Ever had trouble cooking brown rice? Me too. Before, too often the rice turned out gummy and dusty and pasty. No more! Here I've learned a second favorite way to cook healthy brown rice, this time right in a saucepan, right on the stove. There are four tricks. But this technique is definitely a keeper. Real Food, Fresh & Practical. Year-Round Healthy Food Staple. Budget Friendly. Great for Meal Prep. Low Fat. Weight Watchers Friendly, Especially in the Purple Plan. Not just vegan, Vegan Done Real . Naturally Gluten Free.

Today's vegetable recipe: a quick blender soup recipe, just four ingredients and served cold. Low carb. Vegan. Lower calorie than a typical avocado soup. Sigh. Do your eyes go dreamy too at the thought of avocados? There's simply no matching their silkiness, their smoothness. Pillow makers? How about avocado, not the color, but the cool slipperiness. Blending cool cucumber with smooth avocado, it was a recent inspiration. The cucumber adds liquid but flavor too, unlike plain water (as most avocado soup recipes specify) or broth (which strikes me as too heavy for summer). Better still, the cucumber adds volume but few calories, keeping the avocado soup in reasonable territory, diet-wise but still tasting like an indulgence. This soup is served cold, its own cool pillow against summer's heat. I like to serve it in small bowls with small spoons, all to encourage savoring every single silky spoonful. So much for that idea -- when I made this last, my favorite taste tester, who

Today's vegetable 'recipe' - wait no, let's call it vegetable 'serving inspiration': A platter of perfect summer tomatoes, topped with olives and crumbled feta. Perfect for one or two or a crowd. My friend Mary brought a big plate of tomatoes to supper on Friday. I loved her tomato serving idea so much, I re-created it on Saturday! So this isn't so much a 'recipe' as a serving suggestion, for it really did work beautifully and flew together in minutes. Mary made a homemade vinaigrette (carrying it in a handy-dandy salad dressing mixer ) to drizzle over the tomatoes just before serving but I went a step simpler still by purchasing an olive-feta mix from the olive bar at the grocery store (where it's quick to pick up just a few olives for a salad or whatever), already moistened with a little olive oil and it was quite delicious already. Since ours was a small group on Friday, Mary also built 'stacks' of cucumber and thick beefsteak tomato,

Today's vegetable recipe comes from a reader: Familiar tomatoes and familiar peppers combined in a salad that somehow manages to turn out entirely different. Low carb. Weight Watchers 2 points. Sold! It took about 10 seconds to buy into this recipe, sent by a reader just last week. Here's what Laurie B. wrote about her salad recipe that combines roasted peppers (bell peppers and hot chilis both) and roasted tomatoes: "It hits all my flavor sensors - heat, salt and garlic, well, tomatoes, peppers and onions. Oh wait, that's the recipe, isn't it?!" She went on. "It's easy to throw together and is so much more than its parts. I got the recipe from a neighbor (she said it was her mother's recipe) when it was served at their son's graduation party. I've never had anything like it and I'll bet I've made it a dozen times since then. We were taking a big bowl of it to a party and I asked my husband to taste a bit; he ate almost half of it

Today's quick cucumber salad recipe, from no other than Julia Child: How to soak large, seedy cucumbers so they'll be not just edible but tasty! Low carb. Not just vegan, " Vegan Done Real ". Weight Watchers 1 point! ~recipe republished 2012~ to honor the 100th anniversary of the birth of Julia Child, a world-wide celebration happening online, in restaurants and in homes ~ more recently updated recipes ~ Summer 2009: Seems we can't turn around without stumbling over another story of Julie & Julia, the blog-turned-book-turned-movie that opens nationwide on August 7. Just yesterday, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch climbed aboard the Julie & Julia wagon with a story about four St. Louis food bloggers whose blogs are also 'projects', including yes, A Veggie Venture! (Update, sorry, the Post-Dispatch has removed the online story but here's more about the bloggers in the story .) Summer 2009: Seems I can't turn around without stumbling over

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.