So let me start with how excited my husband and I were to plant a garden as soon as we moved into our new house.  We couldn’t wait to pick fresh veggies with our daughter and thought that it would be so amazing to walk into our back yard and pick a fresh salad! With little to no research we headed out to Lowes to buy a ton of veggies dirt and stone to build our garden and it turned out so great we were so proud.  We used half already started plants and half seeds, everything was doing great and really growing until we had about three weeks of horrible rain and that pretty much killed everything in our garden we were so upset!

All that hard work and aspiration for this amazing organic garden! Pretty much the only thing we have left is our basil plant which seems to be doing great, which leads to this recipe that I came up with determined to cook with something that we grew!

I always keep frozen shrimp on hand because they are super quick and easy to defrost, luckily my husband likes shrimp so its an easy meal for us to make.  You could easily substitute whole grain pasta out for the quinoa and that would be delic! I just happened to have this on hand at the moment.

I browsed online for a couple of pesto recipes and ended up making my own version that I loved and shockingly my husband liked too!  The main difference would be the lemon juice that I added but I love the tangy taste that it gives and made the pesto less thick.  You could use this pesto on anything like chicken, spread on french bread with tomatoes, or just on plain pasta.

Pesto Recipe

1.5 c Basil

1 t Garlic

3 T Extra Virgin Olive Oil

1/4 c Grated Parm Cheese

1 Lemon (juice only)

Salt & Pepper to taste

*combine all ingredients in a food processor and blend until your desired consistency!

After I made the pesto i marinated the shrimp in the mixture for a little and then threw them into a frying pan, we had planned on grilling them but it started pouring so that was a no-go! I had started the quinoa in the beginning of my prep and let it cook until it was done.  When my shrimp were done I threw in about two cups of spinach for some extra veggies, then added in my quinoa and it was all done!

This was really a pretty simple meal and not very time consuming, the best part is if you make extra you already have a great lunch packed for the next day!

xo Meg