As the name suggests (name derives from the Italian for twists) this dish was overflowing with plump twisted pasta drenched with a pink sauce and decorated, for flavor and color, with fresh basil, scallops, spinach, and shrimp. The pasta, unlike most varieties, has a purpose beyond flavor. The rotini noodle truly absorbs the flavors and allows for the sauce to stick to it for every mouthful. The creamy, full bodied pasta with thick savory sauce was delicious as it was filling. The seafood aspect, combining shrimp and sea scallops was a nice touch, but left a slight “fishy” taste. The scallops aside, the red peppers and spinach added an incredible flavor that made it very difficult not to try to finish this 2-person-plus sized dish. -LV
Reviewed at Ziti’s Italian Trattoria.
I decided to go with Oscar’s Special, which included chicken, shrimp, spinach, prosciutto, mozzarella and a side pasta. The first thing you could taste from the dish was the sauce, it was very rich and creamy. All of the meat and seafood was cooked just right. However, I did have trouble with the shrimps due to the fact that they were cooked with the tails on. I received a very unexpected case of crunchiness when I bit into one. Overall, the dish was very enjoyable. One note that I should mention is that there could have been a little less salt in the dish. Because you were already cooking with ingredients that tend to be salty to begin with (i.e. prosciutto, shrimp and mozzarella) there wasn’t a need to overly salt the dish as you could have relied on the saltiness of those ingredients to do the seasoning for you and the dish would have been dynamite. The side pasta however was not what I was expecting though. The pasta was cooked perfectly al dente, but the marinara was not as sweet as it should have been, and almost seemed from a can or a jar. I think that a nice addition to the dish was to have included the pasta in the dish itself. It would have given it much more texture, that creamy sauce could have balanced out and had something to adhere to and may not have made the dish so salty. When the night was over, however, I went home full and satisfied from the healthy portions. -HW