I’m all about easy weeknight dinners, and this southern inspired Shrimp & Grits took literally minutes. Precooked frozen shrimp is one of my favorite food hacks. It requires literally no preparation other than running under cold water for a few minutes. It’s great with cocktail sauce at parties (make your own by mixing ketchup and prepared horseradish), in pasta, on salads, or with grits and okra like we had last night!

Moule-frites is just a fancy French/Belgian way of saying “mussels and french fries”. During an excursion to Whole Foods (we tried out the new one in InkBlock and omg it’s enormous) we discovered some Maine mussels and thought, well why not? We looked up a recipe for a white wine broth that seemed reasonable and bought a regular old potato for frying. For the mussels: Ingredients: 2/3 bottle dry white wine (we used the Three Wishes Pinot Grigio from Whole Foods because it’s about $3) 4-6 tablespoons butter One onion 4 cloves garlic Dry and fresh herbs to taste (we used fresh basil and dried cilantro because… well, that’s what we had) 1 pound fresh live mussels Bring the wine to a simmer with the butter, onion, garlic and herbs.

Earlier this week, I was feeling inspired by this recipe from one of our favorite celebrity chefs, Daniel Boulud. Except we had approximately none of the ingredients and it looked far too time consuming for a regular weeknight. So instead, I cooked up what we had on hand to create a dish that Matt has cited as his favorite ever. The highest praise! Just kidding, he says this about everything I cook; it was part of our marriage vows.

Part of my inspiration to write about what we miss from NYC was that Matt has been requesting that I make bagels for weeks. Probably because we haven’t found a decent place to get one in Boston. It was his birthday this week and I had the morning off (#labordayweekend!), so I decided to dig out my tried and true bagel recipe and get boiling. Bagels sound impressive when you tell people you made them yourself, and they take a good amount of time to prepare from start to finish, but it’s so worth it and actually pretty easy.