Shrimp Fettucine
This is a great simple recipe that introduces the home cook to a number of key skills, including blanching, cooking pasta (God save you if you can’t boil pasta), and cooking shrimp. The prep and setup was easy for me, making this a legitimate weekday banger. I cribbed the recipe from a mailer sent by Blue Apron and bought the ingredients from a combination of Whole Foods and Safeway, but mostly Whole Foods. Altogether, this cost $23.10 on my end, which puts it above the cost of what you’d get from Blue Apron.
Ingredients
- 10 oz shrimp, peeled and de-veined
- 8 oz fettucine (half box)
- 6 oz asparagus, ends snapped off and cut into 2-inch pieces
- 2 cloves garlic, minced
- 1 bunch chives, minced
- 2 tbsp unsalted butter (good butter!)
- ¼ cup mascarpone cheese
- ¼ cup Parmesan cheese, grated
Begin by bringing a large pot of water to a boil. Add the asparagus and boil it for 2-3 minutes until it changes color and softens. Transfer to bowl of cold water with ice to “shock” it and stop the cooking process. Drain the asparagus and pat it dry.
Rinse the shrimp then toss it with salt and pepper. In a 12-inch non-stick skillet, add 2 tsp of olive oil on medium-high heat until just smoking then add the garlic along with some salt and pepper (this step is weird, why add salt and pepper to sautéing garlic? Nobody knows). Cook until fragrant, 30-60 seconds, then add the shrimp and cook 2-14 minutes, stirring occasionally, until opaque and cooked through.
Now here is the very suspect part. Blue Apron says now you start the pasta. The water should take about 10 minutes to bring to a boil so do that ahead of time. Then it says cook the fettuccine for 2-3 minutes until it’s “al dente” the problem being that the box of fettuccine I use says it take 10-11 minutes to cook it to that point. Blue Apron provides fresh pasta so that's why there's the short cooking time. Please follow the instructions on the box so you don’t screw the pooch on this one. Anyway, cook the pasta and then reserve a cup of the cooked pasta water for later, JUST IN CASE.
Now that your pasta, shrimp, and asparagus are done, it’s ready to combine them and put it all together. Blue Apron says to throw your pasta, half the cooking water, the mascarpone, the asparagus, and the butter back to the pan. TO BE CLEAR, THIS ASKS YOU TO COOK THE SHRIMP AGAIN, EVEN THOUGH IT’S ALREADY COOKED. You may want to consider leaving the garlic and shrimp uncooked until this stage then adding the garlic and cooking until fragrant then adding everything – including the uncooked shrimp – at this point to bring it all together. Anyway, Blue Apron says to add everything here and cook it until it all comes together as a nice dish. Once it looks/tastes the way you want it, you’re done and you can garnish with the chives and Parmesan. If it gets too thick, add some extra pasta water.
Plate it and you’re done.
Like Kai Ryssdal, LET’S DO THE NUMBERS
- Shrimp – $9.50
- Mascarpone – $3.99
- Asparagus – $2.80
- Parmesan – In stock
- Salt – In stock
- Pepper – In stock
- Garlic – In stock
- Fettucine – $2.00
- Butter – In stock
- Chives – $1.99
- Total -- $20.28
This obviously requires me to have a bunch of ingredients on hand. That said, you should probably have a bunch of this stuff on hand regardless like a normal person. Butter, garlic, salt, pepper, etc. should be basic things available to you. If you don’t have that, expect this recipe to be much more expensive. I also could have dropped the shrimp cost by using either frozen shrimp or shrimp that aren’t already peel/deveined.
