I love this dish – Shrimp Scampi Pasta. It’s meals like this that help me realize that sugar and flour aren’t all they’re cracked up to be, in fact I’m finding more and more that if I veer from my healthy eating program (the 6-Week Body Makeover plan) that I miss my healthy, whole foods. If I eat processed foods they taste flat to me, that’s why I called them dead food.

I think it’s important that I begin to focus more on the tasty whole foods that I eat instead of on the foods (sugar and flour for example) that I want to avoid. Why? Because what I focus on is what I’ll attract more of. So, since I want to stay off of the foods that are addictive and instead eat the healthy, whole foods, it’s those whole foods that I want to put my focus on.

This Shrimp Scampi Pasta is really easy to make, and it might surprise you to know that it’s not your typical pasta – in fact it’s just rice noodles, the only ingredients being rice and water.

If you haven’t made these before, all you do is boil a pan of water on the stove, remove it and place on a cold burner, and add the rice noodles. I prefer the Thai Kitchen Stir Fry Rice Noodles because it’s a thicker noodle but they also make a very thin noodle, similar to angel hair pasta.

Once you put them in the water, separate them so they don’t stick together and leave them in there for approx. 10 minutes, then strain.

For the shrimp, I buy uncooked frozen shrimp. The cooked shrimp contains way too much salt and while the uncooked has a little bit, it’s much less. Otherwise the only shrimp I’ve found that doesn’t have any added salt is the fresh shrimp in the deli area of the grocery store, but I like to buy the fresh frozen when it’s on sale. 😉

I recently learned that it’s much easier to shell the shrimp after I’ve put them in boiling water for one minute and then let them cool (!). Yep, before that I was shelling them after they thawed out – not an easy job to say the least.

You’ll see that the recipe also calls for scallops. Whenever I’ve made this I’ve used one or the other, not both. No special reason, that’s just how I’ve made it.

After the shrimp is ready to go, I just follow the recipe except that now I add the garlic to the pan first. After the pan is heated, I add minced garlic and brown that for about a minute. Then I add the white wine (regular wine, not cooking wine – it has too much sodium), lemon juice, and chicken broth (NSA – no salt added), and I do use the butter flavoring. Add the shrimp, tomatoes (I add a can of NSA diced tomatoes, makes a lot of tomato sauce), and the pepper.

Also, I like to keep the noodles separate instead of adding them in because it makes it easier to measure out portions.

I could seriously eat this every day, it’s that good, and you know what’s funny? This is how I eat to lose weight. Nope, it’s definitely not a diet, but a change in lifestyle. 😉