Recipe Time! Fettuccini Puttanesca With Shrimp And Creamy Vodka Marinara

When we created our perfect marinara recipe last month, we had big plans for it. Did you see the post?

Marinara Recipe: This is the Go-To Standard (AKA will you marinara me?)

In addition to being wonderful in its own right, we wanted the marinara to be something that we could make and freeze and then use as a ready-made base for some of our other favorite pasta treatments, like puttanesca sauce or pink vodka sauce. Then the idea struck: why not do both? A combination of puttanesca and pink vodka sauce with shrimp sounded like a winner, or at least something worthy of a fun afternoon and evening in the Glover Gardens test kitchen.

My friends, we nailed it in one! 

Perhaps traditionalists will shudder at the mashup of these two classic pasta sauces, but my friends, this is a NEW classic. It is a hearty, delicious, party-worthy dish, with everything you want in a pasta meal: creamy, tangy, spicy, pungent, al dente and satisfyingly rich while still bright from the chunks of tomato and a nice protein, the perfectly-spiced, perfectly-cooked shrimp.

We created the recipe for a dinner party that included several hungry people in their 20s, who are always pleased to have leftovers to bring home with them, so it’s another one of our “for a crowd” recipes. It can easily be halved if you want a smaller output – but why? 😁

Fettuccini Puttanesca with Shrimp and Creamy Vodka Marinara

Serves 12 – 14

Ingredients

• 1 tbsp olive oil and 1 tbsp oil from sun-dried tomatoes (or 2 tbsp olive oil)
• 6 anchovies, minced
• 3 cloves garlic, chopped fine or pressed
• 1/2 lb. button or baby portobello mushrooms, sliced
• 3/4 cup vodka
• 6 cups homemade (link here) or store-bought marinara

• 1/4 cup capers, drained
• 4 oil-packed sun-dried tomatoes, diced
• 1/2 tsp red pepper flakes
• 2 cans sliced black olives, drained

• 1 cup heavy cream

• 2 lbs. peeled medium-large shrimp, preferable 16/20
• 2 tbsp. Zippy Sicilian spice mix (link here) or your favorite Italian spice mix (you may need to add salt if your spice mix doesn’t include it)
• 2 tbsp. olive oil

• 1⅓ lb. fresh or 1 lb. dried fettuccine

• Any combination of chopped fresh parsley, oregano, thyme or basil leaves for garnish, optional
• Wedge of parmesan or romano cheese for grating, optional

Cooking Instructions

Preheat oven to 475°, and line a baking sheet with foil. Put shrimp in a medium bowl, add olive oil and seasoning mix and stir, ensuring that all shrimp are coated. Space them out on the cookie sheet, then bake for 4½ minutes. Remove from the oven and let cool on the baking sheet, setting aside.

Put a big pot of water on the stove on high to get ready to boil the pasta, adding 1/2 tbsp salt.

In a dutch oven, heat the olive oil and oil from the sun-dried tomatoes to medium, then add the anchovies, sun-dried tomatoes and garlic, stirring for a moment until the garlic is fragrant. Then add the mushrooms and cook, stirring occasionally, until the mushrooms are soft (about 5 minutes). Add the vodka and cook a few minutes longer until the mushrooms have absorbed some (but not all) of the liquid. Stir in the marinara and raise the heat until the sauce is bubbling, then reduce to a simmer. Add the capers, red pepper flakes and black olives and simmer for ten minutes, then add the heavy cream. Simmer on medium-low heat, uncovered. Taste and adjust seasonings, if necessary.

Cook the pasta according the directions, taking care not to overcook. When it is al dente, remove from heat and drain.  Add the shrimp and the pasta to the sauce mixture in the dutch oven, stirring to combine, and cook for 2 minutes until the shrimp is warm. Transfer to a broad and shallow pasta serving dish, garnish with fresh herbs (optional) and serve with fresh grated parmesan or romano. 

Notes

Dried pasta is fine for this recipe, but we use fresh pasta because The Grill-Meister makes it with his pasta machine – see more about that at the end of the post.

I highly recommend making your own marinara for this, because it is soooooo incredibly good. Maybe you already made a big batch of our perfect marinara and froze some – now’s the time to use it! If you use store-bought, try to find a simple, classic one with chunks of tomato and not many preservatives.

Similarly, you really should make a batch of our Zippy Sicilian spice mix to use in this recipe and others. Otherwise, your favorite Italian spice mix will do, but you may need to add salt and perhaps even more red pepper flakes.

Serving-wise, this dish is BIG FOOD. It doesn’t need much on the side. Our approach was a chopped salad and garlic bread, and that was plenty.

This dish reheats well in the microwave, but you should go “low and slow” to avoid ‘breaking’ the creamy sauce. We start the reheating process without the shrimp, heating it separately and adding it back to the dish, which helps keep it from getting rubbery.

Speaking of shrimp, you can use any cooked shrimp in this recipe – grilled, boiled, sauteed, etc. The method we used is the one we favor when we are going to incorporate shrimp into a bigger dish, because it’s the easiest. I did a post about it a while ago.

A Super-Easy Way to Cook Shrimp for Use in Recipes

You could also use a variety other proteins in this dish – use your imagination!

Join Us in the Kitchen

When it was time to serve, I could only hold the hungry folks back for a moment to snap a few candids. I had held back a few of the shrimp from the batch to use as a garnish on top, but I don’t think I would do that again. The shrimp look just fine bathed in that lovely sauce, and a little naked without it. That’s really the only constructive learning I took from the experience; everything else was just magically right. The Grill-Meister loved the sauce so much he said he’d like to drink it!

I played around with a photo shoot for an individual serving the next day but haven’t quite gotten it right. Still, it was fun.

This dish is a keeper, my friends!

Here’s a text I received 3 days later, from one of our YPs (young people) in Austin:

“OK, wow! We just had the food you sent. It’s AMAZING!“

Yes. Yes, it was.

More about Our Pasta Journey

We’ve been on a pasta journey for years, and one of the memorable milestones was learning to make fresh pasta in a cooking class back in 2017.

Date Night: How to Make Fresh Pasta

After that, the Grill-Meister asked for a pasta machine for Christmas, meaning a classic hand-crank one, a good one. His elderly parents, who loved to spoil their only child, went to a kitchenware and home furninshings store and bought the most expensive electric pasta machine they could find, the Philips Artisan Pasta and Noodle Maker 7000 series. 

Imagine Tom’s surprise when he opened his gift to find a large, fancy, electric machine when he had expected a small, stainless steel Italian model for manual pasta production, but he kept a poker face and thanked his parents politely for their thoughtfulness and generosity. He was beyond surprised at how easy it was to make pasta with the machine, and rapidly realized that we’d have homemade pasta a lot more often, and with a lot less mess and effort if he embraced this unexpected bounty. 

Have Pasta Maker, Will Travel

We took this pasta show on the road, bringing it to his parents’ house soon after that 2017 Christmas, to collaborate on one of his Mom’s favorite dishes, mussels with Spanish chorizo and fettucini. It was a fun and delicious evening for all of us, a joy to remember now that his father has gone over the rainbow.

We haven’t made fresh pasta by hand since this 2017 Christmas gift that keeps on giving, but we don’t miss it – there’s more time to concentrate on the yummy sauces!

Now in the Party Rotation!

This dish was so wonderful that we are already fielding requests for a replay.

It will go into our regular party rotation.

Now I need to go make some more marinara to freeze so I can have some on hand for spontaneous celebrations. 😊

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