shrimpy fettuccine alfredo:

so i keep telling myself and my friends that i am going to make banana bread... so here it is... fettuccine alfredo with shrimp!!! ...?

soooo... an alfredo sauce is super easy to whip up and you only need a few ingredients. you can really pick any pasta to go with this simple sauce and you can toss in anything you like to make it your own. a good combination is chicken and snow peas, but today it's shrimp (because it was on sale) and fresh parsley (because i just got a plant and wanted to use it).

so even though i got cooked shrimp, i decided to use it last minute so it was frozen. i put a bit of oil into a pan and tossed in a couple minced cloves of garlic. over medium/high heat, cook the garlic until it's lightly browned. then i toss in how much shrimp you wanted and put a lid on the pan to steam the shrimpies.

then strain it all out and put the shrimp to the side. then, in a wok, melt about a 1/2 cup-1 cup of butter and, hey, what the heck, toss a few more cloves of garlic in there.

mmm melty butter. then after you let the garlic simmer a bit, add some heavy cream (i use one of those small cartons of whipping cream).

as bob marley would say, stir it up. then let it come to a simmer and throw in a few heaping spoonfuls of parmesan cheese. this will thicken it up nicely. stir more.

in the meantime... if you're doing shrimp... and if you hate running into tails when you eat shrimp in pasta... take the tails off your shrimp.

my little rule of thumb is that your sauce is creamy enough if when you swish it around your wok it lightly coats the sides. voila.

then you can throw in anything you want in there and season with salt and pepper.

also by now your pasta should be cooking. i forgot to mention that part. i usually start boiling the water when i start melting the butter but it depends on how fast your stove boils water.

now comes my parsley. fresh from my balcony's planter.

until recently, everytime it came to adding fresh herbs to anything, i went nuts. i don't have rock star knives (but oh boy do i want them) so i never seemed to be able to chop my parsley into a good size. then i was watching a cooking show and when i saw how the dude (anthony sedlak from the main) chopped his parsley i went "oohhhhhhhh". he kind of bunched his bunch together and made it into a ball, then chop chopped. this works much better.

ta da!

if at this step you're done your sauce pretty much and not your pasta, just keep in on low heat and keep stirring it. sometimes when i have things in front of me for too long i start adding other ingredients. i added lemon juice. just a couple squeezes because i'm a firm believer that lemon goes well with anything that lives in the water. just a tad extra flavour. ANYWAYS. when you've strained your pasta (don't run water over your pasta. sometimes it sticks together a bit but there are starches on the pasta that help your sauce stick to it and water will wash them away. once you get it into the sauce the pasta will separate), toss it into your sauce.

when it's all nice and mixed together...

plate it and sprinkle with parmesan... if you want... which i do.

i thought it was pretty good, and the lucky boyfriend (lucky that he walked in the door JUST as i was plating it) said he thought it was DELICIOUS. whether he was telling the truth or not is irrelevant. he needs to say it every time... but he seemed to mean it.

next time... BANANA BREAD!