florida lottery
I LOVE PASTA! It’s true. I can’t get enough. When I was in college at Cal Baptist University my main food source for lunch and dinner was pasta (whichever shape they were serving that day) with chicken and marinara sauce. EVERY DAY!!!! Oh, and on the side I had fries and two chocolate chip cookies for dessert. It’s a wonder I didn’t gain 30 pounds! I think I did gain at least 10 though. Hey, they don’t call it the “Freshman 15” for nothing. Now-a-days though, I have been really watching my carbs and trying to stay under 50 grams a day, which is extremely hard to do! Have you ever counted your carbs on a normal eating day? One bowl of oatmeal has like over 40 grams! Don’t even get started on a slice of bread or a serving of rice. It is very easy to consume over 200-300 grams of carbohydrates a day. Which is a sad thing for me…the carb queen. When I first started this diet I looked through our pantry and refrigerator and all I saw was carbs, carbs, and more carbs. From chips, to pasta, to bread, even orange juice! Everything I would ever eat on a daily basis had tons of these little fat distributing devils! I had to get rid of them! My wonderful mother introduced me to probably my biggest lifesaver….Dreamfields Pasta. It only has 5 net carbs per serving! FIVE!!!! A normal pasta–even the whole wheat kind–has over 40 grams per serving. Now I can enjoy an occasional pasta meal without feeling like I’ve taken 10 steps back in my diet. So, today I decided to make a meal out of this wonderful thing called Dreamfields Pasta. Btw, it tastes just like regular pasta, which is a plus in my book.
Ingredients:
3/4 pounds penne pasta
1 pound shrimp
3 tbsp butter
3 tbsp olive oil
1 whole onion (small)
2-3 cloves garlic
1/2 cup white wine, or chicken broth
1 8oz can tomato sauce
1/2 cup heavy cream
fresh parsley, to taste
fresh basil, to taste
salt & pepper to taste
First, defrost your shrimp if you buy the frozen kind like me. You can do this quickly by letting it sit under cold running water for about 5 minutes.
Once your shrimp is thawed completely, peel and de-vein it. I know it’s gross, but someone’s gotta do it, and I know it certainly won’t be Steve!
Next, heat a tbsp of butter and olive oil in a medium skillet.
Add your shrimp to the pan and cook until just opaque. Don’t over cook!
Once shrimp are cooked just right remove from the pan and cut into bite-sized pieces. I cut each shrimp into 3 pieces, but you can make them whatever size you want.
Now onto the sauce. First of all, let me say that I LOVE tomato cream sauce. I didn’t discover it until we moved here to Tennessee and I had my first pasta dish at Carrabas called Rigatoni Martino. Heavenly! Ok, back to the sauce. Melt 2 tbsp of butter in a skillet. I’ve created this new relationship with butter that I haven’t had before I went on this low carb diet. Turns out, butter doesn’t have any carbs!! Yay me! Although…..everything in moderation….calories still count! 🙂
Finely chop up a small onion….
And 2-3 cloves of garlic. You can never have too much garlic in my opinion. Here’s an easy way to get that papery skin off the garlic. Place your knife over the clove and whack it with your hand…..but don’t cut yourself!
The garlic will easily separate from the skin, and the harder you whack it, the less you have to chop!
Add onion and garlic to the heavenly buttered skillet and let it cook for a minute or two.
Next add about 1/2 cup of white wine….you can drink the other 1/2 cup if you’d like 🙂 If you prefer, you can use chicken stock instead. Let it cook out for a few minutes, stirring occasionally.
Add an 8oz can of tomato sauce to the skillet.
And stir til combined.
Next comes the fun part. Add 1/2 cup of cream to the sauce, and stir to combine. Turn heat down to low and let it simmer for a few minutes.
Add shrimp back into the skillet. Now if you’re an idiot like me and don’t have any fresh parsley or basil on hand you can use dried, but it would be so much better with fresh.
Next, add your pasta…that’s been cooking this whole time and that I forgot to mention when we first started. Oops, sorry! Hopefully if you try to make this, you will have read this whole post before attempting it. Stir the pasta around to completely coat it in the sauce.
Spoon your lovely creation onto a plate and enjoy!
