Shrimply Irresistible!

We keep seeing those Buitoni pasta commercials, advertising an easy date night dinner of shrimp scampi.  The guy rips open the bag of pasta and shrimp and dumps it into a pan, and voila!  "Homemade" date night dinner, lit candles and all.  After much joking about having Buitoni shrimp scampi for dinner, we decided to make our version of date night shrimp pasta.  Shrimp primavera was definitely our inspiration here, despite it being Fall.

The most time consuming part is cleaning the shrimp, and even then, you can just buy shrimp that are already shelled and cleaned.  But if you're like us and buy the shell-on shrimp, you'll need to peel and devein your shrimp.  At the very least, take out the main vein on the back side.    Just run a paring knife down the back, run it under some water, and you're done.  No one wants to eat shrimp poop!

While Justin was cleaning the shrimp, I got to chopping up some onion, garlic, and tomatoes for our sauce.  We had a couple small beefsteak tomatoes and some yellow romas from our share, but you can use whatever you have on hand.  We just let them cook down and release their juices.  If you have grape or cherry tomatoes on hand, as an alternative, throw them on a backing sheet and pop them in the oven to roast.  Once they start to pop, pull them out, and then just smash them with a potato masher for a nice, roasted tomato sauce.

But back to our sauce.  We poured a little white wine, Italian sauvignon blanc to be exact, into the pan to deglaze it, and get all those tasty bits off the bottom of the pan.  Don't forget to cook your pasta while your sauce is cooking.  The shrimp don't take long to cook up, so toss them into your sauce when your pasta is almost al dente.  Since we still wanted some bit to our asparagus, we threw them in with the shrimp.

When your pasta is done, reserve some of the starchy cooking liquid.  Justin wanted to be absolutely sure the pasta was done, so he threw some on the cabinet...it was done!

Once your shrimps are nice and pink, add in a bit of the pasta water and give it a good stir, before tossing in your pasta.

Give it a good toss so all of the pasta is coated in your sauce.  We topped ours with some fresh chopped parsley and basil, and some parmesan cheese.  And to accompany our pasta, we threw together a Fall salad of mixed greens, apple, toasted walnuts, blue cheese, and a cranberry balsamic vinaigrette.

Date night dinners can still be easy without coming from a bag!

Let's Dish on our Fish...

Wednesdays can be a tough day to get motivated to cook dinner.  You're bogged down at work, already looking toward the weekend.  Although fish is more of a Friday thing this time of year, trout and spinach were all that remained of our share, so tonight that's what we did.  We got a late start, but luckily tonight's dinner came together in a matter of minutes.  No joke!

Justin was in charge of the sauteed spinach.  He started by chopping up some garlic, onion, and the shitake mushrooms from the share.  Into the pan they went with a little butter, where they cooked down for a few minutes, until the onions and garlic were soft.  He also added a dash of red pepper flakes for some heat.

Once that all cooked down, he added the spinach, and a little white cooking wine to deglaze the pan.  It took just a few more minutes for the spinach to wilt down.




While Justin took care of the spinach, I got to work on our whole trout.  Since we had some lemon, onion, and cilantro to use up, we decided to stuff our little guy with all of those tasty ingredients, along with some garlic and ginger.

 

Before stuffing him silly, he got a sprinkling of salt and pepper on both sides of his skin, and inside.  Then I filled his belly with the garlic, ginger, some of the sliced onions, some of the lemon slices, and about half of the cilantro.  I also made a little bed of lemon and onion for him to rest on, and to serve as a little blanket for him.

Into the oven he went for about 7 minutes on each side.  The flavors melted into the fish, and the skin got a bit crispy.  We topped him off with the remaining fresh cilantro.  So in about 20 minutes, we had a delicious meal.  We also had the leftover polenta with kale that we made the other night.  I think it was even tastier as a leftover!  But if you're looking for a quick meal to throw together mid-week, or any day of the week, try this out.  The flavors of the lemon, ginger and cilantro were subtle, but they were there.