Southwestern-Style Shimp Taco Salad

This is my favorite time of year.   The sweet corn is starting to show up in the produce section of the grocery store along with fresh peaches and cherries.   Plums are just around the corner.  

My routine was disrupted this past week because it was the last week of school for my daughter and with all the end-of-the-year activities, I didn't do much cooking worthy of noting here.   Friday night I the spice-rubbed pork tenderloin which I have written about here a few times.   This is my daughters favorite dinner and she requested it.   I served corn-on-the-cob with the pork tenderloin and everything was really delicious.   

I was out with friends Saturday night, another night I would normally cook.    Tonight for dinner, I used some of the left over corn to make a taco salad.   This is another Cooking Light recipe I found on myrecipes.com.   I made this many months ago, maybe even a year ago, and my wife really didn't like it that much.   But, this evening she suggested a taco salad using the corn, so I decided to try this dish on her again.

Photo: Becky Luigart-Stayner; Styling: Cindy Barr

I sauteed the shrimp instead of grilling them, and I marinated the shrimp in the chipotle sauce, olive oil, lime juice, and cumin for about 15 minutes before cooking.   The shrimp cook in just a few minutes so most of the work for this dinner is chopping and prepping.    The salad ingredients include romaine lettuce, tomatoes, corn, fresh chopped cilantro, green onions, black beans, and of course the shrimp.   

The shrimp smelled so good when they were cooking and they tasted just as good.   The whole salad was delicious.   The recipe says this dish makes 6 servings at 228 calories per serving.   But using just a little less shrimp than called for in the recipe, but the same amount of everything else, including the sour cream and avocado, my version of this dish yielded two nice sized salads at about 550 calories and that includes 1 oz of tortilla chips per serving at 142 calories.   This is just about perfect for dinner... especially since I was at the pool with my daughter for a couple of hours just before dinner and I was really hungry.