Dinner tonight: Warm Past Salad with Shrimp

Last night, I made Warm Pasta Salad with Shrimp. Except I made it without the pasta...because I still have pasta guilt from my stint on the Atkins diet in high school. I know what you're thinking, "But she just made stuffed shells!" Somehow that's different. Because they're a vessel, rather than the main attraction? I dunno. Anyway, enough about my neuroses. On to the recipe review!

This recipe was surprisingly unclear for a CL production. It tells you to cook the shrimp and then stir in everything else, but at no time does it tell you when to remove the pan from the heat! I decided, after the spinach stage but before the vinaigrette stage, to keep the pan on the heat for another few minutes to wilt the spinach, then took it off once I added the mustard sauce. The other weird thing was that the recipe calls for minced red onion, but the picture clearly shows way bigger pieces. This led me to start doubting my cooking terminology knowledge, and I went to look up the definition of mince. It does, in fact, mean to chop as small as possible without pureeing. So whoever made the picture in the recipe clearly took some liberties with the directions. Not that we know anything about that, right? ;) And yes, as you see from my pictures, I did not mince either. If they cheated, so can I!

In any event, I wanted to like this. I really did. I liked all of the components. But somehow they just didn't come together. It is possible that my carby foe may have served just this purpose, but I'm doubtful...I have a sneaking suspicion it would just be one more component that didn't work as a whole dish.