Southwestern Something or Other (recipe)

Originally, this was supposed to be Southwestern Pasta, as seen in the picture here. My mother found the recipe in another of my most-used cookbooks, The Vegetarian 5-Ingredient Gourmet, which is a great cookbooks for herbivores and omnivores alike. I have found that many healthy recipes using unusual ingredients hide in vegetarian cookbooks and never see the light of day in cookbooks too focused on meat or fish. Because the meals in this book only contain five ingredients, at the most, you can easily add to and embellish the recipes. A lot of the dishes work well as side dishes and you could simply add fish, chicken, or another meat.

The original recipe calls for:

1 can black beans (drained)
Fresh corn (from two ears) or 1 cup frozen
3 scallions, chopped
1 jar salsa
Pasta

I added:

1/2 cup olives
1 tomato, diced
Seafood medley

In these quantities, it would probably feed 3 people, but I scaled it back just to feed me.

Put your pasta on to boil. When it boils, dump in the pasta and start cooking the rest.
First saute the seafood medley and the frozen corn in a pan until defrosted and they begin to cook. When the shrimp are pinkish, add the black beans, onions, olives and tomato and saute for a couple of minutes. Then add the salsa and stir gently - you don't want to mush up the beans too much.

Serve over the pasta.

This was how I had it the first night. Feel free to try it this way, but I think it goes much better with bulghar wheat, which is also much quicker to make. Brown rice, or wild rice medley would also work well for this dish. You could also experiment with polenta and make a southwestern seafood grits dish. Oooh, I will have to try that!