Workin' With What You Got

I had a friend over for lunch yesterday and in the course of our chatting we started talking about how we both feel like we need to use and eat more of what we already have in our pantries, fridge or freezer.  As someone who loves trying new recipes all the time, I know that I am guilty of buying a lot of recipe ingredients, using just what I need and then moving on.  Or like my previous post about slow cooking and then freezing half, which sounds great until I forget I made it and it sits in the freezer forever! So as I cooked and prepared the Butternut Squash and Smokey Black Bean Salad recipe that I had planned on making (which I've included in this post because it was really good!) for us, I decided that for dinner I would not head to the store in a panic as usual towards the end of the week but rather get inspired and pull together a dinner with what I already had.  What I ended up making was a Sun-Dried Tomato Spiced Shrimp recipe from one of my all-time go-to cookbooks, Cooking Light's, The Essential Dinner Tonight Cookbook, which features an entree recipe and then two accompanying sides while also giving you a sort of schedule or time frame to pull it all together.  It's a great cookbook and I love that they give you a nice photograph of every recipe.  For last night's dinner, I passed on the side dish ideas, but I chose this recipe because it called for jarred sun-dried tomatoes which I had happened to buy a couple weeks ago; I used 1-2 tomato halves out of the jar and then plopped it into the fridge amongst the other various condiments and that's where it's sat since.  Curry paste is another ingredient in this recipe that I had bought for another recipe and you only really use a little each time, but it keeps and I'm slowly chipping away at it.  The recipe also called for other fridge staples in our house such as a lemon and fresh cilantro.  I recently bought a big Costco sized bag of frozen shrimp, which are easy to thaw in a hurry so we tend to always have shrimp on hand if we need to add a little protein.  The recipe is pretty straight forward and Jon and I both thought it tasted really good!  I paired the shrimp with some roasted Brussels sprouts and a slice of french bread, both of which had been impulse buys on my usual Sunday grocery trip and by Thursday were needing to be eaten.  All in all, I think it feels pretty good to "budget" your pantry, fridge and freezer!

Sun-Dried Tomato Spiced Shrimp

A couple notes on this recipe: I did not strain the tomatoes; I just picked them out of the jar with a fork and figured by not straining them the residual oil on the tomatoes was enough oil for the marinade.  I tend to skimp on oil content when I can to keep the fat amount down.  However, I do not recommend skimping on oil with making roasted Brussels sprouts...they need it! Another note, is that I would probably cook the shrimp about a minute longer on each side just to get them a little crispier, but I caution that because shrimp can get over-cooked really quickly, so my advice would be to set a timer. 

http://i1263.photobucket.com/albums/ii623/hope_friedman/sun-driedtomatoshrimp.jpg

Butternut Squash and Smokey Black Bean Salad
This doesn't quite go with the theme of this post because I got the ingredients for this recipe specifically to make this for my friend and I, but like I said it was really good and very filling.  This recipe does have goat cheese in it, which tends to be easier on my stomach than cow's milk cheese.  My friend and I loved this salad because of the goat cheese and I knew my husband wouldn't go near this salad with a 10 foot pole!

http://i1263.photobucket.com/albums/ii623/hope_friedman/smokeyblackbeanandbutternutsquashsalad.jpg