New Orleans BBQ Shrimp

We first had New Orleans BBQ shrimp at Oceana Grill in New Orleans. It's really freaking good and really freaking far away, and we crave it all the time. One time, we even trekked all the way to Brooklyn to a pop up restaurant to have some.

What's so special about it? Well it's all about the sauce. The sauce might be opaque or transparent, red/orange/black, but it has to be spicy to the point of heating up your face. It has to have a smokey bite, so that you feel like the shrimp was cooked on a grill. And it has to be a little sticky, so that you can enjoy the sauce when you first suck it from the shell and again with the peeled shrimp... and maybe a third time with bread.

My bf became crazy obsessed, because he loves sauces, you see. So he played around until he had his own secret recipe with 12 different ingredients. We keep it on the refrigerator door. I'm not even kidding.

You are about to see glimpses of the building of this sauce... but because it's a secret sauce, I'm not labeling any ingredients.

He decided to calm down on the spices this time, because last time we ended up eating an entire loaf of bread.

I think the key to this sauce is the 3 or 4 different kinds of spice, and the butter that binds all the powders so that you can breathe and eat without coughing.

All that's left to do was cook the shrimp. Spoon sauce liberally onto the shrimp to make sure that the meat basks in the glorious sauce! It's BBQ *shrimp* after all!

We also steamed some snap peas to have some greens (and something that's not spicy).