Pesto, Shrimp and Scallop Pasta

I love pasta and seafood so I often combine the two. However, this wasn’t as tasty of a dish as I’d hoped.

I think that in the past, I would cook out a pesto and add cream to it in order to have a creamy herb and cooked garlic sauce. But the more raw applicationss I have been doing with the hand ground pesto has a different flavour.

High heat seat in butter to get that nice browning and end with some lemon juice

Shallow boil the pasta until it’s still firm. Use tongs to remove to the pan that cooked the shellfish.

The pasta continues cooking in the pan which still has flavour from the shellfish.

Add some of the starchy pasta water to encourage thickening as well as continued pasta cooking. Continue adding until it’s just right for you, whether you like al-dente, cooked or over cooked. Tastes are an individual thing.

The sauce starts forming as the starchy water mixes with the oil and pan flavours.

Toss in everything and give it A good mix.

So with the pasta cooking in the same pan as the shellfish that had butter and lemon along with pasta water to deglaze and absorb into the pasta, mixing pesto into it gave me a result that I wasn’t intending. It was good but I’m not sure if I would care to repeat it and instead opt for something that’s more north American creamy and generally derided by the Italian purists.

On a tangent about purists, I’ve seen Internet fury over the last few years about how to eat pho by a non Vietnamese or how an Indian Brit didn’t make fried rice a certain way. But the most numerous and finger wagging horrified reaction videos I’ve seen disapproving of anything are Italians on Italian food outside of Italy. But that’s another rant for another day.

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