Today's vegetable recipe: A simple roasted beet salad with fruit and a few herbs. No dressing required! Weight Watchers 2 PointsPlus. Vegetarian. Primal. Gluten-Free. Your veggie evangelist is a Twitter dropout – back in 2010, I gave up Twitter for Lent and never went back. But I l-o-v-e the concept of recipes in 140 or characters or less, that’s the limit of the message length of a “tweet”. So here’s your recipe, which one would grab your attention?! Reci-tweet #1: Roasted Beet Salad with Fresh Mango, Blueberries & Blue Cheese with a few fronds of fresh herbs. Serve chilled or at room temp. [127 characters] Reci-tweet #2: My favorite salad of the summer. Cubes of earthy beets and wet mango with blueberries that go “pop” and creamy blue cheese. [123 characters] Reci-tweet #3: Summer in a bowl, a contrast in color, texture, taste. Just beets, mango, blueberries and blue cheese. [102 characters] Got it? Now go make it.

Today's new "master" vegetable recipe, the latest in a series: A formula for a "skinny" quiche loaded with ribbons of healthy greens (pictured, Swiss chard) and fresh summer vegetables, whatever's on hand (pictured, zucchini, tomatillo, green peppers and cherry tomatoes). Vegetarian, low carb and Weight Watchers just 4 PointsPlus. Wow. Last week we feared this year's garden might be a bust: something is eating the okra, boo hiss; the plants are producing lots of leaves but not much edible. But Sunday morning, the morning's harvest was worthy of a special vegetable quiche, sweet little tomatillos and bell peppers, a couple of miniature zucchini (plus one giant yellow-skinned zucchini!), even a few cherry tomatoes. The vegetables needed cooking beforehand. I might have sautéed each one individually but decided instead to "flash cook" (often called "blanching") the greens and fresh vegetables in a minimum of water, just enough to

Anyone else procrastinating about the demise of Google Reader? Here's what to do. If you use Google Reader to follow A Veggie Venture and/or Kitchen Parade and all your other favorite blogs, you already know that as of July 1, Google is pitching Google Reader into the compost pile. And if you’re like me, you’ve been procrastinating finding a replacement, hoping against hope that Google would change its mind. Nope … So here’s what to do. Me, I’m doing all three. STICK WITH AN RSS READER Go to either Feedly or Bloglovin quick-quick -- that means, today . Either free service will import your blog RSS subscriptions from Google Reader with a couple of clicks, this will preserve your existing subscriptions, otherwise, g'bye, gone forever. I’m kinda keen on Feedly, myself. SWITCH TO EMAIL For the blogs we care about the most, email subscriptions are best. Click here to subscribe to A Veggie Venture , click here to subscribe to Kitchen Parade . If you already receive emai

Today's easy kale recipe: For sweet little mini pizzas, just "doctor" a jar of a favorite spaghetti sauce with cooked kale, then top as you like. Super easy and surprisingly tasty. For anyone who wants to sneak healthy leafy greens into the family diet, mini pizzas are a great place to start. The sauce itself has virtually no calories at all and zero Weight Watchers points and is not just vegan, " Vegan Done Real ". And a Mini Kale Pizza? Under a hundred calories! For cookbooks that really "teach" and "challenge", my favorites tackle a single subject and explore it deep and broad. So it goes with KALE: The Complete Guide to the World's Most Powerful Superfood by Stephanie Pedersen. (DISCLOSURE KALE's publisher provided a complimentary copy but the thoughts, as always, are my own.) Stephanie's personal story is compelling. She was pregnant on 9/11 and was exposed to a "massive amount of toxins" which were passed ont

Today's vegan main dish or side dish, cooked either in a slow cooker or on the stovetop, an almost-creamy mix of chopped sweet potatoes and red lentils, spiked for a touch of heat with green curry paste. Just before serving, stir in roasted red peppers and fresh spinach. Just gorgeous, really. Low carb. Weight Watchers 3.5 or 5 points. A great choice for Meatless Monday, any meal of the day. Not just vegan but " Vegan Done Real ". This recipe is brought to you against all odds and prevailing winds. A "Pinterest Cook" No More I had such great confidence when the kitchen remodeling started. "I'll cook every day," I promised myself. Right. Within days, I turned into a "Pinterest cook" - that's someone who "cooks" by pinning one recipe after another without ever actually lighting the stove let alone chopping an onion. Then the other night, I couldn't sleep, my brain-on-busy overwhelmed by pesky kitchen details like, Wi

Today's new vegetable salad recipe: Mark Bittman's chopped salad recipe, the one from last week's New York Times, the kind of salad you can make every few days, adding and subtracting vegetables as you see fit. Healthy. Low carb. Low points. Not just vegan, " Vegan Done Real ". Michael Pollan's new book Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation is on my read-soon wishlist. It rethinks our adventures in the kitchen, following four elemental ways of cooking. FIRE That's captured fire like a gas or electric stove or the open flame of wood fire. WATER That's boiling and braising. AIR That's baking. (Have you ever thought of an oven as just a small furnace? Me either.) It's also air-drying thin-thin layers of meat, say, as the Swiss and other Europeans do. EARTH That's the action of fermentation, whether cooking up some homebrew or making cheese. Peeling and chopping, slicing and dicing, these are the constants of a vegetable lov

Today's fun recipe for spring, a savory quick bread studded with artichoke hearts, olives and cubes of asiago cheese. Who else regularly falls down an internet rabbit hole? What, who me ? who you ? It starts so innocently, doesn't it? Just a mindless click of a finger, following a link or a Pin or a Facebook share, never realizing that ten minutes later, we'll look up, wondering, Now, where was I ? Acck. Our screen-filled lives make it so easy to get lost, to focus intently on something of momentarily great but altogether fleeting import. And then again, the rabbit hole can lead to cheese bread! A savory cheese bread, to be exact, plump with artichoke and if you like, olives too. Last week, I asked if favorite recipes should be added to my small collection of artichoke recipes . E-mail subscriber Louise Black wrote back right away, "We have visited Castorville, California (the Artichoke Capital) many times and eaten at the Giant Artichoke Restaurant there. They se