30 Easy Shrimp Ideas for Weeknight Dinners

This relative of artichoke-crab dip, served warm, is made by combining chopped shrimp with cream cheese, sour cream, and/or mayonnaise and usually with shredded cheese (typically cheddar or jack). Toasted pita chips make an excellent accompaniment.

Actual scampi aren’t shrimp — they’re langoustines, like miniature lobsters — but this popular dish, an Italian-American restaurant standard, prepares shrimp in the scampi style, which is to say with butter, garlic, and parsley.

Originally from South Carolina but now found all over the South and beyond, this classic comfort food consists of grits (basically cornmeal porridge, to which cheese may or may not be added) topped with sautéed shrimp.

There’s a long tradition in many cultures of flavoring seafood with pork products, but few combinations are as easy to make and to enjoy as these shrimp enclosed in crispy strips of bacon.

Nobody knows who first came up with the idea for this unusual but delicious preparation of fried shrimp, but it may well come from the Caribbean, where both coconuts and fresh seafood are abundant.