Grilling season is here and swimsuit season is sneaking up on us. You know what that means – lighter meals… AGAIN! We are usually so good with our diet lifestyle change and then BAM! a holiday comes and messes everything up. But that happens to everyone, right? So, unfortunately, we are back on the wagon… for now.
A go-to favorite for us is shrimp. Pretty much everyone in the Blended Kitchen household loves it, except for the Nugget. But that’s okay, we just give him a grilled cheese and some mandarin oranges and we are all happy as clams shrimp!
Grilled Shrimp Skewers
We love shrimp. We love shrimp boiled. We love shrimp fried. We love shrimp sautéed. We love shrimp scampi. We love shrimp grilled. We could go on and on like Bubba from Forrest Gump, but we’ll spare you that. This time, we’re preparing our shrimp on skewers in a light garlicky sauce with tomatoes and green onions. We had these as appetizers with a little cocktail sauce, but you could easily put these skewers on a bed of angel hair pasta, topped with some basil, or on a big, healthy salad for dinner.
Here’s an awesome grilling trick you’ll thank us for later: Cover your platter with Glad Press n Seal or Saran wrap before putting raw meats, poultry or seafood on it. Once you get to the grill and put the food on, take off the wrap and voila! your clean platter is ready and waiting. No more worrying about cross contamination – with this trick you only get one dish dirty.
Seriously, we rock at the 5-ingredient-or-less-dishes.
We started by mixing salt and garlic powder.
Then we added ¼ cup of chopped green onions.
Mix in 2 tbsp vegetable oil and the juice of one lemon.
Pour the onion mixture over the shrimp.
Mix in the tomatoes and let sit for about an hour so that the shrimp have time to marinate.
Thread the shrimp and tomatoes onto skewers. If you look closely, you can see our Press n Seal trick in action!
Pre-heat your grill on high heat. Right before putting the skewers on the grill, reduce heat to medium. Cook approximately 2 minutes, or until you can see the shrimp starting to turn pinkish and firming up.
Carefully turn the shrimp skewers over, allowing them to cook on the other side.
This diet lifestyle change has never tasted so good. Bubba would be proud!
Here’s the recipe:
Ingredients:
1 1/2 lbs uncooked, peeled and deveined shrimp
1 1/2 tsp salt
1 tbsp garlic powder
2 tbsp vegetable oil
juice of one lemon (approx 1/4 cup)
1/4 cup chopped green onions
10oz pkg grape tomatoes
Directions:
Mix all ingredients in a bowl and marinate for one hour. Thread onto skewers and grill. Serve with cocktail sauce or over your favorite pasta.
This is a short blog post today, but we don’t want you to feel short-changed, so we have some fun shrimp facts for you to enjoy! Did you know that:
• There are 128 species of shrimp in the world?
• Shrimp is considered to be the #1 most popular seafood?
• The longest shrimp ever found was 16 inches long? (Imagine the skewer for him!)
• Shrimp can only swim backwards?
• Shrimp’s hearts are in their heads? (Weird, because at Blended Kitchen our hearts are definitely in our stomachs…)
Next week: Get ready for some All-American recipes when we show you how Blended Kitchen celebrated Opening Day 2012!
Nom. nom. nom