Mediterranean Shrimp Salad for Two

Shrimp tossed with a spiced Greek yogurt & feta sauce, served 2 ways--spread on toast or layered with preserved and fresh vegetables in a salad.

Everybody dies famous in a small town.

I'm usually more pop music or classical than country music, but I've been humming Miranda Lambert's song for the past few days. Our little town* has a weekly newspaper and this blog was profiled. On the front page. Above the fold. I'm very pleased with the article and doubly glad that I don't need to clean my house to have you come and read this blog post. [Mom & Dad, I've already mailed a copy of the paper to you and when I did the gal at the UPS store said 'you were in the paper, weren't you? I read about you while eating dinner last night'.]

You can read the article here, and if you did--thanks for stopping by!

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As high falutin' as it may seem to be on the front page, that doesn't alter the reality that I spent part of the morning scooping the back yard. Let me tell you, replacing 8 pound Wee Oliver Picklepants (there is no replacement) with 40 something pound Robert Barker is NOT easier in that regard. However, once the back yard was cleaned up I did manage to have a pretty glamorous lunch.

Mr Bean's gift wrapping skills in Love, Actually pale in comparison to the efforts I put forth while artfully arranging the fresh parsley.

Each time I hit the commissary after work lately I've ended up with a bag of shrimp. Cooked shrimp and raw shrimp are taking over the freezer and my brain. [Um, in a good way]. In addition to seafood advertising, I'm bombarded with Love--so in the spirit of love I made a recipe that works for my daughter and me so we could have a nice lunch together.

You don't need Valentine's Day as an excuse to show someone your love by fixing food they'd like. My daughter rocks--she's kind, funny, hardworking, generous, witty as all get out . . . but [you just knew there was a 'but'] she doesn't like lettuce [or olives, but I can live with that one as I didn't like olives until after my spouse's second Iraq tour]. My vision of a Mediterranean Shrimp Salad includes both lettuce and olives, and darn it I want to eat them!

I started the salad with a spiced Greek yogurt. I got the idea to spice things up thanks to Kristy's gorgeous vegetables [you can see her Sweet Roasted Carrots with Kale Pesto and Spiced Greek Yogurt here]. While those flavors were melding I grabbed the rest of the stuff. I don't have any multigrain sourdough however I saw a magical markdown sticker on sourdough while I was scanning the day old bread rack. Please try this with sourdough toast--it's really good. If I had beet greens from the community supported agriculture (CSA) farm share they would be good alongside, but I'm between farm share seasons. It's my time to play and use the roasted garlic and pickled peppers I put up last summer.

My daughter had her shrimp salad on toast. I didn't finish all my salad at lunch, so my son came home and picked out all the shrimp for an after school snack. Later on, my spouse came home and finished off the rest of the salad. I won't say it's enough for 4, though--but it was plenty for two.

For other recipes using seafood, I've added a Seafood category to the right sidebar Recipes by Category dropdown menu. I haven't fiddled with the Visual Recipe Index by Ingredient (a resource for folks like me eating from the farm share, the farmer's market, the garden, the neighbor's garden, and great deals on ugly produce at the grocery store) to include non-produce ingredients, so please see my Roasted Shrimp and Potato Salad, Shrimp and Garlic Scape Scampi, or Shrimp and Salsa Verde Cornbread Pizza for more shrimp-specific dishes if you too have an abundance of shrimp.

The yogurt should be mixed about 30 minutes before tossing with the rest of the ingredients to allow the flavors to blend.

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Mediterranean Shrimp Salad for Two
By Kirsten Madaus

Shrimp tossed with a spiced Greek yogurt & feta sauce, served 2 ways--spread on toast or layered with preserved and fresh vegetables in a salad. Total preparation time includes 30 minutes for flavors to blend.

Prep time: 00:05
Cook time: 00:00
Total time: 00:35

Yield: 2 servings

Ingredients:

⅓ cup plain Greek yogurt
½ teaspoon dill mix (I use Pampered Chef but any dill dip type mix will do)
1 clove roasted garlic [here's how I put up my crop] or use 1 teaspoon plain minced garlic if you like
¼ teaspoon freshly ground pepper
½ teaspoon lemon juice
1 to 2 Tablespoons crumbled feta cheese
½ pound cooked shrimp (Monterey Bay Seafood Watch suggests wild-caught or US farmed)
To serve: lettuce, olives, sourdough toast, pickled peppers, fresh parsley or dill and more feta cheese

Instructions:

In a small bowl, stir together yogurt, spices, lemon juice and cheese. Set aside for 30 minutes at room temperature.

If using as a toast topper, chop the shrimp before tossing with the spiced yogurt.

If using the shrimp in a salad, leave them whole and toss with the spiced yogurt or just plop a dollop of yogurt on top of the lettuce and pile the shrimp on top of that.

Serve over lettuce with olives, pickled peppers, and more feta, and be sure to toast up some sourdough to go alongside.

One more, since--what it really looked like when I got around to eating:

*According to the city we're 2 square miles, but according to my daughter's A&P teacher it's really 3 square miles. I'm with Mr Guizzo on this one.