My Therapist Cooks

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Lobster Pasta With Lemon Cream Sauce

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Channeling major Kate-Winslet-The-Holiday Christmas pasta recipe vibes with this super easy creamy lobster pasta recipe! I buy frozen lobster tails when I see them on sale and keep them in the freezer for extra special meals when we need cozy + comforting without spending a ton of time on dinner. I have a lobster mac and cheese recipe too for even more creamy dreamy lobster!

lobster with pasta recipes

Oh hey, December. Didn't see you there with all the Thanksgiving pandemic election fake news bs inundating my brain and screens.

But, December it is, and December means we need some festive meals. Right? Right. Let's get right into this lobster pasta cream sauce of joy situation.

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The Best Way To Cook Salmon (per me)

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This is our absolute favorite way to make salmon! A doubled-up method; we sear the salmon in a cast iron skillet until the skin gets super toasty and crispy (salmon bacon, HELLO), then broil to finish. The result is a flaky, medium-well salmon that is perfectly cooked every time.

recipe for seared salmon

Welcome to the inside of my brain, wherein if something goes well a few times I declare it THE BEST with very little testing of other things, then do the same thing over and over in perpetuity because it works for me.

So if we're being honest it's THE WAY I cook salmon, but I'm calling it the best salmon recipe because it is so, so good.

This is our easy weeknight salmon. We have it at least once a week. We cook it the same each time BUT with different seasonings, which I think is a big key to "cooking well" without, say, culinary school. I can't cook all.the.things. but I have a few methods that I'm great at, so I change up the spices and BOOM variety.

You're like...this is not very inspiring it sounds like you only know how to do this one thing.

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Easy Broiled Salmon with Kimchi Fried Rice

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One of our favorite weeknight dinners! Super delicious broiled salmon with a Korean-style sauce that can be made in advance, and quick fried rice with kimchi and whatever veggies you have in your fridge. 

Hello and hi.

Are you doing OK? Are you loving or hating or nothing-ing this stay-at-home moment in our lives?

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Korean Broiled Salmon

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ON WEDNESDAYS WE EAT PINK FISH.

Yep. Super easy broiled salmon, comin' atcha. This recipe is a companion to the kimchi fried rice from last week, but I wanted to keep them as separate posts (and eventually together!) because they are so good together OR separately.

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She Crab Mac and Cheese

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She Crab Mac and Cheese

Super delicious, dreamy mac and cheese that tastes just like she-crab soup but amped up with tons of cheese and pasta. She-crab mac and cheese is the mac and cheese we've all been waiting for! This is perfect for a cozy weekend, Valentine's Day, or even Christmas Eve.

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Grilled Shrimp with Avocado Pico

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Oh hi, stereotypical summer meal!

Grilled Shrimp with Avocado Pico De Gallo

I've been cooking more low carb meals recently, and a struggle I have is finding meals that feel like a whole meal, not like there SHOULD have been mashed potatoes on the side of this steak, you know?

This is that. It's the most perfectly light but complete low carb/gluten free meal, and it's full of huge flavor to boot.

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Mustard Nicoise Salad

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Oh, hey.

Here is a nicoise salad that is full of texture and interest, can be meal prepped or served warm/room temperature, includes veggies and carbs and protein, and has a to-die-for flavor base. So that checks a lot of boxes.

Salads-as-boring is kind of a tired old story, but maybe a truthful one nonetheless. I'm always looking for salads with lots of STUFF on them. One of my favorite things to order at delis is a salad sampler kind of thing, and nicoise salads are that way naturally.

I've seen lots of versions of nicoise salads - some with rice instead of potatoes, fresh tuna instead of canned, and lots of have olives and eggs. I don't like eggs and Jay doesn't like olives, so you understand why those two items are missing here.

The KEY to this salad is that we make one mustard base, then use it in different ways in the tuna, green beans, potatoes, AND salad dressing. This takes some steps out of the dish since we don't have to make all separate sauces, and each component tastes slightly different while also belonging together from the mustard.

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Lemon Thyme Shrimp Caesar Salad

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WITH BROCCOLINI IT'S SO HEALTHY.

Ok I will not shout anymore. But, seriously. These salads? NOT the TGIFriday's sadclownface Caesars with goopy dressing that I ate in high school "for something light." Ugh. If I do nothing in life, it will be to teach Beck just how to eat like a person for how she feels, and disregard any internal or external pressure to look a certain way. I have been SO anxious about this recently, the fear that she'll hate her body and spend her whole life trying to make it look different the way, well, everyone I know does.

But this isn't about that. This is about the way I love to eat salads! Requirements are: flavor, protein, and enough ingredients that I'm not .... eating a bowl of greens. Although I have a salad coming soon that is basically a bowl of greens, so ignore everything I say.

