Help!!
I’m “surprising” my girlfriend with dinner on Valentine’s Day and I have a feeling that she’d like a pasta with some sort of seafood in it. I’ve made a few pasta dishes in the same vein in the past but I’m looking for something new.
No allergies and we’re not really picky. Except artichokes…nasty little things.
Thanks.
The biggest suggestion I will make is to cook the seafood separately then add it when you serve. I’ve had so many dishes with rubbery overcooked shrimp or squid…not good.
That said, I’d say dress some squid with lemon salt and pepper and grill. Or pan sear some good diver scallops and serve with wilted spinach and a blue cheese cream sauce.
Gordon Ramsay’s cookbook has a brilliant recipe for Lobster Spaghetti that is TO DIE FOR. If Lobster is too expensive, you can substitute shrimp or salmon. It’s a favorite dish at our house, and is in regular menu rotation. I don’t have the recipe handy, but it’s in his cookbook called “Gordon Ramsay Makes it Easy.”
Is this the recipe for the Lobster Spaghetti?
I put shrimp in my Alfredo sauce and my husband loves it. It’s rich and delicious. I also add mushrooms but that’s optional.
I melt some butter in a large skillet, a good dollop of it, and cook mushrooms and fresh garlic cloves when they’re about done I dump in the shrimp and saute it until the shrimp are pink. I move everything over to one side of the pan, let the butter run to the other side and stir in a TBS of flour, then I mix everything up and add heavy cream, usually the whole pint or more, depending on how much sauce I want. When the cream has heated I add shitloads of parmesan cheese. Meanwhile I’ve boiled some pasta, baked some garlic bread and have a nice green salad with a dijon vinegarette. Nice dinner anytime. You could surely add some scallops if you wanted to.
I’ve made crab pasta several times, and it’s delicious (and very easy). You can see my results here.
My husband loves Barefoot Contessa’s Shrimp Scampi and linguine.
I like to roast sliced fennel with olive oil and fresh squeezed OJ for about 20-25 mins. Clear room on pan and add salmon fillets with a little more orange and oil and continue to roast for about 10-15 mins. Serve fillet over spinach fettuccine with roasted fennel and garnish with minced fennel fronds.
Very tasty, elegant looking and dead simple.
Here’s a recipe for pasta with a smoked salmon sauce. I had this a few years ago and it was better than good.
Something I threw together at the beach a few years back using what we had:
-Coarsely peel a lemon, giving wide strips of peel, and then cut that into dime-sized slices (roughly).
-Saute the peel with chopped parsley, garlic, salt, pepper.
-Add scallops, shrimp, smoked salmon (any combination), and saute until tender and done.
-Add a little white wine if you want, and cook off a little of the alcohol.
-Toss with linguini.
It’s really delicious.
Note: in a dish like this, the quality of the shrimp may be the biggest determining factor. Farm-raised shrimp have very little flavor and a weird texture. Try to find some wild-caught shrimp, which tend to have much more delicious shrimpiness. Small ones are cheaper and work slightly better in the dish.
We used to do a spaghetti with smoked salmon in a white sauce. It had dill and ground cloves, as I recall, and about 300 calories per square inch. I’ll have to search.
Well I’ve been on a scallop kick lately. My wife has been craving them, and while she’s content with a simple butter, salt, and pepper preparation, I’ve been trying various other things. So here ya go:
Sauteed Scallops, Scallop Fried Rice (you can serve the first one by itself or over noodles or whatever)
Linguine with Scallops in Spicy Garlic Sauce (this one is an Italian style sauce)
Scallops in Spicy Hoisin Sauce
Thanks for the tips everyone. Still haven’t decided what I’m going to go with but I better pick soon.