Oh hi, stereotypical summer meal!
I’ve been cooking more low carb meals recently, and a struggle I have is finding meals that feel like a whole meal, not like there SHOULD have been mashed potatoes on the side of this steak, you know?
This is that. It’s the most perfectly light but complete low carb/gluten free meal, and it’s full of huge flavor to boot.
…WITH BROCCOLINI IT’S SO HEALTHY.
Ok I will not shout anymore. But, seriously. These salads? NOT the TGIFriday’s sadclownface Caesars with goopy dressing that I ate in high school “for something light.” Ugh. If I do nothing in life, it will be to teach Beck just how to eat like a person for how she feels, and disregard any internal or external pressure to look a certain way. I have been SO anxious about this recently, the fear that she’ll hate her body and spend her whole life trying to make it look different the way, well, everyone I know does.
But this isn’t about that. This is about the way I love to eat salads! Requirements are: flavor, protein, and enough ingredients that I’m not …. eating a bowl of greens. Although I have a salad coming soon that is basically a bowl of greens, so ignore everything I say.
This Lemon Thyme Shrimp Caesar Salad is SO good, and definitely feels like real cooking, which I like (rather than opening a bag of salad greens and throwing on some dressing that has definitely been in the fridge for multiple moves but it’s not bad so we keep moving it). We roast tomatoes and broccolini, sear shrimp, toast croutons, and shake up a super rustic Caesar dressing with tons of lemon and fresh thyme. The whole thing together is really perfect, balanced, and feel-good without being sad-healthy, my least kind of healthy food.
…This is me attempting to make a New Year’s Resolution and stick to it. I’ll keep you posted on how it goes. 
Ok so. Around the holidays I was talking to my sister, who is in marketing and graphic design, about this site and what I wanted to happen with it (nothing? everything?), and we talked about how funny it is that some of the most popular posts are these ancient non-recipes with horrible pictures. We talked about re-doing some for the sake of new pictures and updated measurements, and this is the first one!
Shrimp with Curry Cream Sauce, originally photographed in my parent’s kitchen in 2012 under fluorescent lights. Ouch. Let the record state that my parents have a lovely kitchen.
The pictures are bad and the writing is awful (not much has changed there), but shrimp curry remains one of my absolute favorite things in the world. It’s no secret that we are highly obsessed with all kinds of curry, and a yellow curry with coconut milk appears a few times per month on our dinner rotation. The original recipe had a bunch of chopping with garlic, ginger, jalapeno, and green onion. I LOVE starting curries with that flavor combination, but wanted to do a quick version using dried and jarred flavors to save time and effort.
The result is a 15-20 minute curry that tastes like tons of effort without any actual effort. Shrimp cooks in 3 minutes or less and there is a teeny bit of cream at the end in honor of the original recipe.
…
This was a big decision, because I actually have TWO one-pot kinds of meals on deck for you. Because dinner has to take 17.34 minutes to make or it’s not happening, you know? You know those nights. Jay started his new job around the same time that my work picked way up, and, wouldn’t you know it, Beck still wants to be entertained like, all the time. THAT GIRL. So quick dinners are the name of our game a lot of nights, because we still do like cooking at home most nights but also try to eat before 8pm, and sometimes this is the best we can do. 
But, sometimes, like this time, quick dinners are legit delicious, so why not make them all the time, right? This method of cooking pasta in its own sauce has been floating around the interwebz for a long time now, and I’ve never tried it. I actually used to make a pretty similar shrimp scampi pasta back when Jay and I were dating and living in 600 square feet of cramped bliss, and have some ancient pictures of that recipe that were just not up to snuff for this fancy blog. But a scampi pasta has been on my “make for blog” list for actual years, so when I decided to try the one-pot pasta method out it was a clear choice for flavors. 
The deal is that you put everything you’re using, including pasta and water, into a big skillet. You cover that skillet to let everything come to a boil, then you take the lid OFF and let the pasta finish for about the same amount of time it would usually cook. Since the pasta is uncovered the water evaporates and you’re left with a super creamy starchy sauce, almost like pasta risotto, which sounds like the best thing in the entire world. Let’s do it.
…
Oh, Friday.
It’s raining here, and is supposed to rain until Sunday, which is of course awesome for people who like to take pictures of their food in the sunlight. 
Oh well. A weekend off I guess!
Weekends, though, are for party food. Like this!
This little gem was inspired by my sister Emily. Sometimes I make her text with me at night about food, and she says something like “everyone likes pretzels and shrimp,” so I make a crostini with pretzel bread topped with shrimp.
Seriously, the convos go like that. She loves mustard, so I threw some in as an ode to her. Make these! You’ll love them, and they’re EASY.
…