Creole Shrimp And Pasta Meuniere

Here's another one of those recipes that I really shouldn't even bother blogging about, but I feel the recipe is a good base to add your own personal touch to create something delicious.

I wanted to try a new shrimp dish and found this one at All Recipes. It was given 4.5 stars and in reading the comments, most people said it was really good but only because they made many changes due to it being so bland. I read their changes and made my notes and then, apparently, didn't make enough changes to my version. Because the pasta was still very bland. The shrimp, though, was not bland but quite tasty and is the reason I'm sharing my experience with Betty Pritchard's recipe.

You start out with a lot of butter. Imagine that. A big butter post on La Mia Cucina - who woulda thunk it? And as much as I lurve me my butter - I don't particularly like a lot of it with my pasta. Much to Hubbs' chagrin. I hate a greasy pasta, it just doesn't sit well with me. After reading the recipe, I thought maybe the butter was just a base for a nice creamy sauce, but alas, it wasn't. Although by browning the butter and adding the worchestershire, hot sauce and herbs, it really did give the shrimp a delectible taste. The changes I made, were as follows: I did not have "fines herbs" - quite frankly, I had no fakkin' idea what "fines herbs" was until I checked it out on Wikipedia and realized that I didn't have those herbs even in a dried version. So I substituted with Herbes de Provence. Another change was I just added the hot sauce but omitted the jalapeno pepper sauce because as we all know, I'm a spice chicken. And finally, I added 3 cloves of garlic, finely minced and 2 TBS. of white wine. Two ingredients I seem to always add to a shrimp/pasta dish.

This brown butter sauce clung well to the shrimp, and quite frankly, if I ever wanted to make a snacker out of shrimp this is how I'd prepare them again - but the butter sauce didn't do much for the pasta. Maybe this dish would have been better suited to rice? I'm not sure. I even went with the old standby of adding some of the pasta water and parmigiano but it still didn't perk the pasta up at all.

So.. try this recipe for shrimp, but either omit the pasta and try rice, maybe? Or just make the shrimp. For the 7 TBS of butter, it was just enough to coat the 1 lb. of medium sized shrimp perfectly, so you wouldn't be wasting a bunch of sauce if you were to omit pasta or rice completely.

Creole Shrimp and Pasta Meuniere

I'm not bothering with typing out the recipe, but you can find it here.