Cajun Shrimp and Cheesy Grits

I have had horrible headache all afternoon. At first, I thought it was from drinking too much caffeine, so I slugged down a CamelBak water bottle full of plain water and took a few Advil. It went away but came back not even 2 1/2 hours later. So, I ate a little something for a snack and that didn't help, so then I slugged down more water and finally took more Advil. Still had a headache.

It wasn't until I ate dinner that I finally got some relief.

With a pounding headache I didn't want to fuss. No chopping and I wanted dinner on the table in 20 minutes or less. So I ended up making Cajun Shrimp with some cheese grits (and some green beans because I realized I hadn't had any veggies other than peas today. Oops.).

When I got home tonight I knew I had shrimp I could thaw, but I had no idea what to do with it. So, I went to one of my favorite recipe sites, myrecipes.com. It's a database of recipes from Time Inc. publications like Cooking Light, Real Simple, and Health. I use the enhanced recipe search the most. Tonight, I used shrimp as my search term and checked off all three of the above magazines because I knew they'd all be healthy choices and clicked "quick/easy." Then, I sorted the results by rating. Cajun Shrimp came up near the top and it sounded great. Truthfully, it was the idea of cheesy grits that sold it for me. Yum! Both were great, actually.

Their Dinner Tonight feed is another place I look for new recipes, and if you're a beginning cook, these recipes include a video that helps you see the dish being made first. My only complaint is that keep the videos short, they use pre-chopped vegetables, which is what I needed help with most when I was learning to cook. Understandable, though, because who wants to sit and watch a 45-minute YouTube- style video?

When I was learning to cook I watched a ton of Rachael Ray's 30 minute meals. I know she grates on people's nerves sometimes, but she doesn't use swap outs on that show, so that's how I learned to cut a vegetable. I never actually made her recipes, though, because most have a zillion calories. It's an exaggeration, but you get the idea. At least the Dinner Tonight dishes have reasonable calorie counts for those of us trying to cut back.

I'm always looking for new recipes, so where you look for recipe inspiration?