This Lemon Thyme Shrimp Caesar Salad is SO good, and definitely feels like real cooking, which I like (rather than opening a bag of salad greens and throwing on some dressing that has definitely been in the fridge for multiple moves but it's not bad so we keep moving it). We roast tomatoes and broccolini, sear shrimp, toast croutons, and shake up a super rustic Caesar dressing with tons of lemon and fresh thyme. The whole thing together is really perfect, balanced, and feel-good without being sad-healthy, my least kind of healthy food.

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Spicy Crab Poke Bowls

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Spicy Crab Poke Bowls

...what can I say except, you're welcome? 

We've been watching a lot of Moana around here lately. Which is PERFECT for this island fusion bowl to start your week, theme movie + dinner totally unplanned. Obviously it goes without saying that the Moana-obsessed toddler in this house would turn her nose up in disgust at the lack of only crackers in this bowl, but it's developmentally appropriate to be a total ass about diverse foods at this age, so I forgive her. 

You, however, you will adore this. It's a re-do of one of the most popular recipes on the site, this spicy crab salad. I know there are many that turn their nose up at anything with fake crab and mayo calling itself sushi, and that's fine. But-however-also, this stuff is popular for good reason: it's delicious, and so simple to make on your own. I love spicy crab ANYTHING when we order sushi, right next to my all-raw authentic fare, but the ingredients are so simple and cheap that it seems silly to save spicy crab for special sushi nights. 

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Dill Roasted Salmon Salad Kit

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Today we have a gift idea! 

A gift idea that was gifted to us once, in fact. Once, long ago, while I was pregnant with Beck, Jay broke his leg in three places on the first day of vacation. It was horrendous, and he still is dealing with pain from the injury and planning to have a third surgery to do some more correcting of what can only be described as a crappy first attempt at fixing him. 

In those early weeks of healing, one of my yoga students at the Y brought this meal to me one day at the gym. It was SO good and one of the most thoughtful things she could have done. The end result was a salmon salad with orzo, but she packaged everything separately and cooked the components perfectly so that the salad was great cold and we could mix and match to make plates exactly the way we wanted. I created a version and love this idea for a gift for someone who needs it, but it's also great to prep on the weekend and have for lunches and dinners all week. The salmon DOES get slightly fishy when eaten cold, so you could definitely cook the salmon right at the last minute or even sub chicken, but I don't mind the cold salmon flavor at all. 

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Easy Shrimp in Curry Cream Sauce

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This is me attempting to make a New Year's Resolution and stick to it. I'll keep you posted on how it goes. 

Ok so. Around the holidays I was talking to my sister, who is in marketing and graphic design, about this site and what I wanted to happen with it (nothing? everything?), and we talked about how funny it is that some of the most popular posts are these ancient non-recipes with horrible pictures. We talked about re-doing some for the sake of new pictures and updated measurements, and this is the first one! 

Shrimp with Curry Cream Sauce, originally photographed in my parent's kitchen in 2012 under fluorescent lights. Ouch. Let the record state that my parents have a lovely kitchen. 

The pictures are bad and the writing is awful (not much has changed there), but shrimp curry remains one of my absolute favorite things in the world. It's no secret that we are highly obsessed with all kinds of curry, and a yellow curry with coconut milk appears a few times per month on our dinner rotation. The original recipe had a bunch of chopping with garlic, ginger, jalapeno, and green onion. I LOVE starting curries with that flavor combination, but wanted to do a quick version using dried and jarred flavors to save time and effort. 

The result is a 15-20 minute curry that tastes like tons of effort without any actual effort. Shrimp cooks in 3 minutes or less and there is a teeny bit of cream at the end in honor of the original recipe. 

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Crab Macaroni Salad

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Is the grossest thing ever to you?  Please say no, I love it so much.  

I don't know how this came about, but Jay and I were...eating sushi? wandering the grocery store? something inspiring like that I'm sure, and we got to talking about how we love imitation crab.  I KNOW.  So not real food, but we both enjoy it, and clearly we aren't the only ones, given the popularity of California rolls.  Krab makes appearances in a few creamy southern potluck-esque dishes like this macaroni salad.  Since we've been active and jungly and eating organically for a week in Belize I figured what BETTER time than to share a creamy pasta salad recipe?  

Eye roll, I know.  

Speaking of being back from Belize, we are so all over the place.  Interviewing people and planning for the remodel, which will start in about 3 months and be done approximately never.  All of the laundry because everything smells like river.  Reconnecting with Beck.  Huge computer issues that took literally two whole days and is still not solved.  Planning for some new writing projects (holidays!).  Attempting to get back into work without becoming totally bummed that vacation is over.  And, on top of that, we're vaguely jet lagged which means we are zombies in the morning but all kinds of youthful at night so we've been bingeing Schitt's Creek which OMG PLEASE DO NOT DELAY WATCHING THIS.  It is just so good.  

