Spicy Shrimp Alfredo Fun

Lately I’ve been cooking a lot, and it has been mainly the same things over and over. This Thursday I was sitting at work trying to decide what to make for dinner, and I decided that I wanted to try something different and look for a recipe online. I had shrimp at home, and I wanted to make some type of pasta. I personally really like alfredo sauce, even though it’s really not that great for you, so I went to the Food Network website and I did a search for shrimp alfredo. One of Emril’s recipes came up, and it looked spicy and good so I decided to give it a try. You can find the recipe RIGHT HERE!

I didn’t have andoille sausage, so I knew I needed to get some. I figured that Whole Foods would have it for sure, but I thought it might be something that the regular grocery store would have, so I went to Food Pyramid first, because I also needed a few other things that would be cheaper there and I didn’t really need to get all of it at Whole Foods. So, I went to the section where the sausage is and I didn’t see it. Now, I was fairly sure what I was looking for, because I have seen pasta and gumbo recipes with this type of sausage in it, but I wasn’t exactly sure if that was what type of sausage it was. I didn’t see it anywhere (a severe flaw of both Food Pyramid and WalMart, they never have ingredients I need), so I decided to ask the person at the meat counter, because they should know… right? This was a big mistake.

I walked up to the counter and asked the woman if she knew if they had any andoille sausage. She looked at me with blank stare, then looked down to the sausage at her counter. I knew that the sausage was not in the counter, because all they had was Italian sausage next to the refrigerator or shrimp. There was a very, very small selection. But, I didn’t expect to find it in that counter at all, I just thought she might point me in the right direction. She pointed to the Italian Sausage through the glass and said, “Here it is!” and proceeded to grab some gloves to dish some out for me. I said, “No, I’m pretty sure that’s not it,” and then I showed her the word “andoille” on my sheet of paper that had my shopping list on it. She looked at the word, then back down through the glass, and said “Yeah, right, that’s it.” At this point I knew she didn’t know what I was talking about, and I decided it was probably best to go to Whole Foods for this ingredient, so I politely said, “No, I’ll just look around,” and started to walk away. She followed me out and walked over to the section where you find pre-packaged sausage, and she pointed to a huge roll of Summer Sausage and said, “Oh, here it is!” with lots of excitement in her voice. I sighed… then walked over and said, “No, I think that’s Summer Sausage, I’m looking for andoille sausage, and I’m pretty sure it’s different.” She proceeded to keep looking through the packages for the key word, while I stood beside her knowing it wouldn’t be there since I had already checked, but deciding to let her try and help if she wanted to. After a few minutes of her finding different types of sausage and trying to convince me that each one was what I was looking for, I thanked her and said, “I guess you guys don’t have it,” and just walked away.

Whole Foods had it. I asked a guy in the meat department and he walked me right to it. They had several different choices.

So, I went home and proceeded to make the pasta. Brian decided he wanted to help, so we did it together and it was lots of fun. I cut up the ingredients and Brian put them in little bowls:

I didn’t take pictures of the cooking process, but I just followed the directions exactly and never ran into any problems. Here is the finished product. It was extremely flavorful, and If I made it again I would use less sausage. The sausage basically made the whole thing taste spicy and.. well.. like the sausage. It was still very good though and I would make it again with the modifications. I also didn’t use as much shrimp as the recipe called for, and it may have been better with a little more shrimp. So less sausage, more shrimp.

Voila!