I always fall back on this recipe when I need something quick and don't have a lot of time to think about it. It's what I call a Better-than-Takeout meal. It's quick to make, and most of the ingredients are staples in my Complete Pantry. I sometimes omit the cream, and I almost always have fresh basil on hand so this dish means no trip to the supermarket for me.
This is the first recipe in this series where you'll learn about heat settings and how to tell when a pan is hot. Learning how to control the temperature of your stove and how hot a pan gets is very important. If your pan is too hot, you'll burn the food (duh!). With practice, you'll know how each of your pans performs, and you'll get used to the particular heat settings of your stove.
And you'll get your first exposure to sautéing garlic. Nothing spoils a dish faster than burned garlic, and most new cooks don't even know that they've burned the garlic. All they know is that the meal doesn't taste very good. Garlic is easy to burn and if you do burn it, you should throw it out and start again; it's cheap and it's not worth ruining a dish. Be sure to check out our technique for sautéing garlic (there's a link on the right side of this screen) to find out more and to see pictures of what burned garlic looks like.
Understanding hot pans & heat settings and working with garlic are two of the most basic skills for successful home cooking. So practice and get them right!
Read the ingredient page for "shrimp" ... it tells you about "counts" and buying the correct quantities. If you buy frozen shrimp, the bag is the same size (for example, 2 pounds) regardless of the "count" - you just get a different number of shrimp in the bag and the size of the shrimp is different. The higher the count, the smaller the shrimp.
For this dish, you'll cook the pasta according to package directions. While the pasta cooks, you'll make the shrimp sauce. It's that simple.
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