All that to say, we really need some pasta.  And so do you!  4th of July begs for it, no joke.  

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Salmon Cake Lettuce Wraps

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I made you cake!  Savory, salty, crispy seafood cake topped with a tartar sauce that is just.so.good.  At restaurants I'm always tempted to order crab cakes but rarely do, and here's why:  if I get even the slightest crunch that indicates shell, I don't want to eat anything else at all and become hungry and annoyed and sad.  So this solves that.  With salmon!

You could totally make these into burgers btw.  

But!  This totally feels like summer to me, and has two important characteristics that are important to us at the moment.  First, they're relatively low carb.  There are some breadcrumbs in the cakes, but not many, and we went with lettuce wraps for health and flavor.  AND, we used canned salmon here for frugality.  I'm actually a big fan of canned fishes; they taste great, are inexpensive, and are great for recipes like this where the fish gets so cooked that a super fresh piece would almost be wasted.  

We had these for lunch on a Saturday recently, and it was such a great mid-day meal.  But now I'm thinking..brunch.  With a runny egg on top?  Can eggs go with seafood?  Seafood can go with a bloody mary, that's for dang sure.  

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Easy/Cheesy Tuna Noodle Bake

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I will never for all of my life understand the no cheese with seafood rule.  Do you?  Do you understand it?  

I'm assuming it's like white pants after Labor Day, if paired with black on top and bottom we can get away with it.  Right?  I think yes.  

So!  Here's a laugh.  I had in mind that I'd start making some things for the blog that are similar to things that Beck likes to eat.  Because she's part of my life and I cook for her a ton and this is a blog about life.  It made sense.  Beck adores peas.  Beck adores noodles.  Beck adores tuna.  

Beck hated this.  

But not because it was bad.  It wasn't!  It's delicious and you will love it.  I think that we're just still on a foods-need-to-be-separate train, or at least that's what I'm telling myself.  The grownups liked this, so we're going with it.  The flavors are so familiar but a little jazzed up with fontina cheese and garlic parsley crumbs on top.  I want to top my life with garlic parsley crumbs.  

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Easy Honey Lime Salmon

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It's 5 ingredients of love, basically.  Six if you count olive oil, so fine.  Six ingredients of love.  

Full disclosure:  you know how we're supposed to eat sustainable, wild seafood caught by fairies in a responsible manner.  I know it, I know the reasons for it, I support it.  I also like bright, light, pink, fatty salmon that has been farmed by angry ogres (I assume) better.  It's the taste.  And the texture?  Wild salmon has a darker color, less fat, and is maybe a hair more dry, and I just really like fatty salmon.  

I'm a monster, I know.  But!  I'm trying.  This here is wild-caught Alaskan salmon caught by a local human.  She catches salmon in Alaska for part of the year, then sells it here for the rest of the time.  It's as close to local salmon as you can get when you live in inland South Carolina, and I'm going for it.  It wasn't dripping in its own artificially produced fat, so I fixed that with a glug of olive oil and a smear of honey.  Super thin lime slices are broiled right on top, and the whole mess is ridiculously simple and good.  

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Herbed Shrimp Butter Bowls

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I turn 31 today.  To say it's been a strange time is an understatement, but the years tick on and all that.  

I honestly hardly remember what I did when I turned 30 besides pump and nurse and try to keep poop out from under my fingernails.  Does anyone have a clue what I did last year for my birthday?  I was slightly distracted.  

But!  This year I'm...more aware of my distractions?  Houses and dogs and toddlers and jobs, most days it is wonderful but also kind of relentless, right?  It all changes very quickly but then is monotonous, not that that's a bad thing.  

I spent Saturday with my family celebrating my and 3 other birthdays, and we had a blast messing with Beck and eating and drinking and just being together.  A Tuesday birthday is maybe the most anticlimactic kind, so I'm making up for it with happy hour tonight with friends, and these butter bowls for you.  

Butter bowl.  

You're either fully repulsed or grateful that I said it first - sometimes we just want to eat all the butter, right?  I'm with you.  This is an imitation of an appetizer at one of my favorite local restaurants - a butter-based broth with huge flavor, lovely shrimp, and bread for dunking.  I went garlic/wine/lemon for my flavors and threw some local microgreens on top for health + crunch.  Balance, people, balance.  

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Lobster Mac and Cheese

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Happy February!  

Not Valentine's Day.  Because we're supposed to hate it, right?  I don't....care about it, honestly.  We sometimes do something for Valentine's Day, we sometimes don't, but I always try to make a fun fancy meal for the blog this time of year.  This year will be a twofer!  I made this for the local newspaper but wanted to share it here too, and there's another fun Valentine's surprise comin' atcha too!  ...

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