Hi Blog Readers, I have definitely been away from the blog for a long time. A lot has happened – but I’m happy to be back cooking and writing about food!

In the past few months all of my energy went into planning my wedding, and now I am slowly getting back to normal – just a few weeks after my wedding. It has been a lot of fun having enough time to get back into the kitchen and start cooking again!

In the past couple of week I have made a lot of healthy (and delicious) meals . Lean turkey chili, butternut squash soup (the most perfect fall food in my opinion!), grilled salmon, shrimp and so on. I’ve also used the crock pot for a few recipe.

One of the favorite meals we have been making is grilled Wild Salmon. We try to have salmon once a week or every other week at least. I season the salmon with lemon zest, pepper, a pinch of salt. While the salmon is grilling I spoon lemon juice and white wine over the salmon which gives it an amazing flavor!

For this dinner we paired the salmon with roasted asparagus and whole wheat couscous:

For the asparagus, I line a cookie sheet with aluminum foil. I wash and snap the bottoms of the asparagus off, lay the asparagus on the lined pan. Drizzle the asparagus with a spoon of olive oil and then salt and pepper the asparagus. I roast my asparagus under the oven broiler. While I do this I do not close the oven, I leave it just a little open so I can monitor the asparagus – it can quickly go from not done to burned – so watch as you do this. After the asparagus is finished, I garnish the asparagus with a little lemon zest.

When having a dinner like this I love adding couscous as the starch because it is such a hands off preparation! For couscous you just need to add water and couscous to a pan, bring to a boil and once it is boiling stir the couscous, and turn off the heat. Put a lid on your pan and let it sit for five – ten minutes. Fluff with a fork and you’re ready to serve! (It might be the easiest thing I make on a regular basis.)

Overall this is a fairly simple dinner and it is one of our favorites!

Another great dinner I made recently was shrimp sautéed in a little butter and white wine (are you seeing a trend here? We had a bottle of white wine open and also had some too good to pass up Kerrygold butter on hand as well!)

It was a Friday night and I had a very long work day and a long drive home in the rain… I was planning on skipping dinner and having a bowl of cereal instead. But I remembered that I had eight or nine shrimp in the fridge… one of the things I love about shrimp is how quickly they cook up. I usually get already peeled and deveined shrimp from Whole Foods (it saves a lot of time and mess in the kitchen!).

My part of cooking this dinner took less than ten minutes. Luckily for me, SC was cooking up pasta for his dinner and made enough for me to have some too. I cooked the shrimp and put it aside while I waited for the pasta to finish up: (the ‘sauce’ in the bowl is a little butter (1/2 a tablespoon) with lemon and white wine; shrimp seasoned with freshly ground pepper.)

Once the pasta was finished I tossed everything together and garnished with fresh parsley.

After a tough day this dinner totally hit the spot and it was so easy!

Stay tuned – I’ll be sharing more of the meals I have been making in the coming days!