Busy Week from Hell made Real Simple!

This past week and a half at work has been insanely busy. Late nights and high stress do not lend themselves to eating well or eating right.

In anticipation of this hectic time, I chose two recipes from Real Simple that I could quickly prepare in advance to make my lunch a pleasant experience.

My first recipe was salt and pepper shrimp with Thai fried rice. Just about all of the ingredients were pantry staples, I had frozen shrimp in the freezer and there was some nice long grain brown rice on sale at the supermarket. Easy! The recipe (on the link above) was pretty simple to execute, however, I omitted the chorizo to save myself a few calories.

When the dish was complete and I was getting ready to pack it up in my Tupperware, I decided to mix the shrimp in with the rice to save some space in my work fridge. It looked beautiful and tasted great! I didn't find it as filling as I had hoped however, so perhaps the chorizo would had made it a more satisfying meal.


The week had taken a lot out of me (and it's not over yet) and I was really in need of some comfort food. That being said, for my second recipe I chose the turkey and roasted red pepper meat loaf in this month's issue of Real Simple. The magazine's been sitting unread on my table all week, so not only was it quick and handy but also gave my cookbooks a rest.

Chopping the onions and red peppers were the most labor intensive part of this dish but once you got past that it was a breeze. As I was mixing the meat, I could smell the herby goodness of the parsley and the zest of the dijon mustard. As the meat was resting on my cutting board, I realized that I accidentally omitted the Parmesan cheese called for in the recipe. After giving the meat a little taste, I can see where they were going with the cheese but I think it came out just fine without it.

So now I have a delicious satisfying lunch to look forward to next week. Hopefully I'll have the time to enjoy it!