Today's simple vegetable recipe: Chunks of carrots roasted with fresh mushrooms. Weight Watchers friendly! Low carb! Not just vegan, " Vegan Done Real ". ~recipe & photo updated 2008 & 2014~ ~ more recently updated recipes ~ ORIGINAL POST 2006: Day after day, other food blogs inspire! Today it was Kalyn's Kitchen's great-looking roasted carrots and mushrooms . They were GREAT! Even my dad, who's so-so about carrots, admits they were "okay". For the record, that would be a compliment – he ate every single bite! I followed Kalyn's recipe except that I used: a whole pound of real carrots! the kind you peel and cut into chunks. The pre-peeled carrots marketed as 'baby carrots' aren't baby carrots at all, just huge humongous carrots formed into carrot-bullet shapes. They're fine for eating raw but have little flavor when cooked. Just 1 tablespoon oil. In the last year, I've learned that the trick for using LESS OI

Today's hearty vegetable recipe: A concept recipe, happy with addition and subtractions based on what's on hand and what's in season. Weight Watchers Friendly. Easily made vegetarian or Not just vegan, " Vegan Done Real ". ~recipe & photo updated 2014~ ~ more recently updated recipes ~ Original 2006: I fell in love with the name, Gypsy Pot. I swooned over the everyday ingredients in uncommon combination. In short order, I moved to the kitchen to begin the peeling and chopping for a somehow completely familiar and yet altogether new soup that is a Gypsy Pot. It's earthy peasant food and something sublimely sophisticated both at once. The inspiration comes from The Traveler's Lunchbox , whose own inspiration comes from Anya von Bremzen's The New Spanish Table . NEXT TIME This isn't a soup to start when you're in a rush, instead one to savor the experience of cutting and chopping and cooking. It takes 20 minutes alone to peel a &^%&a

This delicious beet salad comes with lessons. Roasting beets is efficient! Up front, invest five minutes in prep, then unattended time in the oven. Once the beets're roasted, it's one quick salad after another. (The last one was only just on Day 347 . ) Fragrance doesn't roast in (as attempted Day 346 ). But it's easy to add later. This salad is scented with orange but lemon and lime would be good too. Well-organized bookmarks take some discipline. But when you've got cooked beets and 30 minutes til supper's expected, no worries if your bookmarks have a folder for "beets", better yet, one for "beets" and another for "cooked beets". This beet recipe comes from The Flying Apple, posted way back in October. It's easy, it's good. Thank you, Angelika, for making supper's vegetable such a breeze! Start your bookmarking now! Bookmark or print this recipe only File it in Vegetables / Beets Cooked. FROM THE AR

<< Today's simple zucchini salad recipe: A pretty combination of sunny-yellow yellow squash and summer-green zucchini, chopped and tossed in a lemony vinaigrette. Low carb. Weight Watchers 1 or 2 points. Not just vegan, " Vegan Done Real ". >> ~recipe & photo updated & reposted 2012~ ~ more recently updated recipes ~ 2006 Original Post: If the weather's not yet spring-ish, the food can be! Easily slipping the knife through the soft flesh of the green zucchini and yellow squash, I realized how remarkably different, how spectacularly simple, how wonderfully light and bright, this quick chopped salad seems — now — compared to the root vegetables that felt so perfect just a couple of weeks ago but now seem unappealingly heavy and earthy. Wool sweaters may be still in order. But not for long! We'll doff them — like parsnips and turnips — soon enough!

An easy beet salad, paired with toasted walnuts and dressed with a vinaigrette that starts with jam and brings out the natural sweetness of the beets. ~recipe & photo updated 2010~ 2010: This beet salad recipe was first published in 2006 on Day 347 for a food blogger event featuring 30-minutes meals. I used a Rachael Ray menu. It took 35 minutes to make the menu but I was astounded at the cost and the calories. The meal was expensive ($6.50 a person) and packed with calories (an enormous 1030 calories and 24 Weight Watchers points). (For anyone interested in all the detail, I've left it verbatim at the bottom of this page.) Even Rachael Ray's beet salad was loaded with calories. But MY version of the beet salad is light and lovely, entirely delicious and worth making. I like to make this as a main dish salad. BEET & WALNUT SALAD Hands-on time: 15 minutes Time to table: 15 minutes Serves 8 as side salads, 4 as main dish salads TOSS IN A SALAD BOWL 1/2 cup chopp

Happy Birthday to my Dad, who turns x0 next week! No, x0 is no typo. And x0 is an apt age, yes? for a much-loved father of a daughter perennially 29?! Dad's "birthday pie in the sky" is this wonderful blueberry galette, a quick dessert all dressed up in a fancy name -- and this week's Kitchen Parade column . (c) Copyright 2006 Kitchen Parade

Roasted beets are delicious -- though nothing novel enough for a food blog in its twelfth month dedicated to vegetables in new ways every single day. (In fact, roasted/baked beets made their first appearance way back on Day 24 . And roasting these beets, well, it's the first time to notice how A Veggie Venture is coming full circle, that we're about to move back into spring-ish vegetables, leaving the winter's roots and purees behind. I'm happy to welcome back favorites like beets and asparagus but it feels a little sad, too, an ending of sorts.) But fragrant roasted beets, now that caught my attention! (Yours too? You're reading, yes?!) But too-too-bad, the fragrance didn't permeate the beets. It didn't even "smell up" the kitchen, which would have been good enough on a wintry day. I tried star anise, fennel and lavender with three large (nearly one pound each) beets. (The star anise and fennel were suggested from the inspiring recipe from Th