I don’t think my cooking blogs will ever be “how to” recipes. I’ve mentioned before that I love to cook but I’m not a chef. Cooking for me is therapeutic, and therapy is a form of self-care. That’s why I decided to talk about my experience with creating some kind of dish on my Friday blogs. It’s challenging though, it forces me to make something interesting and worth posting about by the end of the work week. Every Friday I find myself thinking about what I’m going to post the following Friday that doesn’t involve mushrooms lol.
I went to visit my family for Thanksgiving like I do every holiday season. So around this time of the year, I don’t do much cooking because I’m gone for about a week. The day after I got back home, I had to make lunch because I spent entirely too much money while I was traveling so I didn’t want to order out. I decided to make shrimp, my mushrooms were on the verge of going bad so I knew they were going to be in the mix (I just wasn’t sure how lol). I had about half a cup of quinoa left over so I figured it would be enough to go with amount of shrimp I planned on making (I had a little under half the bag of shrimp left).
I didn’t have a recipe for this meal, but I knew I wanted to sauté the shrimp so I grabbed several seasonings from my cubbard. I believe I used onion and garlic powder, lemon pepper, salt, pepper, paprika, basil, fennel and herbs de provence (by the way, just learned about herbs de provence this year….TOTAL game changer for me. I use it in almost every dish). I didn’t measure anything, I just used a good dash of each seasoning and mixed everything in with the shrimp.
I added the seasoned shrimp to the pot, I used about a tablespoon and a half of olive oil and cooked it until it was pink.
While the shrimp was still cooking, I chopped up the mushrooms and tossed them in with the shrimp. Whenever I make mushrooms I like to cover the pot so the steam can “sweat” then out a bit. In my mind it adds a little more moisture to them.
I felt like the meal needed more color (food diversity is essential to a healthy diet. Eat your colors!!), so at the last minute I decided to add tomatoes and onions. I thought about adding kale but decided against it for some reason. Spinach would’ve been a good option as well.
There’s really not much to say about the quinoa, I cooked it based on the instructions so it took care of itself while I was tending to the shrimp. I just added a few dashes of salt and watched the pot to make sure it didn’t burn.
That was it! Like I said, the meal took less than an hour to make. It was enough for lunch and dinner and it turned out really good. It was a lot of moving parts though. I added ingredients as the meal progressed because I didn’t have a plan in mind when I started. I didn’t provide exact ingredients because this was a meal that I made up based on my basic cooking skills. If you’re interested in exact measurements, let me know and I can write something up for you.
Let me know if you decide to make it and tag me in pics on social media. It was super simple, delicious and healthy. Shrimp doesn’t take a long time to cook and neither does tomatoes or mushrooms. This meal could be transformed into a carb free shrimp stir fry and you can add kale, spinach or both and it would still be just as filling. Let’s chat!
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