 Hey, this is Christina Blackmon and today I'm going to share with you about a very common coastal Ecuadorian dish that I grew up with. My family particularly is from the Andes, which are the mountains in South America, but my grandmother used to spend her summers when she was a teenager and throughout college in the coast part of Ecuador in Manabee, is one of the provinces there, and her aunt there taught her how to cook this arroz con camarones dish, which is basically rice with shrimp. The first step is to marinate the shrimp. You can do it an hour before, or if you want more flavor, you can do it the night before. And this is what I did. I just cleaned the, I cleaned the shrimp and saved the heads to make some shrimp broth in order to cook the rice on it. And then after I cleaned the dish last night, I added three ingredients, which is one teaspoon of mustard, one teaspoon of cumin, pepper and salt to taste, and four minced fresh garlic. And so you mix all that together and throw it in the fridge for an hour or overnight. That would be okay too. And so after that's done, we're going to keep this in the fridge to keep the shrimp fresh. But after that, what we need to do is go on and cook the rice. Now, since we are in Asia, we need to make sure that our rice is not sticky rice. And for that reason, you can use Thai rice. And we put one minced garlic and two spoons of canola oil or any type of oil, except olive oil, to start frying basically your rice. And so you put here's the garlic and the oil. And we let it cook for a little bit so the garlic will release its flavor. And so we let it there for about a minute or two. So let it sizzle there for a little bit. So now we can add the rice to the oil and garlic base, coated with all the oil. And cook it or toss it and saute it for about five to 10 minutes. So this is ready. That's a good mix of white kernels and the rest of the rice. And we add three cups of broth. So here's one. We do two shrimp and one of chicken. So now we're going to bring this, we're going to add one teaspoon of salt. Maybe that's too much. Okay, when you have a good boil in the rice, like a good ongoing boil, that's when you go ahead and cover. Okay, so now we're going to go on to preparing the veggies that would and the shrimp that would be added to the rice. So I'm going to add about this much. So here is where we add the vegetables. Make sure you always add the onions. So there's one red onion. If you don't have red onion, you can go ahead and do any onion you have. It will be okay. Red onion just gives a stronger flavor. And here are four minced garlic. The rice is drying out. So when it starts drying out, just go ahead and put it on a medium low. So as you start smelling the flavors of the onion and the garlic, then that gives you a good idea that it's time to add the bell peppers. And my choice of bell peppers is always green and red, not because of the colors only, but the combo of both gives a pretty good taste too. So now we can start adding the one big tomato. So we're going to let this cook for about five to seven minutes. But I do think that I need just a little bit more broth. So I'm going to add more shrimp broth, just a teeny bit there, just to make sure the rice is very well cooked. So we need to add to this one teaspoon of cumin. So the first, there's two teaspoons of cumin for this dish. The first one you add to the shrimp and the second one you add it to the vegetable mix. I just use regular spoons, but if you have the measuring spoons and you don't feel comfortable in using this, that's perfectly fine. Now at this point, you can start adding the bell pepper and salt. And so I'm going to go ahead and add my salt just to taste and the black pepper too. The family secret, if you want to call it, but the family ingredient to this recipe is mustard and cumin. But we don't cook any shrimp without mustard. And so it's just a little, it gives it a little nice taste. So when it's on this texture, then you go ahead and you add the shrimp. And before I forget, we can add the two tablespoons or teaspoons of anchovy. You can go ahead and add a little bit more of shrimp broth just to create more steam for it to cook. Now we add the shrimp mix, shrimp and veggies mix. And then let it sit there for about two to three minutes. Okay. And we are set. The last step is to add the three tablespoons of cilantro. We eat this with a really nice cold beer. And so, but if you don't drink, you can have something else that will fit your taste. So thank you for watching and I hope you enjoy it.