Recipe organization turns into a family cookbook.

Byline: HOME COOKING By Jim Boyd The Register-Guard

CORRECTION (ran 4/16/04): The recipe for B-56 Shrimp on Page E3 Wednesday should have called for 2 tablespoons, not 2 pounds, of chopped shallots or scallions.

Sheila Schroder, executive assistant to the dean of the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication, offers a recipe today for angel hair pasta with shrimp and mushrooms in a cream sauce made with Asti Spumanti, a semisweet sparkling wine.

The dish is from the 308-page cookbook she produced two years ago as a way to organize the recipes she had collected over the years.

"I'd stash them away in shoe boxes or envelopes," she says. `Then I would remember one day, `Oh, I have a recipe for this occasion that would be just perfect.' And then I couldn't find it.'

So she gathered up all her recipe clippings and picked out the one or two recipes per cookbook that she actually used and collected them together in a spiral-bound cookbook, "Sheila's Sampler: A Collection of Recipes (Tried and Untried), Helpful Hints, Words of Inspiration, and A Wee Bit of Irish Whimsy."

"I did this just for me and my family. It is not for sale, and one of the reasons is that I do not want to spend the rest of my life paying off a copyright libel lawsuit," she says, explaining that the cookbook doesn't list the source of each recipe. "It could have been one I got out of a newspaper. It could have been one I got out of a cookbook. I'm not sure."

She spent six months at her computer putting the cookbook together, and the printing and binding of 30 copies of the book cost her $900 ($30 each).

Was it worth it?

"Yes," she says. "If for no other reason than the self-satisfaction you get out of completing a project that you've always wanted to do."

Specialty: It would be variety, says her husband, Phil Schroder, a machine shop foreman at Myrmo & Sons.

`I just really don't like the `if it's Monday night it must be meatloaf' syndrome,' Sheila Schroder says. "I am constantly scouring anything and everything that has recipes in it, looking for stuff that just meets our taste buds."

How she began cooking: "My mother was a waitress, and because of her career usually she was gone during the dinner hour," Schroder says. "I started cooking - I can't even remember how old I was, but by the time I was 12, I was cooking complete meals for a family of five."

Her biggest cooking success: The Schroders are "empty nesters" now, but when they married eight years ago, she inherited his three teenage sons. Her biggest success, she says, was the first dinner she prepared for her future husband and his sons.

"They (the three sons) were totally prepared to dislike anything that it was, no matter what it was," she recalls. "So I decided to fix chicken and dumplings. As we sat down to the table, one of the boys made an unfortunate remark that kind of spoiled the meal for a moment or two. But by the time the meal was done, there wasn't a scrap left anywhere and, to this day, anytime I say I'm cooking chicken and dumplings, they're all home."

Her biggest cooking failure: "That one wasn't too long ago. It was probably only six months ago," she says.

`I love Bubba Gump's coconut shrimp and I found a recipe for coconut shrimp and I thought, `I'm going to try this,' ' she says. `And I failed to heed the lesson you learn in Deep Frying 101, which is don't put too much stuff in the fryer at once, and allow the oil to reach cooking temperature before you put in subsequent batches. So I put in too many at once. And I took them out and refilled it too soon. So what I ended up with was coconut coated erasers.'

Her favorite cookbooks: She mentions a 1950 edition of the "Better Homes and Gardens Cook Book," which she received as a gift from an aunt. "There is just absolutely no better cookbook for basic recipes and techniques, in my opinion," she says.

Her other favorites are "Heart of the Home: Notes from a Vineyard Kitchen" by Susan Branch and "The Complete Guide to Bread Machine Baking," another Better Homes and Gardens book. However, she believes bread machines make a loaf with too crusty a crust. So she uses her bread machine to make dough, which she then bakes in the oven.

Why this recipe was chosen: Schroder says this is a "yummy" dish. "The reason it got named B-56 shrimp is because that was what I cooked my husband for his 56th birthday," she said. "I think the reason it's so good is cooking the shrimp in the Asti Spumanti just gives the shrimp an absolutely wonderful flavor that I have never tasted before in any other dish."

B-56 Shrimp

1 cup sliced mushrooms

1 tablespoon olive oil 

1 pound medium shrimp, shelled

1 1/2 cups Asti Spumanti, a semi-sweet sparkling wine

1/4 teaspoon salt

2 tablespoons minced shallots or scallions

2 Roma tomatoes

2 tablespoons flour

1 1/4 cups heavy cream, divided

1 pound angel hair pasta

3 tablespoons chopped parsley

1/4 cup grated Parmesan cheese 

Saute mushrooms in a medium saucepan in hot olive oil over medium-high heat. Cook just long enough to release mushroom juices and let them evaporate. Remove mushrooms and set aside.

In the same saucepan, combine shrimp, sparkling wine and salt. Heat to simmer over high heat.

When liquid boils and shrimp turn pink, they're done. Immediately remove the shrimp from the cooking liquid with a slotted spoon and keep warm.

Add the chopped shallots and tomatoes to the cooking liquid. Boil over medium-high heat until the liquid is reduced to about 1/2 cup (approximately 6 minutes).

Whisk the flour into 1 cup of heavy cream. Whisk the flour/cream mixture into the reduced shallot and tomato cooking liquid. Boil for 1 to 2 minutes until slightly thickened and reduced. Taste and add more salt and pepper if desired.

Meanwhile, cook pasta according to directions on package. Drain thoroughly and return to cooking pot. Toss with remaining 1/4 cup cream and add parsley.

Serve pasta topped with shrimp with sauce spooned over all. Sprinkle with grated Parmesan cheese.

Serves 4.

CAPTION(S):

Sheila Schroder produced a cookbook so she and her family could easily find recipes for favorite dishes.