Quite the oxymoron, Jumbo Shrimp. Prawns, perhaps, are better named. Regardless of their size, good, sweet shrimp are no inconsiderable things when it comes to taste. But no matter what I call them—shrimp, prawns, mudbugs, mini-lobsters, or, Shellfish (though, to be sure, they neither have shells in the strict sense nor are they fish) their proper name in my personal lexicon is Delectable. So they appear, disappear, and are invited back to the table time and again chez moi.

My spousal-person, understandably enough, prefers that I keep the decoration of said sea-life to a modest few iterations, rather than going too crazy with innumerable variations on dishes and seasonings he may not fully trust, but he has been known to try a new style or two and adopt them into the canon. For example, I never essayed anything resembling a dish alla Fra Diavolo (Italian food fans will recognize the standard American interpretation of the style as being served with spicy tomato sauce that is indeed devilishly good) until quite recent years, but it’s requested about as often as my also-American interpretation of a good prawn curry. Both of these share top billing around our house with chilled shrimp of whatever size is most freshly available, served with little more than fresh avocado, lemon juice, and salt. Maybe a couple of olives on the side, or the lemon juice amped up with a zip of salsa. No need for much bling; the shrimp’s the thing.

Of course, you do know that I am a meddler. I will fiddle and foozle endlessly with any ingredient that so captures my fancy, and so it is with shrimp and all of their crustacean kin when I’m not in the mood for The Usual. At least many of the best ways of serving shellfish and their ilk are ripe for the tweaking, so I needn’t go so far afield in my experiments that my esteemed fella can’t happily dig into a relatively unsullied meal of whatever form he prefers, so I can roam a little, gastronomically, without losing sight of the guy across the table from me. Shrimp are good that way. Shrimp fried rice, for example, can be sweet, sour, spicy, or salty; Japanese-inflected or Thai-influenced, Chinese-inspired or Polynesian in character, and one way or another, we can doctor the dish at table to suit our individual tastes just fine.

And, since we live in a region that’s rarely cool enough for our comfort during about ten months of the year, shrimp salads are a good, refreshing change of pace from time to time as well. A lovely green salad topped with shrimp is marvelous whether it’s complemented with taco salad ingredients, fried in coconut coating to sit atop a jazzy heap of shredded Napa cabbage and citrus mélange and sprinkled with black sesame seed, or as the star protein in a Cobb salad, deconstructed into neat little arrangements of the classic Cobb ingredients or just piled hither and thither—no matter what the urge, shrimp are a fair bet to fulfill it. So says my pantry (via the best tinned tinies I can find), my fridge (when the season is right) and my freezer (as often as I can lay hands on those swell swimmers that were pulled straight from the ocean into the deep freeze).

And so says my stomach. Amen.