By Greg B. Left to my own devices, I’ll make some pretty simple food.  If I can use only a single frying pan in the whole process, that’s great!  And this Christmas season, I treated myself (with the help of a gift card) to a 10″ 5D all-clad frying pan with lid.  I’m pretty sure I’m in love with the pan… it’s an expensive piece of cookware but in the times I’ve cooked with it, the difference really stands out.  The old adage of ‘you get what you pay for’ is pretty accurate, this pan heats extremely evenly, holds head well and the non-stick surface is so good, you can fry an egg straight on it, no oil no lubricants, and it will just slide off when cooked.  Amazing.  Anyway, I opened my fridge to make dinner the other night, and saw I had a surplus of brightly colored vegetables, but no thawed out meat.  Not a problem!  I have some Russian black pepper bacon and a bag of frozen shrimp, so lets see what can be made from this.

If this recipe kind of seems like a hodge-podge of things in my fridge, that’s because it is!  But it came out really well, so I figured I’d share this with you all.  For this dish you will need:

• 4-5 slices of Russian bacon (it’s more like a pancetta, get good thick and fatty slices)
• a small hand full of asparagus, cut in half and bottoms trimmed
• 1 red pepper, diced
• 2 shallots, diced
• 1 yellow squash, sliced
• 1 medium carrot, sliced
• 2 cloves garlic, diced
• 5 tablespoons diced chives
• 1 lime, rolled, cut in half and squeezed over the  dish towards the end of cooking time
• 1/2 cup of frozen shrimp

This recipe is brutally simple, but definitely yields a really nice dish at the end.  Take the bacon, and slice off some fairly thick slices.  Add these to a pan and cook for 4-5 minutes on medium high heat, both to render some of the fat off the bacon and into the pan and also to begin to brown the bacon.  Now, this particular Russian bacon is very fatty… there’s a solid inch of fat on one side of the slice.  But this will render down very nicely into a substance in which to cook the vegetables!  While this cooks down, prepare the other veggies and add them to the pan as you slice them.  Some may be concerned about cook times and how different the cook times are for these vegetables, so if this is a concern, I like to add the carrots first, since they cook slower (you can probably even add them almost immediately with the bacon at the start).  Then add the asparagus, peppers, shallots and garlic.  Let everything cook for a few minutes, then turn the heat down to medium.  Add a little salt and pepper to taste (remember, the bacon will be salty and also already has pepper on it), squeeze the lime juice over the dish then let it cook.  Stir it after about 6 minutes, and let cook another 5 minutes or so.  Then add the shrimp and cook until the shrimp are done.  It’s that simple, and just look at what you’re meal consists of:  good animal fats, a little bit of meat, a lot of brightly colored vegetables and a touch of seafood, in case you wanted more protein and some omega-3′s.  It’s healthy, it’s quick, and it’s easy to throw together.  Bon Appetite!