Shrimp wrapped in basil and prosciutto

This is the second part of our solution to the rare problem of too much prosciutto (see "Fettucine Alfredo," below). It also used what is probably the last of our fresh garden basil, as temperatures are now dropping into the 30s at night.

Get a pound of large-ish shrimp, and mix them into a bowl with some white wine, a little less olive oil, a clove or two of minced garlic, and a touch of dried red pepper. While they marinate, go out and pick the largest basil leaves you can find, one for each shrimp. Lay out your prosciutto, so you can see how many slices you have available, and get a shallow baking sheet lined with tinfoil.

Now your task is to roll each shrimp in a basil leaf and then in a prosciutto strip, so that it's mainly covered but doesn't unroll. How you do this depends on how big the shrimp and the basil leaves are, how many prosciutto slices you have, and your own geometric analysis of all of the above. Holt found a great prosciutto-cutting technique: as the nice guy at Krause's had laid out the slices on individual pieces of greaseproof paper, Holt scissored through both paper and prosciutto to get the size he wanted, then just lifted the prosciutto off the paper.

Lay the wrapped shrimp out on the baking sheet, and broil them about 3-4 inches from the heat. Watch them like a shrimp-eating hawk (an osprey? an erne?) - ours took only about 4 minutes. As they're on hot metal, you don't have to flip them, and they're done when the shrimp looks pink and opaque at its thick end.

You could wrap the shrimp in prosciutto alone, or basil leaves alone, or some in one and some in the other; or you could grill them on skewers if you flipped them halfway through. A squeeze of lemon would be nice, and they would make excellent appetizers for a party, too.