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My favorite recipes are the ones I call fancy-not-fancy. A little luxurious, but so quick and easy they might actually qualify as 15-minute meals. Roasted shrimp scampi is the perfect example of fancy-not-fancy -- ultra quick, and ridiculously good, with broiled shrimp swimming in garlicky white wine and butter, with parsley and flecks of red pepper.

Roasting is one of my favorite ways to cook shrimp. I like how it gives me a few extra moments to focus on something else, like making a buttery white wine sauce, for instance. Shrimp scampi is easy, but it's also luxurious, a restaurant-style meal at home; and we all know how restaurants make their dishes taste so good. Butter. Lots of it. These shrimp are roasted in butter, and then tossed with a simple sauce made of white wine, garlic, lemon and more melted butter.

The funny thing about shrimp scampi, though, is that it didn't originate with shrimp at all. Scampi is actually the Italian word for langoustine and its kin, which are small lobsters whose tails are considered quite a delicacy. These small lobsters are similar to shrimp in their mellow sweetness, and they are often poached in white wine or butter. So the scampi in shrimp scampi actually signifies the common preparation of shrimp's distant cousin.

All right, enough with the semantics. Let's scampi, shall we?

Roasted Shrimp Scampi

Serves 4 to 6.

2 pounds medium (26 to 30) shrimp, peeled, deveined and tails removed

1/2 cup unsalted butter

Coarse kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper

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