Coconut Fried Shrimp with Pad Thai Inspired Dipping Sauce
Birthday dinner for a friend: crunchy tuna & salmon rice, coconut shrimp, lemon meringue cookies. A new series where I cook a friend their dream dinner menu as my birthday gift
Ryan Nordheimer•
November 1, 2025
Last year I made a layer cake for each of my friend’s birthdays:
- Zoe: Chocolate Raspberry Cake
- Parker: Lemon Meringue Cake
- Caitlyn: Lemon Poppyseed Cake
- Me: Pistachio Apricot Cake
- Jane: Tiramisu Cake
- Matt: that Funfetti Cake
- Charlotte: Pumpkin Peanut Butter Spice Cake
- Jonah: Key Lime Pie Cake
Then I became tired of making layer cakes almost every month. Each one would take 3 days to make because each had at least 5 different components. For example, Parker’s Lemon Meringue Cake had tahini vanilla cake layers, lemon curd, mascarpone mousse, grand mariner simple syrup, Swiss meringue buttercream, candied lemon peel, and more Swiss meringue for decoration. And I pushed the cakes larger and larger (3 tiers for Cake Picnic, 3 ft long for a cookbook club I hosted with Justine Snacks). It felt like 2024 should remain the year of the cake.
I still wanted to do something for my friends’ birthdays though. If you couldn’t tell, gift giving is my strongest love language. The primary purpose of all the above cakes was to gift my friends something one-of-a-kind, secondary purpose social media content. And just a couple weeks ago I cooked myself an elaborate birthday feast and realized “Oh, I could do this for all my friends.” Obviously not on that scale because I’m not insane, but a smaller dinner party of all their favorite foods. Luckily one of my friends’ birthdays was right around the corner.
Jane is up first. Her birthday is 8/30. Her favorite foods are:
- Lemon / yuzu
- Sushi, specifically tuna crispy rice
- Seafood
- Eggplant
And that was the menu pretty much. I made tuna & salmon crispy rice with yuzu mayo, coconut fried shrimp with a pad Thai-inspired dipping sauce, sriracha glazed eggplant, and lemon meringue pie cookies (those were a specific request). Most of my friends were out of town, so the dinner “party” was 3 people: me, Jane, and her boyfriend Jonah.
Hooray for third-wheeling dinner parties,
Ryan
Hey! My name is Ryan Nordheimer. Welcome to my cooking and baking site. I’m a 25-year old home cook living in the East Village in New York City. Hopefully you enjoy my food through my own, tried-and-true recipes.
Ingredients (12)
Ingredients (12)
Instructions
Add your flour to one bowl, eggs (2) to a second, and coconut (2 cups) to a third.
Grab a shrimp by its tail, dunk into the flour first. Shake off excess. Then bathe thoroughly into the egg (2). Then drop into the coconut and really press it on. Transfer to a parchment-lined half-sheet tray and repeat with remaining shrimp.
In a medium bowl, stir together the sugar (3 Tbsp), soy sauce (2 Tbsp), fish sauce (1 Tbsp), and lime juice (2 Tbsp) until sugar dissolves. Taste for seasoning. Drop in some jalapeño slices to make it gorgeous.
In a medium saucepan, add enough oil to reach up around 3”. Preheat over medium-high heat. Once at 350F, drop in about 1/3 of the shrimp.
Cook for 2-3 minutes, until golden brown all over.
Transfer to a paper towel lined half sheet tray. Season with flaky salt and repeat with remaining shrimp in 2 batches.
Serve shrimp hot with the dipping sauce. Shrimp will stay crunchy for between 30 minutes and 1 hour.
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