Shrimp Puttanesca Rice Bowl Recipe - Healthy Dinner Idea (2024)

Easy rice bowl recipe! This classic Italian puttanesca sauce is simmered with shrimp and ladled over rice for an easy, healthy meal. 336 calories and 5 Weight Watchers SP

Shrimp Puttanesca Rice Bowl Recipe

The beauty of an easy rice bowl recipe is that you can make top it with almost anything to suit your tastebuds. This shrimp rice bowl, with the briny, salty taste of a classic puttanesca sauce, easily slid onto the "make again" list in our house. Truth be told, my family will take bowl meals almost any way they come. My Avocado Salmon Poke Salad Bowl is a favorite with my boys (and me!), while my husband would opt for a Chicken Burrito Bowl almost any day of the week.

Always easy, always flavorful - rice bowl recipes are the way to go when you need to put a healthy dinner on the table quickly.

If you're following a low sodium diet, puttanesca sauce likely isn't doctor-approved. However, if you can afford to make the indulgence once in awhile, the capers, olives and anchovies add a wonderful depth of flavor, along with the garlic and tomatoes.

What if I hate anchovies?

For all of you anchovy haters out there, the anchovy flavor isn't detectable. Rather, it's add a wonderful layer of briny flavors to the sauce. In fact, they sort of "melt" into the olive oil when cooked in the first step of this recipe. My kids make all sorts of dramatic gagging sounds when I order anchovies on a pizza, but they gobble up this sauce with abandon.

Tips for making this rice bowl recipe:

• Start by heating the olive oil in a large nonstick skillet. When cooking the garlic, anchovies and red pepper flakes in the olive oil, use the back of a wooden spoon to break down the anchovies as they cook.
• The next step is to add the canned diced tomatoes, capers and kalamata olives. If you prefer a smoother sauce, use canned crushed tomatoes in place of the diced tomatoes. San Marzano tomatoes (affiliate link) have the best flavor and they'll truly make a difference to your sauce. However, other brands of canned tomatoes will work well, too.
• Wait until the end of cooking to add the shrimp to the sauce so that they don't become overcooked and rubbery. It will just take about 3 minutes for them to cook in the simmering sauce.
• I like to use brown rice for these bowls, but white rice, quinoa (affiliate links) or even cauliflower rice are great substitutions. If you make and freeze quinoa as part of your weekly prep session, this dish will be even easier to make! Just pull out some portions of frozen quinoa, pop it into the microwave and you're done.

This is definitely making it onto our list of easy weeknight recipes. If you are constantly looking for new healthy weeknight meal ideas (like me!), be sure to follow my Healthy School Night Recipe board on Pinterest. It's full of fantastic ideas from many of my favorite bloggers.

Other shrimp recipes:

{Cookin' Canuck}
{Cookin' Canuck}
Salt & Pepper Prawns with Creamy Avocado Dressing {Supergolden Bakes}
Grilled Shrimp Salad wit Honey Lime Vinaigrette {Joyful Healthy Eats}

Printable Recipe

This post was originally published on September 9, 2013, and was updated on August 12, 2019.

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