Fire Roasted Tomato and Feta Pasta With Shrimp (Official Meal #8)

I chose this recipe because I wanted to try something new without wandering too far from my comfort zone.  I know that I usually use some sort of chicken in my dishes (considering I love chicken), but for my last dish, I decided to use shrimp.

Ingredients
Serves 2

• - 1/2 pound linguine pasta
• - 1 tablespoon olive oil
• - 3 cloves garlic, minced
• - 12 medium shrimp, peeled and deveined
• - 1 (14.5 ounce) can fire roasted tomatoes
• - 1 tablespoon chopped fresh basil
• - salt and pepper to taste
• - 1/2 cup crumbled feta cheese

Bring a large pot of lightly salted water to a boil.  Add pasta and cook for 8 to 10 minutes or until a dente; drain.

While the pasta is cooking, heat the olive oil in a large skillet over medium heat. 

 Add the garlic; cook and stir until fragrant, about 1 minute. Add the shrimp, and cook until opaque, about 3 to 5 minutes.

Add the shrimp, and cook until opaque, about 3 to 5 minutes. Pour in the tomatoes and heat through. 

Season with basil, salt and pepper.

Amount Per Serving  Calories: 702 | Total Fat: 23.4g | Cholesterol: 111mg

• Recipe from: http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Fire-Roasted-Tomato-and-Feta-Pasta-with-Shrimp/Detail.aspx

Overall, this dish was good.  It held a medium rank among the other dishes I have cooked within the past week.  This recipe allowed me to become my own chef and adjust the ingredients in order to end up with the dish I wanted to cook.  For this meal, I added in orange bell peppers.  Among the eight recipes I have tried, a few of them contain bell peppers.  Dealing with this ingredient so often has caused me to somewhat favor bell peppers, which led me to adding in 3/4 cup of orange bell peppers to the recipe.  The orange bell peppers have a sweeter taste than its red, green, and yellow cousins.  It stood among the few main contributors to the overall taste.

Another change that I have made to the recipe is the substitution of parmesan cheese for feta cheese.  I decided to do this because of my Asian family's lack of taste for uncommon cheese, especially feta cheese.  Since we had the tube of Parmesan cheese still left in the refrigerator from past recipes, we decided to just substitute the Parmesan cheese for feta cheese and sprinkle that on the pasta instead.

While cooking this dish, I learned how to peel and devein shrimp.  The terms used to describe this technique might sound a bit intimidating, especially for a novice like me, but the technique itself is surprisingly simple.  Within a few minutes, I was peeling and deveining the shrimp at the same rate as my mom.  

How to peel and devein shrimp:

1.  Pull off head (if still attached) and legs.

2.  Starting with the head end, pull off the outer shell.  Depending on how to you intend to present the shrimp, you can keep the last segment of shell and the tail tip on, for decorative purposes.  Place shells in 

plastic bag, securely close, and throw away (to prevent smell).

3. Using a small paring knife, cut along outer edge of shrimp's back, about 1/4 inch deep.

4.  If you can see it, remove and discard vein that runs along right under surface of the back, with your fingers or the tip of your knife.  If you can't see the vein, don't bother with it.  

5. Return the peeled and deveined shrimp to your bowl of ice or ice water until you are ready to cook.  

A few suggestions for this dish would be...

1) not as much sauce - This seemed to be swimming in sauce.  I feel like it wouldn't have made a different whether it was tomato sauce (like Prego) or can fire roasted tomatoes.   

2) add in fresh mushrooms - Considering this dish doesn't have much flavor and variety of ingredients, the addition of mushrooms would be perfect.

3) garlic or butter bread/toast as a side dish - You can't have pasta without bread!

Even though I haven't been cooking for a long time (it's almost been a month), I feel like I am developing a sense of taste that allows me to decipher the appropriate amount of how much of each ingredient to add in.  This new sense of taste helps me to somewhat "imagine" the taste of the recipe/dish just by scanning over the ingredients and each of their quantities.  This also helps me adjust the amounts of spices, such as pepper and salt, I mix in.