Shrimp Scampi

Hi everyone! This past week, I had the chance to try cooking a dish that I have had many times at restaurants but never made myself: Shrimp Scampi. This dish is a quick and easy weeknight dinner that only takes a few ingredients and less than thirty minutes to cook. There are a few different varieties to this dish but I went the simple route and made my Shrimp Scampi with plenty of butter and lemon juice. I found this recipe from Ina Garten and then doctored it up a bit by adding a couple of my own ingredients and messing with the ratios a bit. So without spoiling it all in the opening paragraph, here are the ingredients I used and the steps I took to make this lemony and buttery Shrimp Scampi.

Recipe Courtesy of: Ina Garten

https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/ina-garten/linguine-with-shrimp-scampi-recipe3-1916619

Ingredients:

1. Linguine pasta- however much you would normally use for the number of people that you are serving. I used about 1/2 a box for two people
2. 4 tablespoons of butter- the recipe linked above calls for 3 tablespoons but I always like my food to have a bit of extra butter and thought that more butter would help to cut the lemon flavor a bit.
3. 3 tablespoons of olive oil
4. 5 cloves garlic minced– the recipe above calls for 4 cloves of garlic but I like my base to have a bit of extra garlic in it
5. 1 pound fresh peeled and deveined shrimp– I also took the tails off once I bought the shrimp to make the dish a bit easier to eat.
6. 2 lemons juiced
7. 1/2 a lemon zested
8. leaves from 7 stems of parsley minced
9. Salt and pepper– as needed to make the dish well seasoned
10. Fresh parmesan cheese— to grate on the top of the dish at the end
11. red chili flakes (optional)– to taste and add heat to the dish

Steps I took To Make This Dish:

1. Boil a large pot of salted water over high heat. Once the water is boiling, add a splash of olive oil as well as your linguine pasta. Cook the pasta for roughly eight or nine minutes until it is al dente. After nine minutes, drain your pasta and set aside for later.
2. While the pasta is cooking, heat up a large deep bottomed pan over medium high heat. Once the pan is hot, add the three tablespoons of olive oil and melt three out of the four tablespoons of butter in the pan as well. Once the butter is melted, added the minced garlic.
3. Cook the garlic in the oil and butter mixture for roughly 1 minute, stirring constantly as to not burn the garlic.
4. Once the garlic has been cooking for a minute, add the shrimp to the pan. Season the shrimp aggressively with salt and pepper. Stir the shrimp and garlic mixture around and then let it cook for about five minutes. I flipped the shrimp half way through so that they would cook evenly. After about five minutes the shrimp should be slightly pink all around and fully cooked.

5. Once the shrimp is cooked, take the pan off of the heat. Proceed to add the lemon juice, lemon zest, red pepper flakes and parsley to the pan. Stir the shrimp around to combine it with all of the ingredients.

6. After all of the ingredients have been combined, add the cooked linguine to the pan as well as the remaining tablespoon of butter. Stir the pan again to combine all of the ingredients together.

7. After stirring one last time, it is time to serve! Put the Shrimp Scampi into bowls, add freshly grated parmesan cheese to the top and enjoy!

Final Thoughts and My Opinions of this dish:

Overall, I really enjoyed this dish as it was simple but at the same time elegant and elevated. I really enjoyed how the richness of the butter and tartness of the lemon juice combined to form a light and refreshing sauce. My shrimp was cooked perfectly and worked well with the sauce and pasta. I also loved that I only had to buy the shrimp, pasta, and parsley to make this dish. Some dishes that I have made in the past have required so many ingredients that it makes it inhibiting to make every night. But, this dish contains mostly ingredients that you have on hand at home which makes it nice and easy to make on weeknights. I also really enjoyed that this dish only took about thirty minutes to make as oftentimes I only have about thirty to forty five minutes to cook dinner during the week.

When I made this dish last week, I realized that it contained a lot of lemon and not enough other items to cut the sourness. I should have realized this earlier and attempted to cut the sourness with butter or another ingredient while I was cooking it. But unfortunately, I did not realize this and thus my final dish was a bit lemony for me. As a result of this, the recipe I wrote above is updated a bit to fit this feedback. The fourth tablespoon of butter put in with the pasta at the end is designed to cut that acid a bit and make the sauce a bit more richer and creamy. I also added the parmesan cheese at the end to add a bit of creamy and nuttiness as well. I think these addition will make this dish even better in the end.

To conclude, I really enjoyed making this Shrimp Scampi and I definitely plan to make it again in the future as it is simple and requires only a few ingredients. Thank you so much for reading this blog post and I hope a Shrimp Scampi dinner is in your near future!