Fusili & Scampi New Orleans Style

This is one of the few times I will actually garnish

I’ve never had a bad New Orlean’s Pasta

Time:1 hour 20 minutes (peeling and deveining shrimp included)

Difficulty: 1/5

Ingredient Availability: 5/5

Shrimp and pasta kinda just go together. When I was younger, one of my favorite things that my mom would cook was a citrus shrimp pasta. Although it’s not something that I would’ve thought would go well together, it was a precursor to the idea that lemon that makes almost everything better to me. When I saw this recipe, I was definitely interested. I’ve had a few New Orleans inspired pastas from different restaurants and they are usually pretty good and packed with flavor. Making a version of those at home should be even better, right?

Key Ingredients and Omissions:

I don’t think you need to use your drinking wine for this

There was nothing that I left out of this recipe and I don’t think anything should be. I couldn’t find peeled and deveined jumbo shrimp at my grocery store, so I just went with the shell on shrimp. If you can find the shrimp with the work already done, I would go ahead and get those as they will save you a good amount of time. I also just used cooking white wine instead of a drinking wine.

Tools:

• Nothing Special

• Sharp Knife

Cooking Review:

Shrimp: 43 minutes

To start out, I peeled and deveined a pound of jumbo shrimp, which took a little over half an hour. After that, I combined the marinade/spice mix for the shrimp, tossed them, and let them sit aside as I worked on the rest of the recipe.

Prep: 15 minutes

The other prep that I had to do included shredding the cheese, squeezing the lemons, and cutting the garlic and green onions. I also got the pasta water started on its way to a boil.

Sauce: 15 minutes

To make the sauce, I melted the butter in a pot along with the bay leaves before adding the sliced garlic. Once everything was fragrant, I added the cooking wine and cooked it down until just about dry. The chicken stock was added next and reduced to about half. The sauce was taken off the heat until the pasta was done cooking.

Finishing: 6 minutes

The pasta was added to the pot with the sauce along with the shrimp, cheese, green onions, and lemon juice. The remaining butter was added and stirred in vigorously until completely melted.

Analysis:

The flavors of this dish are very bright thanks to the half cup of lemon juice at the end. I liked the lemony flavor, although I can’t say it was expected. The acidity is well balanced by the saltiness from the cheese and richness from all the butter. Everything was well cooked and the textures were nice. I really enjoyed the freshness brought by the green onions as garnish at the end. The only problem with this recipe is that it doesn’t really give the New Orleans flavors that I think most would expect. While it tastes good, it does’t quite live up to New Orleans style in my mind. The recipe still earns a 8/10 for being fairly quick and easy for a tasty result.