This creole dish is one of the most popular dishes at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. It's really easy, tastes great, and gives your heart a nice workout.
It's simple enough that it allows you to experiment with your own ingredients and styles. If you don't have crawfish, you can use shrimp, crab, oysters, or anything else that you think would go well.
In this instance, I used shrimp because Houston sucks.
This is what I used:- 1 stick of butter
- 1 onion
- 1 bell pepper
- 7 cloves of garlic
- 1 pint of heavy whipping cream
- 1 package of rotini
- Oregano
- Tony Chachere's
- White Wine
- Some shrimp
Instructions*While you're doing all of this, get a pot of water going and cook the fettucinne. Drain it and run cold water over it to make it cool.
1) In a saucepan, melt a stick of butter. When the butter is melted, throw on the chopped garlic. Let that sautee on medium-ish for just a little bit (but not too long because garlic gets bitter when overcooked)
2) Then, after your kitchen smells awesome, throw on the chopped onion and bell pepper. Throw some oregano and cajun seasoning on there
3) After that sautees for a bit (until the onion and bell pepper get soft), pour some white wine on there. I don't know how much, 1/4 a cup maybe. It's to taste and it will cook off anyway.
4) Once the white wine cooks off a bit, pour in a pint of heavy cream.
5) Let the heavy cream cook for a little bit, making sure it doesn't start to boil. You want to cook the sauce down so that it thickens
6) When you're pretty much done with that, throw in the crawfish. You don't want to overcook the crawfish, that's why you do this last. Once the crawfish are done are almost done, throw in the rotini. Cook this on medium/medium high for a minute or so, making sure you got the pasta fully covered by the sauce.
Now you're done. It's really good if you grate some hard Italian cheese (parmesan, romano, asiago, etc..) over the plate after you serve it, but this isn't necessary.
Note: If you don't use crawfish, you might have to make slight variations on how you cook this. For instance, if you use shrimp, I like to sautee the shrimp separately in garlic and olive oil before throwing it in at the end. Mainly you just want to avoid overcooking.
Also, you don't have to use rotini pasta (though this is what they use at jazz fest). Angel hair pasta or linguine works well.
Here is a picture of the shrimp monica I made tonight. The package of pasta I had contained a lot more pasta than I thought, so this one isn't very "saucy," but it was tres delicieux anyway.
