Warm Pasta Salad with Shrimp

I like to cook my lunches for the week on Sunday afternoons.  This way, I go into the week with a healthy game plan and I'm not aimlessly searching the fridge and Fast Food Row for lunch. September's Cooking Light Magazine had a great looking pasta salad dish I made for lunch this week.  It turned out awesome and heats up well each day so I had to share with you.

Proceed with caution.  I get a major case of Portion Distortion with pasta so I'm being very careful to mind my serving size with this.  I'm eating each day out of small cereal bowl, not plates.  I measure out less than their 2 cup portion size (which is actually a BIG portion for pasta) to save a little calories if I'm not too hungry. 

Here is a link to the recipe. 
http://find.myrecipes.com/recipes/recipefinder.dyn?action=displayRecipe&recipe_id=2011051
The dish is not "light" tasting at all.  Plus it has loads of fiber from the beans, green goodness from the spinach, and is super satisfying from the shrimp.


I did make a couple of changes to the recipe:

1.  I tripled the spinach it called for to up the nutrition. I also added in a bit of Kale that I had left over and need to use in the fridge.

2.  Only included 1/3 of the shrimp it called for, so I would only get 3-4 shrimp per bowl. 
(Since I'm sans meat during the week and trying to limit my seafood to mainly dinner.) 

3.  The recipe didn't call for whole wheat pasta, which I thought was weird for a Cooking Light recipe.  Kroger didn't have whole wheat bow tie pasta anyway, so I used 1/2 box of Barilla Plus (Best Life Approved) pasta.

Let's get cooking...

Dressing mixture includes chopped garlic (below pic), lemon juice, Dijon mustard, olive oil,

kosher salt, and pepper.

Saute shrimp in a tinsy-winsy bit of Olive Oil. 

Next, add in spinach, cannellini beans, red onion, and capers.

Mix together well while the beans heat through and spinach cooks down a bit.

Toss in hot pasta

Mix in pasta, then add dressing over the whole dish. 

Stirring to make sure dressing coats every-last-morsel of pasta.

I had my fist bowl for dinner Sunday.  Since Sunday's are splurge day around my house, I added a generous sprinkle of fresh grated Parmesan Cheese over the top.  This week I'm having the dish minus the extra fat from the cheese :-(

Does that look YUM-O or what?  If you made this for your family they would never pick this out as a "Light" recipe.  One, 2-Cup serving has 487 Calories, and 16 grams of fat.  That's pretty high for lunch, which is why I go lighter on the portions size. 

But for dinner, this could be an under 500 calorie winner!