Toss This Ingredient Combo Into Your Pan To Elevate Basic Shrimp Pasta

A weeknight pasta with a simple protein can help carry you through many a meal plan, and shrimp with noodles certainly makes for a worthy staple. Simple doesn't have to mean basic. Next time you are at a loss for a few key ingredients that could hang together to make a worthy dish, consider reaching for a combination of halved cherry tomatoes and sliced black olives.

Part of the beauty of a shrimp pasta is the lighting speed at which you'll get it to the table. In the time it takes to boil the pasta, you can quickly sauté the shrimp (don't forget the garlic). Once they are pink and cooked through, take the skillet off the heat and give it the old tomato-and-olive one-two punch for a quick and easy flavor upgrade. You are just aiming for heating the vegetables here, not trying to cook them through. Let the hot pan do the work, leaving the tomatoes fresh and bright and allowing the saltiness of the olives to shine. For this pasta, rinsed frozen shrimp work just fine. Or, you could buy fresh beauties and try the no-waste secret to unforgettable shrimp pasta, incorporating a homemade stock that can also anchor a future weeknight meal (you will thank yourself for this flavor bomb later).

The tomato and olive combination is a fairly well-played Italian riff, perhaps because of the depth of flavor it readily delivers, and this easy mash-up calls to mind the staple pasta Puttanesca. Puttanesca is a relatively modern Italian pasta dish hailing from Naples. Although a full-fledged Puttanesca sauce usually incorporates capers and anchovies to give it next-level brininess and aroma, this scaled-back, two-ingredient version tickles the same satisfying itch. 

You could also go take this tomato-olive blend in different directions, like adding feta cheese and other Mediterranean ingredients in a tasty Greek pasta. However you assemble it, get ready for rave reviews that are usually hard to achieve with such a select set of ingredients. And don't forget the final details that will make your simple pasta taste expensive, like plating it delicately, adding a sprinkle of fresh herbs, and drizzling with good olive oil. Once you've honed your shrimp, tomato, and olive game, you can move on to refining a classic cacio e pepe (that's cheese and pepper) and other effortlessly delicious pasta dishes.