The best vegetable recipes of 2010, just one per month, all in one handy spot for easy reference.
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Spring Garden Vegetable Soup with Asparagus, Artichokes, Peas & Spinach ♥ Recipe
Today's spring soup recipe: A bowlful of our favorite spring vegetables, especially artichokes and asparagus.
The seductress that is Spring is toying with us here in St. Louis. For a few days, she taunted us with warm – hot, even – days, luring us into the impression that 'Spring is really here!" For years, I've tracked the very day in my estimation when spring 'really' arrived and 2011 was looking record early by some days.
But no. The real spring has yet to arrive. As I write, there is new snow on the ground and tomorrow's outdoor birthday party is being moved inside.
Still, spring WILL come and it helps to bridge the seasons with what I think of as 'bridge foods' – in this case, a big potful of soup that simmered on the stove but not the heavy stews and meaty soups of winter but a potful of spring vegetables. I envisioned an all-green soup – thus the celery, asparagus, artichokes, peas and spinach – but then thought better of myself and chopped in some carrot for color. With a little help, patience will pay off and spring will make herself known, this time for real.
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How to Eat More Vegetables: Tip #7
We all know we should eat more vegetables. But how, how do we do that, really? What real-life tips and ideas work? How can we build our lives around the healthiest of all foods, vegetables? Every Saturday, the 'veggie evangelist' shares practical tips and ideas from the experience of herself, her readers and other bloggers.
And now for this week's tip:
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Sushi Salad ♥ Recipe
Turning sushi inside out and upside down, all the familiar sushi ingredients, turned into a salad. A sushi salad, really? Who's ever heard of a sushi salad?!! But it's another concept recipe – have fun with this one!
Tried and true is good and all. But just for fun, isn't it a kick to turn our favorite foods upside down? That's the premise of Sushi Salad, just a few familiar sushi ingredients but in salad form, not small bites. And to my taste, it really does taste like sushi! (Please know, I'm no expert. I have "real sushi" every so often but mostly, it's the packages from the supermarket ..)
This Sushi Salad recipe calls for quinoa instead of rice and skips the nori (though there's no reason to not use some) – this was really fun, it's definitely a keeper, taste-wise, but also for ease of preparation and for flexibility.
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How to Eat More Vegetables: Tip #6
We all know we should eat more vegetables. But how, how do we do that, really? What real-life tips and ideas work? How can we build our lives around the healthiest of all foods, vegetables? Every Saturday, the 'veggie evangelist' shares practical tips and ideas from her own experience, her readers and other bloggers.
FIRST, MORE ABOUT SMOOTHIES Last week's tips came from two readers who are serious about their smoothies. In an e-mail exchange afterward, Kathleen H from New Mexico explained why smoothies are so very important to her health. I've updated the post, How to Eat More Vegetables Tip #5.
AND NOW For this week's tip:
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Baked Sweet Potatoes ♥ Recipe & Temperature
Back to Basics: How to roast or bake sweet potatoes in the oven. It's as easy as easy can be: just rub the sweet potatoes with a little oil and bake. (We're baking whole sweet potatoes here, no need for any knife work at all!) This is a great way to cook a lot of sweet potatoes at once, also my favorite way to cook just a couple of sweet potatoes for dinner or for later when the oven is already on. Not just vegan, "Vegan Done Real".
The other day, I needed to cook a pile of sweet potatoes for a recipe calling for cooked sweet potatoes. (The recipe's not ready for posting but shows much promise!) My choices were:
Steaming or boiling – but I thought the sweet potatoes would be too wet. Cooking the sweet potatoes in the microwave – it's a good technique for one or two sweet potatoes, not so much for a bunch. Roasting chopped sweet potatoes wouldn't work either, I didn't want the crispy caramelized edges that develop. So instead, I baked a trayful of whole sweet potatoes, then stripped off the skins to yield beautiful cooked sweet potatoes. Baked Sweet Potatoes were the perfect solution!
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How to Eat More Vegetables: Tip #5
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| We sure love our smoothies! |
We all know we should eat more vegetables. But how, how do we do that, really? What real-life tips and ideas work? How can we build our lives around the healthiest of all foods, vegetables? Every Saturday, the 'veggie evangelist' shares practical tips and ideas from her own experience, her readers and other bloggers.
