Kitchen Adventures: Saucy Problems

One of the great joys of cooking is receiving a yummy recipe from a friend. Many times, it's a dish that is tied to an event you shared together, and every time you make it you feel some of the joy of that occasion all over again.

Unless you make it wrong.

My dear friend Michelle gave me a lovely gift when I moved into my current apartment. She put together a book with a number of her tried and true recipes since I was hoping to cook more in a kitchen I wasn't sharing with two other people.

One I'm glad she included was her Asparagus, Shrimp and Penne Pasta in Saffron Sauce. She first made it for me back when she was living in North Carolina. We were enjoying a rare girls weekend alone and it was a fabulous time. So I was really excited to take a stab at it myself.

Here are the ingredients:

2/3 cup white wine
1/4 tsp tightly packed saffron
2 lbs asparagus
1 lb shrimp
2 Tbsp olive oil
1/4 cup minced shallots
1 lb penne pasta
1 1/2 cup cream
3/4 cup chicken stock

And here are the steps:

1) Combine wine and saffron in small bowl and steep for at least 20 minutes. Then pour yourself a glass of wine for the rest of the process.
2) Trim asparagus, cook for 3 minutes then transfer to an ice bath.
3) Cook shrimp in olive oil with shallots until bright pink. Move shrimp to a bowl, leaving juices in pan.

4) Start penne pasta cooking.
5) Add saffron and wine mixture to shrimp skillet juices and boil until almost all liquid is gone. Then add cream and chicken stock and simmer over medium heat until mixture reduces by half (about 7 minutes).
6) Stir in asparagus and shrimp and simmer 2 more minutes.
7) Add salt and pepper to taste. Add sauce, shrimp and asparagus to pasta, stir and garnish with minced chives or Parmesan cheese (or both if you're me).

Now let's talk about what really happened.

Everything was great until I got to the sauce stage. I managed to get most of the liquid cooked out of the shrimp and shallot juice, but when I added the cream and chicken stock things went south. It cooked...and cooked...and cooked. It took close to 15 minutes to get it reduced by a third, and I was so hungry by that point I gave up, poured in the shrimp and asparagus and followed the rest of the directions.

It still tasted yummy, but the sauce wasn't the nice creamy consistency I remember it being when Michelle made it. So while I ate, I scratched my head and tried to figure out where I went wrong. I narrowed it down to a few possibilities.

1) I didn't cook enough of the liquid out of the shrimp juice.
2) I didn't use heavy enough cream. I bought whipping cream, but maybe I needed the HEAVY whipping cream.
3) I measured something wrong owing to my wine consumption during cooking.

Can anyone help me out here? I'd really love this recipe to work correctly so I can feed y'all the next time you come over.

And I promise not to drink all the wine next time...