Seafood Casserole

Because I like to alternate my posts between running, then recipes for the things I eat that make me have to run some more 🙂

Seafood Casserole – adapted from here.

What you need:

• 6 oz uncooked spaghetti, broken
• 1/2 lb fresh scallops, cut in half or quarters if large
• ½ lb fresh shrimp –  peeled and deveined. Smaller ones are best.
• 6 Tbs butter, divided
• 4 Tbs flour
• ½ tsp salt
• ¼ tsp freshly ground black pepper
• 2 cups half and half cream
• 4 Tbs white wine or sherry
• ½ cup sliced button mushrooms (I didn’t use these since I am not a fan)
• 1 cup frozen peas
• 8 Tbs parmesan cheese, divided

What you do:

• Cook spaghetti per directions on the package. Drain and rinse with hot water.
• Heat oven to 375 degrees.
• Lightly butter a 2 quart casserole dish, or 4 individual 2 cup ramekins.
• Thoroughly rinse scallops and shrimp in cold water, drain, and cut scallops to desired size. I like a bite sized piece.
• Melt 3 tbs of butter in a sauté pan.
• Add seafood and mushrooms and sauté over medium high heat. Cook 6-8 minutes, or until scallops are opaque.
• Remove from pan and set aside.
• In same pan, melt remaining butter. Add flour, salt and pepper and blend well. Add half and half all at once. Cook until mixture thickens. This should take about 5 minutes. Stir constantly with a whisk.
• Add 4 T of parmesan cheese.
• The recipe calls for combining everything into the saucepan here – I only added the peas and wine to heat them. Then I mixed everything in the casserole dish. Original text: (Add scallops and mushrooms back to the pan. Add wine and peas. Continue stirring until heated through. Place spaghetti into saucepan with seafood mixture, and stir it all together until well mixed.)
• Place it all in the buttered casserole. Sprinkle with Parmesan cheese. Bake for 25-30 minutes, or until light brown and bubbly around the edges.

My adaptations – no mushrooms, scallops were already the sort of bite sized frozen kind which I just thawed, not mixing all the ingredients in the sauce pan (unless you use a really large one, that would have been a tricky task, and since my casserole dish is a 2.5 qt it was easier to combine everything in that), pasta box was the already reduced sized spaghetti pieces.

Since the standard response is “Pics, or it didn’t happen!” – here you go!

This dish was rather easy since there is no excessive chopping, and it was nice to have that time while it was in the oven to clean up all the other prep items. It is also really yummy! Of course, you can’t really go wrong with me with a pasta + shellfish dish, but I was really happy with the flavor balances. About the only thing I would do differently the next time is possibly only use scallops (the small shrimp ended up a little too tough for me) and increase the peas & cheese. This re-heats very too which is important to me since no one else in my house would eat this so unless the boyfriend comes around to help out, this is all for me!