Fresh-from-the-Garden Minestrone

This minestrone recipe is designed to take advantage of whatever is growing fresh in your garden right now. While you may want to stick to the combination of root vegetable, squash, beans and greens, substitutions can and should be made depending on what’s available. What makes this soup really tasty is the “garnish” of bacon, [...]

Mashing Vegetables Beyond Potatoes

Image via Wikipedia

Lately, I have been experimenting with mashing a wider range of vegetables than the standard potato. And why not? The baby loves mashes, even when he’s turning his nose up at vegetables in general. For adults, they are comfort food. Everyone’s happy.
What is the difference between a mash and a puree? Generally, purees [...]

Garden Goodness: Mixed Sauteed Vegetables

When the garden starts really producing at the end of summer, you need to think of lots of ways to eat up all those lovely vegetables. You can’t go wrong with a mix of sauteed vegetables.
This versatile dish goes with so many things. Use it as a bed for grilled chicken, steak or fish, or [...]

Glazing Vegetables

Glazing vegetables is an extremely useful technique for punching up an otherwise boring vegetable side dish. I used to avoid recipes that used this technique, because I associated glazed vegetables — specifically, carrots — with a sugary, syrupy sweet dish. If I wanted to eat dessert, I’d have ice cream.
But I was wrong. The traditional [...]

Farmers Market Vegetable Soup

The problem with going to the farmers market is that it is all too easy to yield to temptation and grab up way too many fresh vegetables than you can possibly eat in a week. What better way to take advantage of all that bounty than to make a huge pot of soup? You can [...]

Simmering: A Technique for Cooking Flavorful Vegetables

There are probably two main ways we all learned how to cook vegetables with liquid: boiling and steaming. But both of these techniques have disadvantages. Boiling vegetables in a lot of water often yields overcooked, mushy results that many of us remember (and hate) from our childhoods. And steaming all too often lets the flavor [...]

Eat Your Vegetables! Prepping, Blanching and Revitalizing Vegetables

colors in the market, originally uploaded by Zé Eduardo
Sometimes it seems like a lot of work to sneak in those 5 servings of vegetables per day. When I’m trying to throw together a quick weeknight supper, I often don’t want to spend time making side dishes. And I’m not going to eat fresh vegetables for [...]

Mediterranean-Style Roasted Vegetable Salad

Are you overrun in garden goodness? Then try this salad. It was a big hit at our house and is chock full of delicious veggies. While I made it with eggplant and squash, I think it might also take well to additions or substitutions of tomatoes and sweet peppers. A little bit of roasted chile [...]

Hearty Pasta & Vegetables

If you have pasta in your pantry and one or two vegetables lurking in your crisper, there’s no reason not to make a filling and healthy dinner. This is one of my ‘go-to’ recipes when I’m short on time, energy or creativity. Using this basic blueprint, you can pretty much make any pasta dish you [...]

Roasted Vegetable Salsa

When it’s wintertime and you’re missing fresh salsa, this can be a more-than-acceptable substitute. The seasonings I give here provide a Mediterranean flavor, and I like to serve this salsa as part of a mezze with pita chips. If you want a more Latin-style salsa, use hotter chilies and substitute seasonings like lime juice, vegetable [...]