Cooking: Shrimp Scampi (Lite)

Alright, after eating what I've wanted for quite sometime, I've put on too much weight. I'm subscribed to self.com's magazine which is inspirational and makes me envious at the same time. I checked my ideal weight on self.com and it says I need to be 134.5 lbs! I'm not even going to tell you what I weigh now, but let's just say I need to lose a bunch. Out of the blue, my friend convinced me to join her in our quest to lose weight together. Fine... I conceded. I love food way to much to lose weight on my own.

Self.com has a bunch of recipes for lighter and healthier meals but I was skeptical of the change in flavor by using healthier ingrediants. I settled on making shrimp scampi which is normally very oil laden, but this recipe (http://www.self.com/health/recipes/2008/03/0324shrimp_scampi) seemed quite the opposite with fresh ingrediants such as bell peppers, poblano peppers, garlic, limes and cilantro. Surely those ingrediants would make the dish explode with flavors right? Well, I still wasn't convinced until I started cooking.

As soon as the shrimp hit the hot olive oiled pan, the smells wafted into the air. Alright, maybe it's not so bad. Justyn was outside charring the poblano peppers for me so I could de-skin them and chop them up.

I added the thinly sliced red and yellow bell peppers, lime zest with garlic and shallot (shallot was my addition) and sauteed them until they had softened a bit.

Next went in the thinly sliced poblano peppers which I then deglazed by adding some white wine.

After the wine had reduced, I added the lime juice. Mix and season and then add some pasta. Speaking pasta, the recipe says to use farfalle which I think is a better choice than penne, but Justyn really doesn't like the farfalle. He says they don't look right (even though it's just pasta). Whatever...

And finally you plate and enjoy. We had a little white wine to compliment the shrimp and sat outside in the patio. The weather outside was slightly warm but not overly hot so we had a perfect Spring dinner. I was a skeptic at first, but after this recipe, I've changed my mind about healthy eating. I think I will still take some convincing but now I have a more open mind to it. The flavor of the cilantro, roasted poblano, lime juice and white wine combination really did make the dish pop and I didn't miss the otherwise heavy and fatty shrimp scampi.