Lent

Orzo Salad with Shrimp, Feta, and Olives

Orzo Salad with Shrimp, Feta, and Olives

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I’m often asked how I eat the way that I do without spending a fortune at the grocery store. One of these days, I’ll get around to doing a full post about that but my number one tip is to plan ahead. That way you can plan to reuse ingredients (no use letting half that bag of vegetables go to waste) without feeling like you’re eating the same thing over and over again. This orzo salad is a great example — it uses many of the same ingredients as the Greek Burgers with Tzatziki that I posted last week, but it’s an entirely different meal. Just plan to have this two or three days after you make the burgers, and you’ll be able to use up any feta, red onion, cucumber, and fresh dill that you might have left over. (Of course, it works the other way around too if you want to make this salad first!)

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But, burgers aside, I really do recommend this salad. It’s so easy to make — you can even make it ahead and have dinner waiting for you when you get home from a long day at work — and it’s loaded with fresh flavor. I don’t know what it is about this type of dish, but there’s something about them that I love — even though everything is mixed together, each individual ingredient maintains its integrity. You can eat it all together, or pluck out specific items and eat them one by one for entirely different flavor experiences. Some other examples of recipes that I find to be similar include my Pasta with Brussels Sprouts and Gorgonzola Cream Sauce and my Roasted Shrimp with Orange and Fennel. In my head, I always think of them as “picky recipes,” both because you pick at them with your fork while you eat and because you’ll likely find yourself picking extra items right out of the serving dish when you’re dine with what on your plate. In fact, Shawn and I probably polished off another half serving of this salad between the two of us just by continuing to eat after we had finished what was originally dished out.

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Scallops with Minted Pea Sauce Appetizer

Scallops with Minted Pea Sauce Appetizer

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Even though dry peas and lentils are both starchy and filling, I find that I treat them in very different ways. I generally look at lentils as an alternative to meat, using them as the main component of a recipe. Dry peas, on the other hand, tend to take a backseat and offer more of a supporting role to a cast of other ingredients. For example, in my pea & herb stuffed flatbreads you probably wouldn’t consider peas to be the main flavor. (You actually might not even realize they’re in there!)
In this appetizer, I wanted the dry peas to be a more obvious component of the dish. I had noticed a feature on vegetable based sauces in Fine Cooking and thought that a pea sauce might be fun with some seared sea scallops. (I know. Again. I promise this will be the last FC inspired post for a while! But I can’t help it that their magazine is so inspirational!)
This sauce reminded me a lot of pea soup, but it was much creamier than any pea soup I’ve ever had. I really liked the burst of freshness that the mint and ginger provided – it really helped prevent the sauce from having that heavy, muddy taste that dry peas can so often have.
I tried to make an entree out of this recipe, but it just wasn’t filling enough to be satisfying. I would make a great appetizer though!

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