I’ve seen this on the menu at several restaurants, all slightly different – grilled shrimp, fried shrimp, broiled shrimp, for example – but, the one thing that seems to stay the same is the bang bang sauce.

I knew that the bang bang sauce had mayonnaise (I know that seems odd for pasta, but trust me, it’s good!), sweet chili sauce and sriarcha. I decided to add a little garlic, red pepper flakes and a little bit of lime juice to mine.

Another thing that I’ve seen varied is the type of pasta. I chose to add linguine. To me – spaghetti is too thin to really ‘hold’ the sauce and short pastas just don’t seem ‘right’ to me. So linguine it was!

Since I was cooking just for myself (probably for my lunch and my dinner), I decided to make this recipe a ‘for two’ (or 1 really hungry…

While I would much prefer to have fresh shrimp, living inland doesn’t really allow for that very much.

Luckily, you can buy deveined and already peeled shrimp in the freezer section of your grocery store. Not as good as fresh (but cheaper than the ‘just thawed out, because you don’t live at the beach’ shrimp they sell for twice as much at the meat counter, making people think they are getting ‘fresh’ shrimp – you’re really just getting previously frozen, conveniently defrosted, shrimp if you live inland. That said, I will buy the frozen version and thaw it myself – saving at least 50% of the cost of the shrimp!

I try to keep some shrimp in the freezer for nights just like tonight – when I don’t have any other protein already thawed for dinner. Shrimp is easy to defrost at home. I put mine in a colander and…

Go on, if you have a moment, click on the link below, featuring Fred Astaire and Ginger Astaire singing a famous Gershwin song — but let’s not do as its title suggests … which is : Let’s call it off.

Speaking for myself, I would never ever ‘call off’ the humble potato so I am always amazed at the amount of people who just don’t see the point of a potato, denigrating this marvellous tuber as a ‘senseless’ vegetable.  Life without potatoes would be very sad for me, I even like them plain, just boiled with a bit of olive oil or butter over them.  I reckon Ernest Heminway had a lot to do with people (especially women) fearing potatoes as the most calory-laden food out there.  His heroine Maria in “For Whom the Bell Tolls” speaks out against the fattening danger of potatoes.  Heminway’s novel was a best seller…

Yesterday I wrote about some leftovers … see photo below:Here are the remains of what had been meatballs cooked in a tomato and pea sauce.  These leftovers could have easily been used to coat a lovely plate of pasta but, somehow, and blame it on the cold weather if you will, I was in the mood to ‘cook’ yesterday … i.e. to spend some time fiddling with the minutiae of ingredients, pottering with ‘bits’ to my heart’s content, my small scaled kitchen groaning under a welter of pots and pans, and aluminium bowls and wooden boards.  I knew the oven would have to figure in the picture somehow (what can be pleasanter than a hot oven on a cold day?) … and thus it was that I got inspired. Inspired to make a rice-based dish called ‘sartù’ … with its princely origin in Campania … and one that is…