And now for this week's tip, more submissions from readers, this time Kathleen H. from Gallup, NM and Shawna M. Thanks, guys! You so perfectly expressed our love for smoothies!
UPDATE: After I posted these tips, Kathleen explained further exactly why smoothies are so important to her health. She wrote, "I really think that veggie smoothies have played a major role in my cancer survival. I ordered the Vita-Mix two days after my first lung cancer diagnosis in March of 1999. I've used it at almost every meal I've eaten at home since then -- fruit, seeds, whey protein powder for breakfast and veggies at lunch and dinner." WOW. Here's to more healthy smoothies -- and to continued good health for Kathleen and all of us. (A Vita-Mix is a high-performance blender. It's not cheap but people rave about them.]
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Hot & Sour Chickpeas ♥
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| Vegan Done REAL, it's this easy. |
Quick and Easy and Vegan Too: An easy vegan main dish, no processed food required, just the kind of recipe that inspired Vegan Done Real. Weight Watchers, 3 or 5 points.
Vegan Done Real
Some times you have to act. What follows is the reason I've conceived Vegan Done Real, a collection of 52 whole-food vegan recipes from myself and nine other vegan and omnivore bloggers. I hope you'll share it with your friends, real life and Facebook, because we just cannot afford to let the commercial food product companies co-opt the concept of a plant-based diet all in the guise of 'healthy'. As my friend Karen, one of the contributors, wrote on Twitter: "Oprah went processed vegan; these bloggers are keeping it real: 52 recipes." [Note to Vegetarians]
The Background
I'm a glass half full kind of gal. When something looks off, looks plain wrong, I might feel frustrated or even angry for a moment, but then, well, I shrug it off, I let it go. I choose to look at the situation with kindness and generosity, to accept that I might not share, let alone understand, someone else's motivations.
But it's been more than a month now and I'm still steamed at the lost opportunity when Oprah and her staff ate a vegan diet for an entire week. (Wow, quite a commitment, eh? A whole week. But okay, thinking with kindness and generosity. One meal counts. A week is a big deal.) So that was good. And of course, Oprah being Oprah, there was a show devoted to the experience. Michael Pollan was on.
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How to Eat More Vegetables: Tip #4
We all know we should eat more vegetables. But how, how do we do that, really? What real-life tips and ideas work? How can we build our lives around the healthiest of all foods, vegetables? Every Saturday (oops, unless she's caught up in cooking for a Mardi Gras party, in which case, on Monday), the 'veggie evangelist' shares practical tips and ideas from her own experience, her readers and other bloggers.
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Polish Dill Pickle Soup ♥ Plus Some Fun News!
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| Polish Dill Pickle Soup: It'll grab you! |
Today's soup recipe: A potato soup like you've never imagined, completely potato-y but also pickle-y, dill pickle-y to be exact. The creamy-sharp combination takes you by surprise. "Oh that's good," you just might say. We did.
So yes, today there's a fun recipe but first, the reason why it's especially fun: it's featured in the weekly column that I'm writing for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the big local newspaper here in St. Louis. (Pinch me, yes, I'm really writing that!!! It's really true!)
The column is called 'Special Request' and is the Post's popular restaurant recipe request column. On Wednesdays, it appears in print in the paper's food section and online at stltoday.com. Each week, a new restaurant and a new recipe is featured. (Pinch me again. Really. DO.)
What does a proud home cook know about restaurant recipes? Well so far, the recipes that Post readers are requesting are far more humble than haute. The recipes from the first two columns are actually "very Alanna".
Today I'm sharing the oh-so-surprising recipe for Polish Dill Pickle Soup from The Fountain on Locust, a funky little restaurant here in St. Louis. We did the tasting (yes, they call this 'work') on a snowy-icy January night and the hot soup took us completely by surprise -- it's a potato soup, sure, but there's this definite and distinctive dill pickle flavor. Aiii, it's something special!
And last week on Kitchen Parade, I shared the recipe for this lovely three-ingredient raspberry dessert that I call Sugar-Free Raspberry Bliss from the Saint Louis Club. How pretty is THAT, eh?!!
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