Shrimp and such

Ever since we've been back from France, we have made a real effort to only buy what groceries we need for the next 2-3 days' worth of meals. We only buy one fruit and one veg snack at a time (ie, one bag of apples and one bunch of carrots), and we don't buy any other snack fruit or veg until we've eaten those up.

Christmas was somewhat of an exception, as we bought things we don't normally keep in the house, such as crackers, to use for recipes to take to Christmas parties, but on the whole we have worked really, really hard to shop more frequently, and for fewer items.

And it's been marvelous. It's worked. We have plenty of room in our tiny fridge. And we have almost no food waste. This is one lesson from living in France that was really driven home (flown home? Ha), and we're going to try our best to keep it up. Our grocery bill has been slightly less than it was from this time last year, which is good, but the real savings is in the food we used to buy in bulk, or on a whim, that didn't get eaten.

With that said, we do stock up on a few things to always keep on hand. One is Costco-sized bag of frozen chicken breasts. They'll always get eaten. The other is some kind of frozen seafood, either a bag of frozen fish filets or a bag of frozen shrimp. This time we had shrimp and were looking for a way to use it up.

After eating something similar at the Lazy Goat one night, we found this recipe on Real Simple and made it...many, many pre-blog moons ago. Because we were in search of an easy dinner and because I kind of got behind on blogging over the holidays, I decided to make (aka have Brian make) this to share with you. It's an easy one-dish meal that you can customize - we like to throw some red pepper flakes in there for a little heat. But it's easy to make to your tastes. We usually serve it over a little bit of Barilla Plus angel hair pasta to make it a little more filling.

It's not too terrible in calories, either, so it won't wreck your New Year's diet (unlike the chocolate salted caramel pecan pie). Overall, quite a win. We hope you enjoy this as much as we do!

xoxo,
E & B

---

Roasted tomatoes with shrimp and feta

Ingredients:
5 large tomatoes, cut into eighths
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 tablespoons minced garlic
salt and black pepper
1 1/2 pounds medium shrimp, peeled and deveined
1/2 cup chopped parsley (which we left out, because I hate parsley)
2 tablespoons lemon juice
1 cup crumbled feta

Directions:
Heat oven to 450.
Place tomatoes in a large baking dish and spoon the olive oil and garlic over them.
Sprinkle with 3/4 teaspoon each salt and pepper (or just eyeball it), and toss.
Roast on top rack of oven for 20 minutes.
Remove backing dish from oven and stir in shrimp and lemon juice (and parsley, if you chose to add it).
Sprinkle with feta.
Return dish to oven and until the shrimp are fully cooked, about 10-15 minutes.
Serve warm.

Nutrition: Based on my lovely MyFitnessPal calculations, this makes 6 servings, each at roughly 230 calories apiece, which is pretty good. But be careful what you pair it with - pasta and bread can make the calorie count rise really quickly.