Today's vegetable recipe: My aunt's recipe for green peppers stuffed with a mixture of ground meat, fresh corn and rice or another starch such as quinoa, then topped with a tomato-y sauce and melt-y cheese. Low carb. Weight Watchers 2 to 4 points, depending on size. My 3x5 recipe box is gill-packed with 'retro' recipes that date to the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Thing is, the recipes weren't 'retro' then, not back when I copied ingredients and cooking instructions onto neat 3x5 index cards. They were just the recipes that my mother, my aunts and my older cousins were cooking. They were just recipes from good cooks feeding their families. They were just my family's best recipes, the family favorites, the ones we all loved. So it felt funny to make my dear Auntie Gloria's Stuffed Peppers again for the first time in many years. Today's 'whole food' cook in me was tempted to substitute the can of tomato soup her recipe calls for with, say,

Another hit recipe from our favorite cookbook this summer, Seven Fires by fascinating Argentinian chef Francis Mallmann. Appearance-wise, it's dramatic; preparation-wise, it's ever so simple. It's just sliced rounds of baked (and "burned"!) eggplant, tomato and summer squash, topped with a lemony spinach if you like. Works as well for one or two as for a crowd. Low Carb. Gluten Free. Paleo. Weight Watchers friendly. Whole30. Not just vegan, " Vegan Done Real ". Who remembers the 2007 movie Ratatouille ? I watched it again recently on a rare wet and chilly summer night, snuggling into the story as much as a warm blanket. It's a classic, just like the classic French dish called "ratatouille" which the movie brought into the mainstream. (And taught a whole generation, perhaps two, how to pronounce the word. Can you say rat-uh-TOO-ee?) It's a sweet pleasure, made for laughing out loud during a movie for two or in a theater with a crowd.

Today's unusual salad recipe: Small pieces of raw eggplant tossed with celery, olives and capers. Surprisingly pleasant! Vegan. Low carb. Weight Watchers 1 point. So. Can we eat raw eggplant? Yes! Do we want to eat raw eggplant? Yes again. The inspiration for this simple summer salad came from a few slices of eggplant leftover from another recipe, just hanging out there on the counter whispering, "Try us, try us, we'll taste great, maybe." They'd been dipped in nothing more than olive oil seasoned with salt and pepper. How would the raw eggplant taste? Good! The eggplant's white flesh is pleasantly spongy (definitely NOT mushy) and the skin provides great texture as well as color contrast. I do think that texture's especially important to consider when adding other ingredients, you don't want the whole salad to be soft, some crispness is important. I also suspect that the more-tender Asian eggplant is the appropriate choice here, versus the b