TGIF. But actually. I’m looking forward to the long weekend, and especially no classes on Monday. I love my classes this quarter. They’re a lot of fun and they’re really small, which means I’m getting to know my classmates really well! But I really need a weekend for my weekend, so I’m happy there’s nothing to do on Monday.

I wanted to make a light dinner since typically my lunches are very heavy, plus the fact that I tend to come home pretty late. And having a huge, heavy meal right before bed makes it hard for me to sleep. However, to be entirely honest, I didn’t love this meal. The shrimp were DELICIOUS….but I should not have made them into a salad. I felt that the salad just didn’t do it for me. I think next time I would top the shrimp over rice and add some veggies on the side. The shrimp were so good and I feel like the salad just really drowned them out.

But anyway: I highly recommend making the shrimp. I followed the shrimp recipe from foodiecrush. The instructions were really easy and straightforward. Basically, chop and mix and cook. No brain power needed.

Everything smelled soooo good. To the sauce, I also added some lemon and orange zest because I was having a “why not?” moment. I don’t know if it did anything, but it made me feel like it did. Additionally, I only used a 2lb bag of shrimp, which I think contributed to me not liking the salad portion. Next time I would cook 2 bags of shrimp (the recipe calls for 3lbs but I only had a 2lb bag at home).

For the salad, I also followed a recipe from foodiecrush. I think this salad would have been really good, but I think there were a lot of errors on my part and so it just wasn’t really what I was hoping it to be. For starters, I think I had way too much lettuce. I had plenty of avocado (so good), and I bought the almonds….and then forgot to put them into the salad.

They didn’t end up being mixed in, but when I pulled a portion out for dinner, I added in the almonds separately. It definitely made a difference. It added more flavor to the dish overall.

But like I said earlier, I think this would have been good if I had made it a little better. But I do think that next time I will make the shrimp and put it over rice with some veggies. The shrimp was very easy to make and turned out absolutely delicious.

To be continued…

Gabriela