In Which I Cheat

I was raised to be a from-scratch cook. My mom did everything herself and only in her later years acquiesced to making dinner such as frozen popcorn shrimp, chicken bites and tater-tots (which she still deep-fried herself.) Thus I feel I have to confess that I cheated. *ghasp* I used jarred pesto. This will be brought up in my next confession. Just kidding!!! Using jarred pesto is NOT a sin but there is a potential that buying the horrifying looking off-season basil that our Meijer had would have been. Hence the choice of pre-made stuff. Why the choice of pesto in the first place is kind of an interesting story. Have you been pregnant? Maybe? Okay well, during my pregnancy I have had totes bizzaro dreams in which I say stuff like "totes bizzaro." Recently they mostly have to do with 1. food 2. which I am able to look at, touch and smell but not eat. Usually I wake up whimpering, half due to hunger and half due to the fact that it's 9:00am and Noodles and Company isn't serving pesto cavattapi yet. Because, yes I dreamed about pesto cavatappi. With extra Parmesan nonetheless. WHICH I COULD NOT EAT.

So anyway, I got up and went about my day, still thinking about pesto... and on my way home from watching the world's most precocious twin three-year-olds I made my second grocery store run this week to get the ingredients for the (literal) dream pesto pasta.


Pesto a la Dream

• 8 oz dry pasta
• 8 oz salad shrimp, thawed
• 1 bunch broccoli
• 6-8 mushrooms
• 1/2 pint grape tomatoes
• 1/4 cup heavy whipping cream
• 1 5 oz jar pesto
• Parmesan cheese
• salt and pepper

So I have to use non-glutenous pasta for the sake of my hubsband. This is our favorite brand.

I realized as I was adding this that I didn't photograph the brand name. Which is Gludenfloofenbaums or something like that. Alls I know is that it doesn't contain corn and therefore isn't gummy. Anywho, go ahead and boil your pasta for about a minute less than it says to on the package or else it will turn to mush when you saute it. I would recommend cuts but you can go ahead and try longer pasta.

Nexty I want you to chop up your vegetables like this. First, tiny broccoli!! Why is it that there is never enough broccoli? I cut this up suuuuper tiny but you don't have to be as crazy as me. Normal pieces are fine.

For this recipe I used crimini mushrooms, which grocery stores have decided to call "baby bellas" for fear of actually educating the public, but white buttons work just as well.

Cut off the stems flush with the cap, cut in half and then in 1/4 inch slices. Next slice your grape tomatoes in half. If you are cool like this guy I worked with at the Jolly Pumpkin you can just put your hand flat on top of all of them and slice 'em all simultaneously but if you, like me, are not cool, value your fingers and really don't want to try and distinguish between tomato juice and blood, cut them one at a time.

Oo! Look! A pretty bowl of veggies!!

From this point on it's pretty much just a procedure. Heat up a nice, big saute pan pretty hot with a tbsp or so of oil. Add the veggies first and saute about a minute. Throw in the pasta and shrimp and let heat thouroughly thuroughly toroughly all the way before you throw in the whipping cream. This is a trick I stole from Noodles and Company while I was working there in college. Make sure everything is fully coated with the cream before adding the pesto and it will stick sooo much better. Add a little salt and pepper to taste. Plate it up, garnish with Parmesan and you are ready to eat!!

This goes nicely with a dryer white wine. I forgot to take pictures of the finished product so I guess you don't get to see it. Oh well. Mine didn't look that pretty anyway because the GF noodles sorta fell apart. Buon appetito!

Much love, Tirienne