Shrimp Pasta Salad

Guess who gave me this recipe? Jonathan! I do believe it was a new moment in my cooking life when I walked through Meijer getting texts containing instructions on how to cook shrimp - from a male college student!

But that Jonathan is a good cook. He's the one who taught me to grill, too.

I first had this at Ronda's house when Jonathan and his brother took over the cooking one night and then they invited me to eat with them. Because my Dad doesn't like shrimp and crab, I've not eaten that much of it in my life, so I was a little nervous. But...I gave it a try and found I really liked it! Jonathan promised me it was super easy, so I tried it a few times and found it is, indeed, as easy as it is scrumptious!

It keeps fairly well for a few days, so it tastes as good as a leftover as it does the first time.

The Recipe

1 package ready to cook shrimp (peeled, deveined, etc.)
1 1/2- 2 cups of rotini pasta
1 jar of alfredo sauce
2 strips of imitation crab meat

Cook pasta in boiling water and drain. Cook shrimp in boiling water and remove to separate dish. Cut crab meat into small pieces. Combine pasta, shrimp, and crab meat in bowl and pour alfredo sauce over the combination. Stir well and serve.

This is a very fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants recipe, so the measurements are very much debatable. I bought the shrimp at Meijer and only found one size of a bag, so that's what I used. And if you've never bought this kind of crab meat before - you find it near the shrimp as well. (I had no idea where to find such things.) If you don't like rotini, you could use another shape of pasta. Linguine noodles would probably work well in this recipe if you wanted something longer and more elegant looking.
The crab meat comes wrapped up in a piece of plastic, so be sure you remove that first. I just used two of the strips and saved the other two for the next round of it. If you are a huge fan of crab meat, you could definitely use all of it at once. And if you hate it, you could leave it out!

The cut up crab meat....

The shrimp still has a tail (like you see on the right), so you just pull or cut that off and throw it away, so all you have is the actual shrimp part like you see there on the left.

I normally do all the prep work of the shrimp and crab while the pasta is boiling away....

This is what the shrimp looks like before it cooks. Kind of brownish.

You put it in some boiling water and it cooks QUICKLY!! Jonathan said 2-3 minutes and I thought he was surely mistaken, but he was not! He said when it begins to turn pink, it's done. And it turns pink about as quickly as a mood ring!

After I drain the big pot containing the shrimp, I put everything back in it so I have plenty of room to stir in the sauce.

Sauce!

Completed salad! (I used the tri-color pasta mostly for color. Other than the edges of the crab meat, this would be a very bland dish in terms of color if you don't bring in color with the pasta. Definitely not bland in taste!)

Sit down with a plate and enjoy!!