Garlic Pasta with Prawns

We had a ‘fish’ day on the list, e.g. the suggested protein for our evening meal was fish. Too lazy to go down and ‘fish’ through the freezer to see what we had, but knowing we had some prawns and wanting to use pasta instead of rice, which we had the previous 2 nights, I searched on these 2 ingredients in http://www.allrecipes.com/. (You need to appreciate how rich it is, my writing about cooking: the smoke has just cleared from the kitchen where I left a large pot of lentils cooking, for too long, it turns out. But I’ll tell you about lentils later).

I found a recipe for garlic pasta with prawns but decided it needed a bit of tweaking. I was telling Bill that I thought it needed a bit of colour in addition to parsley and so planned to put in peas. Also the recipe called for Parmesan and knowing that he is not particularly partial to Parmesan, checked with him about this. His response was ‘Precisely.’ So I asked, "But is it permissible?" You can see where we were going with this conversation and why we get along so well. We ended up having prawns and pasta with parsley and pumpkin, as we had no peas and parsnips would not add the colour I particularly wanted. Bill pronounced it ‘Perfect.’

Garlic Pasta with Prawns

Add about 6 hand fulls of pasta shapes to a pan of boiling water, cook for about 10 minutes and drain. Meanwhile, sauté a diced onion in olive oil and add 3 sliced cloves of garlic. [My prawns were frozen and so I boiled them for a few minutes as well. They would have been more tender had I let them thaw overnight. I also boiled my frozen cubes of pumpkin, left over from Thanksgiving, still, to thaw]. Add prawns [I used most of the package] and pumpkin to the onion and garlic. I cut the cubes of pumpkin into smaller pieces.

When the onions are translucent and the pasta cooked, drain the pasta and coat it with about 20 ml of olive oil, then add the prawn mixture. Sprinkle each serving lightly with Parmesan cheese and with dried parsley.

It wasn’t too bad, if I do say so myself.