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Showing posts from August, 2010

Twelve Favorite Tomato Recipes ♥ Never Take a Good Tomato for Granted!

My twelve favorite tomato recipes, a perfect dozen selected especially for the last few weeks of the very best summer tomatoes. Never take a good tomato for granted. That's the lesson folks Out East learned in 2009 when the late tomato blight struck tomatoes across the eastern half of the U.S., dooming the entire crop. I felt their pain, remembering the year when four days of a late-spring hard freeze nipped the blossoms on peach and apple trees. That year? No peaches, no apples, for Missouri and Illinois. But no tomatoes? Un.Thinkable. I vowed to never take good tomatoes for granted. So for a couple of months, it’s red heaven on a plate, tomatoes morning, noon and night. Sliced and salted. Sliced and sugared. Sliced and slivered with basil and slippery with mozzarella. Then grilled, broiled, roasted, sandwiched and then finally, souped. One night I even drizzled a little tomato syrup over ice cream! Don't let the tomato season pass without reveling in the glory that is t...

Israeli Couscous Salad with Yellow Squash & Sun-Dried Tomatoes ♥

Today's latest summer salad recipe: Take sexy Israeli couscous and match it up with pretty yellow squash. What do you get? Summer in a bowl. Not just vegan, " Vegan Done Real ". Aiii, culinary nomenclature can be so confusing. First there's couscous , which we tend to think of as a natural whole grain and cook and serve like a grain, but is really just another form of dried pasta. But did anyone else love the word 'couscous' as a kid? I did. "Koos-koos, koos-koos, koos-koos" I'd try to say three times, failing except for the real point, which was to laugh out loud, that was a success. And then there's Israeli couscous . It's still another form of pasta, toasted instead of dried, and shaped in perfect tiny pearls somehow way sexier than other itty-bitty pastas and their cousin, regular couscous. But Israeli couscous is as much a 'food product' as couscous, it's not a natural whole grain either, albeit one born of necessit...

No-Guilt Grilled Corn with Chipotle-Lime Browned Butter ♥

Today's easy summer recipe for the grill: Grill sweet corn with the husks off to reveal corn's natural sweetness, then brush with just a touch of a bright and spicy butter. What a summer treat! Sweet corn is one of the summer's most-anticipated vegetables, so worth waiting for, so worth savoring each and every kernel. But calorie-wise, corn gets a bad rap, one it doesn't deserve. Why? FIRST An ear of corn has built-in portion control: one ear of corn yields about a half cup of corn kernels. Even for Weight Watchers, that's a small enough portion that it counts as, get this, 1 point (Old Points) or 2 points (PointsPlus). NUTRITION ESTIMATE for CORN ONLY Per Ear of Corn, assumes 1/2 cup kernels : 66 Calories; .84g Tot Fat; .14g Sat Fat; 0mg Cholesterol; 11mg Sodium; 14.65g Carb; 2.08g Fiber; 2.48g Sugar; 2.48g Protein. WEIGHT WATCHERS Old Points 1, PointsPlus 2 (for the record, for Old Points, the exact points are .97, not 1.47 or something approaching 2 point...