we did really well. Unfortunately, we found as we went along that the recipe has some technical problems. First, in the list of ingredients it calls for (among other things, of course) 4 red bell peppers and 6 tbls of grated ginger. I bought 3 peppers, really nice ones like you find here with ease, and only used two - which was still too much. Possible the recipe should call for 2 cups chopped red bell peppers so as to not leave so much to the imagination and the whims of the growing season. And at no time does the recipe calls for you to add the ginger. We noted this later and just added it, but maybe would be better to add it when you saute the onion and garlic to really get the flavor of ginger into the mix.

There were also a couple other questions - remember I have eaten this several times before but Rosemary never, and neither of us have ever seen it cooked - so we had to fall back on our Gringa knowledge of cooking - imagine instructions like add salt and pepper to taste (?) and instruction to boil a broth from the shrimp skins but then only one time in which to add it to thin as needed. Ours was already too thin, so no shrimp broth. Also, Instructions to use fluid from boiling the manioc root to aid in mashing the root for later use, maybe I used too much at that time and should have used a little more shrimp broth later (?). Finally, there is not an indication for the amount of time you allow each step so our texture was a little lumpy instead of creamy. OKAY, bottom line - it was also a little bland - when I have eaten Bobó before it tasted strongly of shrimp not of starchy manioc root.

We are open to suggestion. It is important to note that our faithful and loving husbands both ate two helpings so could it have been that bad?

We are going to do some Internet study of the recipe in Portuguese - I think it lost something in the translation to English, and try again - isn't that right Rosemary?

Stay tuned,

gingerv