Quick & Easy Shrimp Scampi

Saturday night around 5 pm (when the first storm hit), I decided to make myself a nice pasta dinner as fuel for the 5k I was running later that evening. After all, what better excuse to carb-load than an upcoming race?

Note: strictly speaking, a 5k isn’t a long enough race to worry about carb-loading. I just wanted to eat pasta.

My all-time favorite kind of pasta is Shrimp Scampi. In my mind, there’s nothing more delicious than seafood, pasta, garlic, and butter. It’s a little decadent, sure, but every delicious bite is totally worth it.

Shrimp Scampi is a meal that usually requires a trip to the grocery store for fresh seafood, tomatoes, etc. But on Saturday I wanted to create a quick and easy version that you can make with food you probably already have on hand in your kitchen. First off, I always keep a bag of frozen shrimp in my freezer as a go-to dinner option. Think the “fresh” shrimp at the seafood counter is better? It’s not likely. Most shrimp are “individually quick frozen” (IQF) at the dock when they are caught so really the ”fresh” shrimp at the counter are just shrimp the store has defrosted for you. I prefer to keep frozen shrimp on hand instead. By all means, if you have access to some fresh, local shrimp that would be the best way to go! 🙂

So, since I already have shrimp on hand all I needed was butter (check), garlic (double check, I always have an unnecessary amount of garlic in my house), tomatoes, and pasta. Fresh tomatoes would be delicious in this dish, but I didn’t happen to have any on hand and I think using canned (or jarred) tomatoes is a great option to help make this a go-to dinner that doesn’t require a trip to the store.

I was very happy with the way this turned out! It was absolutely delicious and full of that buttery-scampi flavor that I love.

Quick & Easy Shrimp Scampi with Linguine
Serves four.

– 1 stick of butter, unsalted
– 3 cloves garlic, minced or pasted
– 1 pound frozen or fresh shrimp, raw
– 1 shallot, chopped (you can substitute about half an onion – I just love the shallot flavor!)
– 1 lemon
– ¼ cup white wine (you can substitute chicken broth or water)
– 1 can diced tomatoes, drained
– 1 pound linguine pasta (or you can substitute pasta of your choice)

Melt the butter over medium heat. Once the butter is melted, add the shallot and cook for 3-5 minutes, or until translucent. Add the garlic and cook for another minute, until garlic is fragrant. Deglaze the pan with the white wine (or stock or water, if using). Add the shrimp and cook for 6-7 minutes or until the shrimp turns pink. Add the zest and juice of one lemon.

Drain the canned tomatoes in a fine mesh sieve. Add the tomatoes to the pan and heat through (just a few minutes).

Boil water and cook the pasta according to package directions. I always cook my pasta one minute less than the package directions say so that it is ‘al dente’ (i.e. still has a bite to it) and so it doesn’t over-cook when you add it to the hot sauce.

Add pasta to the shrimp and sauce and stir thoroughly to combine. Serve with bread to soak up the buttery sauce, and a side salad.

If you enjoyed this post, you may also like these recipes:
~ Roasted Red Pepper Pasta Sauce
~ Fresh Tomato Bruschetta
~ Balsamic Glazed Asparagus Pasta

Garlic Scape Pesto

While I continue my journey back to health, my eating habits haven’t been particularly exciting. In fact, my life in general hasn’t been very exciting. As I said yesterday, I’ve been living off of soup and Netflix. I did make it to Body Pump last night (my first workout in a week) and it felt great! That hour and a half in thy gym was the only time I didn’t feel all stuffy and terrible, probably because I was too busy focusing on my burning muscles. Have I mentioned I’m ready for this cold to be over and done with already?

In the meantime, I’ve found a few recipes I made over the past few weeks that hadn’t quite made it to the blog yet. Up first, garlic scape pesto!

Up until a few weeks ago, I didn’t know what garlic scapes were. But Washington’s Green Grocer has some in the box for the week so I decided to give them a try. After all, anything with the word “garlic” in it is bound to be delicious. I have garlic consumption problems.

I found out that garlic scapes are the green shoots that grow out of the garlic in the spring, and are trimmed so that the garlic bulbs have a chance to grow fatter. Fat garlic bulbs are always a good thing! However, the green scapes that are trimmed are equally edible and delicious! They sort of remind me of green onions (in appearance only) with a light garlic flavor. Yum! 🙂 I also found out that the most common use of these little beauties is to make garlic scape pesto.

It turns out this pesto is ridiculously easy to pull together. Just take the garlic scapes (I had about a cup) and cut them into pieces small enough to fit in the food processor.

Add nuts (I went with walnuts because I thought the flavor would mesh well with the garlic – and it does!)

Then process together with lemon juice, salt, pepper and enough olive oil to form a good pesto-consistency. Yum!

At this point, you can also add about a 1/2 cup of cheese and process together, but I was considering freezing mine so I wanted to wait until I was about to use it before adding cheese.

Garlic Scape Pesto
Makes approximately 1 1/2 cups.

– approximately 1 cup garlic scapes
– 1/2 cup walnuts (or other nuts)
– salt and pepper
– 1 tablespoon lemon juice
– up to 1/2 cup olive oil (stream in until a good consistency is reached)
– 1/2 cup parmesan cheese

Place all ingredients except olive oil (and cheese if freezing) in the food processor and process until combined. Stream in olive oil until an appropriate pesto-like consistency is reached.

You can enjoy on this pesto as you would any other pesto – on pasta, or chicken, or in soup. The possibilities are endless!