Ina Garten’s Roasted Shrimp Salad and Does This Blog Make Me Look Fat?

Like a lot of people, my New Year’s resolution is to lose some weight. 2011 saw too many treats at the new office, too many trips to the Gourmet Warehouse for duck confit and all-butter puff pastry, and a new relationship, which always means a lot of dinners out.  Truth be told, running this blog has made it difficult to stay svelte. There has just been too much damn good food around here.  I don’t want that to change, but I still need to start doing things differently because I have gained 15 pounds since my lowest weight in the summer of 2010

Loving food the way I do, I have always struggled with twenty to thirty extra pounds. In my life I have tried countless diets: Atkins, Weight Watchers, South Beach, Slim Fast, Nutri System, Jenny Craig, just to name a few. Some of them several times.  Nothing ever worked for long until I got divorced in 2004.  At 5’8″ I weighed 180 pounds. It was the heaviest I had ever been.  I felt miserable and knew that I looked terrible. It was then that I did the only thing that has ever helped me lose weight and keep it off for any length of time.  I call it the eat half diet.

One thing I had learned from fifteen years of dieting was that diets don’t work.  I also learned that any time I deprive myself, I tend to binge on the foods that I deny myself sooner rather than later. Eating whatever I feel like–but eating a lot less of it–is far more effective for me. I don’t have to measure anything, write things down, or worry about macro nutrient ratios.  I don’t eat much processed food or junk, anyway, but I get to have those few bites of chocolate mousse or lemon tart.  I can still have a handful of frites with my steak at my favorite bistro.  When I first tried this method back in 2004, I lost ten pounds in the first month, all the while eating exactly what I felt like eating.  And for a long time, I kept the weight off.  But over the last year my portions have slowly crept up in size and I have begun to snack throughout the day, something I had also put a cap on.

So now I’m back to the small portions of the foods that I really want to eat and slowly savoring every bite.  It has worked before and know that it will work now. Basically, when I did this in the past, I was following the recommendations outlined in Mireille Guiliano’s French Women Don’t Get Fat. If you haven’t read this mega bestseller, I highly recommend it. You can read my review here.

I think we’d all be a whole lot slimmer and happier if we ate small portions of food we absolutely love. I’m starting with this Roasted Shrimp Salad by Ina Garten, taken from her latest cookbook How Easy Is That–which I absolutely adore.  Roasting the shrimp gives them so much flavor. The salad contains mayonnaise, but I don’t worry about the fat.  Because eating fat doesn’t make you fat. Eating too much does, right?

Ina Garten’s Roasted Shrimp Salad

Ingredients:

2 1/2 pounds peeled jumbo shrimp

1 tablespoon good olive oil

kosher salt

freshly ground black pepper

1 cup good quality mayonnaise

1 tablespoon grated orange zest (2 oranges)

2 tablespoons freshly squeezed orange juice

1 tablespoon good white vinegar

1/4 cup minced fresh dill

2 tablespoons drained capers

2 tablespoons small-diced red onion

Directions:

1) Preheat oven to 4ooF. Pat the shrimp dry with paper towels and place them on a cookie sheet. Drizzle with olive oil, sprinkle with 1 teaspoon salt and 1/2 teaspoon pepper, and toss together.

2) Spread the shrimp in one layer and roast for 6 to 8 minutes, turning once while cooking, just until pink and firm and cooked through. Allow to cool on the pan for 3 minutes.

3) Meanwhile, make the sauce; in a large bowl, whisk together the mayonnaise, orange zest, orange juice, vinegar, 1/2 teaspoon salt, and 1/2 teaspoon pepper. When the shrimp have cooled, add them to the sauce and toss. Add the dill, capers, and red onion and toss well.  The flavors will improve if you cover the salad with plastic wrap and allow it to sit at room temperature for 30 minutes. Otherwise chill up to 6 hours and serve at room temperature.