Fettuccine with Shrimp and New Peas in White Wine Sauce

Simple, delicious and takes very little time. This recipe is rather heavily tweaked from one I found on Yahoo!Voices by Julie McMurchie. I simplified hers and changed some ingredients so I consider it "mine" now! I'll give you her options as well, but I found the end result as I made it to be well worth making again.


Ingredients:
    300-350g dried fettuccine (I used spinach fettuccine)
Sauce:
    2 TBS olive oil
    2 shallots, finely chopped
    1 cup dry white wine
    4 TBS cold butter in chunks
    1/2 Knorr or Maggi chicken soup cube
    4 tsp. fresh grated lemon peel
    Juice of two smallish lemons or 1 large juicy one
    Few grinds black pepper
    250 g raw shrimp or scampi
    200g fresh shelled peas
    2 TBS fresh dill, finely chopped or snipped

How to make it:
Put a large pot of salted water on to boil for the pasta. Whenever it boils as you are making the sauce, put in pasta, add 1 TBS olive oil, and reduce heat just enough so it doesn't boil over. Give it a stir now and then while working on the sauce.

Saute the shallots in the olive oil over medium heat until it becomes soft, but don't let it brown --about 2 minutes.
Add the white wine, raise the heat and bring to a boil. Boil for about five minutes, or until it is reduced by half.
Crumble in chicken broth cube and stir.
Remove pan from heat, turn heat down to medium. While pan is off heat, add cold butter and allow to start melting.
Return to heat and cook, stirring, over medium low heat until the butter completely melts and incorporates. Remove from heat.
Now whisk in the lemon peel, lemon juice and pepper to taste. Set aside and keep warm until ready to use.

By this time the pasta should be almost done. In the last 3 minutes of boiling the pasta, place a strainer over or partly into the boiling water; fill with fresh peas and shrimp and steam only until peas are a bright green, shrimp are pink and pasta is al dente.
Drain pasta, peas and shrimp; return to pasta pot, add the snipped fresh dill and pour sauce over all, stirring well to coat the strands.
Serve immediately.

Julie strains the shallots from the sauce, omits the pepper and chicken cube (making the recipe too bland, in my opinion) and uses parsley rather than dill. If making the sauce on its own without shrimp or peas, that may be okay, but otherwise I'd strongly suggest using either dill or fresh basil.

Julie also says: This white wine sauce can be used as the basis for shrimp scampi. Make the sauce in a saute pan. Add the shrimp and cook until they are pink and opaque. Remove the scampi to a serving plate and pour the remaining white wine sauce over the top. (In this case by all means use parsley. I can really see this sauce working well simply poured over broiled or grilled scampi!)