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When I was a young sailor at Cecil Field in Florida, three of us went to an all you can eat shrimp place. I was a madman for shrimp, and the competitive juices kicked in and harnessed my love of the crustacean.

I ate so many shrimp in a variety of forms (breaded, fried, steamed) I ended up in a state of gastric distress. We drove back, and I lay in the bed of that pickup truck groaning.

I couldn’t eat shrimp for years.

I was so disappointed I did that to myself, and learned a lesson that night. Never again would I engage in an eating contest.

After about 15 or 20 years of traversing the Great Shrimp Desert, I regained my appetite for them.

In my most lustful historic shrimp feast I attended a Christmas Work Party at a fancy hotel some years ago, and a server waded through the crowd bearing a turkey platter sized plate heaped nearly a foot high with a mound of cold, steamed shrimp with the edges of the tray thick with nice, horseradish-y cocktail sauce.

That night I followed in the wake of that tray of shrimp as it meandered through the crowd!

I love it steamed, with peppercorns, bay leaf, and just a touch of Old Bay, barely even enough to taste. I take the store-bought cocktail sauce and spice it up with fresh grated horseradish, lemon, and Tabasco sauce!

My second favorite way to eat it is a Spanish tapas dish “Gambas Al Ajillo”. I have small teracotta dishes (they call them ‘cazuelas’ in Spain) about six inches across and two inches deep that I cook it in. I don’t like to use the teeny cocktail shrimp, I like to use the smallest whole shrimp I can get that aren’t the tiny ones. I add six or seven shrimp to each dish. I then take 1-2 cloves of garlic for each serving, and using a single edge razor blade, I slice them as absolutely as thin as I can possibly make them. And there is a reason for that.

Then, I take 1-6 whole dried red chili peppers (I put six in mine!) and toss them on top. I add a bay leaf, just a tad of paprika, and some parsley.

I heat up some fine Spanish Olive Oil (1/2 cup for each serving) in a saucepan until it is just about smoking, then pour the hot oil into each dish and it sizzles like mad!

I heat up some nice crusty small-loaved Spanish bread (If I can get it) and slice it into moderately thin slices, remove the bay leaf, and serve it hot.

That absolutely brilliantly great thing is that you don’t have to time it or anything. You just pour the oil in and you serve, the olive oil to drip the bread in is...killer.

But what really makes the dish is the garlic. A disclaimer-I cannot eat a lot of garlic, most especially strong garlic or the minced garlic you see in jars, which I simply can’t stomach. I adore garlic, but it causes me digestive problems.

But when I slice it like that with the razor, thinner than paper, and pour the hot olive oil over it, much of the garlic seems to melt and dissolve, and that strong garlicky taste largely disappears, as does the indigestion that usually follows it. I know if I told people how much garlic I just gave them, they would probably not be enthusiastic, but...because the strong taste isn’t there, they don’t know.

It is a brilliant dish. Dipping that bread...