A Fifteen Minute Prep Garlic Shrimp Dinner

The biggest misconceptions when cooking from scratch are that it must be both labour and time intensive. This is this vision of a harried, frustrated homemaker with crying kids straining to cut and chop to get a nice, healthy, cooked from scratch meal on the table. It doesn't need to be that way! It is surprising at how many interesting and tasty meals can be made in 30 minutes or less. In fact there are many meals you can make that only take 15 minutes from start to finish!

Garlic Shrimp Dinner

One trick for getting quick meals on the table that I've often talked about on this blog is to keep pre-cooked meats in your freezer. When it comes to pre-cooked seafood one of nicest to keep on hand is jumbo shrimp. It is a versatile seafood that can be used as an appetizer, in salads or as the main course meat. This is a case where a little goes a long way too so pre-cooked jumbo shrimp ends up being quite cost effective. If you want to save further on pre-cooked shrimp buy according to the sales cycles. Shrimp tends to go on sale just before the Christmas holiday season and again just before the main grilling season so stock your freezers then.

Pre-cooked shrimp was used for my garlic shrimp meal. This time I prepared spaghetti. As the spaghetti was cooking I removed the tails from the thawed shrimp and set aside. I warmed 3 cloves of minced garlic in ½ c of melted butter allowing the butter to just lightly brown. Then I tossed in the shrimp to warm through and removed from the burner. I diced tomato, red onion and green pepper mixed with balsamic vinaigrette for the side salad and cut straight 8 cucumbers into quarters for the second vegetable side. Then I drained the pasta, mixed with the browned butter shrimp sauce and plated. Fresh parsley from the garden was the garnish. It was a very deliciously simple yet filling meal that took me under 15 minutes to put together.