Friday, January 17, 2014

Friday Night Foodie: Shrimp Scampi with Zucchini Pasta

This week was one of those weeks; a no good, very bad week.  Work felt like drowning most days (pretty sure at some point of each day I was holding back tears), I felt guilty for feeling tired because I get to leave aforementioned work at the end of the day (and how could I possibly be tired, I don't have kids), I felt lonely, rejected (stupid eharmony), unworthy, and really, just sort of like a failure.  All that to say, I am very thankful it's Friday and, thanks to the generosity of my sweet parents, I have a spa day tomorrow.

On the more positive side of things (ever struggle to be transparent, then feel like you're being too negative, then try to be positive but wind up feeling fake?  I swear I can't be the only one who struggles with this…) I did have a fairly successful recipe this week and am actually sharing it on a Friday night! Round of applause please…maybe?  No?  Ok.  This week I tried shrimp scampi with zucchini pasta.  In an attempt to avoid gluten and carbs at dinner (I ate brown rice almost every morning this week) I favored this recipe which uses zucchini as the pasta.  I need a veggie slicer, but a potato peeler worked just fine for me.  You start with four zucchini:
Peel off the skin, then shred into strips…next time I might try using my cheese grater for a different shape of "noodle"

Saute 1 head of garlic in a 1/4 cup of butter or ghee

Naked zucchini!
Add zucchini "noodles" and 1 lb of raw shrimp…I messed up and used cocktail shrimp…not bad but fresh would have been better.

Fresh parmesan cheese on top and voila!

Deliciousness!

The good: the taste was excellent and in spite of the butter, because zucchini and shrimp are low in calories this is a pretty healthy dish.  Plus it's sort of a way to sneak veggies into a meal.

The bad: I should have used raw shrimp.  The taste might have been better.

The ugly: my kitchen smelled very strongly of shrimp for the next twenty four hours.  I did not want to heat it up for lunch the next day, mainly because the smell put me off.  Again, this might have been due to the sort of shrimp I used, or it may just be that it wasn't quite good enough to make the left over roster.  I might try it again, but I'm not so sure.

Do you have a favorite way to "hide" veggies?








1 comment:

Kirsten Oliphant said...

That sounds good!! I would guess that kind of shrimp is the reason for the smell. I tend to go big or go home with seafood. As in, the big and best shrimp are the best, so I'll buy them at the counter and just buy fewer because they're better. Same with scallops--don't buy tiny! A few big will do and taste better. I haven't done zucchini pasta in a while, so this was a good reminder.