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Fattoush (Traditional Middle Eastern Salad) ♥ Recipe

It takes a lot of words to describe what is in fact a super-simple traditional Lebanese / Syrian / Middle Eastern salad. So instead, just learn this one word and repeat after me: Fattoush. Fattoush. Fattoush. (That's fuh-toosh, fuh-toosh, fuh-toosh.) Now? Go make one. You really don't want to miss this classic summer tomato salad while this year's tomatoes are so perfect! Not just vegan, Vegan Done Real . ~recipe updated, first published way back in 2011~ ~ more recently updated recipes ~ Dear St. Louis Post-Dispatch, A certain St. Louis food blogger is wild for the Fattoush Salad at Ranoush, the Syrian restaurants in University City and now in Kirkwood. Would you please see if the owners would share the recipe? Please, pretty please? That Certain Food Blogger Since February, I've been writing a weekly column for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch called "Special Request" – the one where St. Louisans write in to ask for recipes for their favorite dishes from

Tomato Bisque ♥ Recipe

Today's rich tomato soup, a creamy tomato bisque that starts off with the famous Tomato-Onion Sauce from the now-deceased Italian cook Marcella Hazan who introduced Italian cuisine to the U.S. and Britain in the way that Julia Child introduced French cuisine. I make Hazan's Tomato-Onion Sauce with fresh tomatoes instead of the usual canned tomatoes. It's stunning! Aren't tomatoes summer vegetables? (Yeah-yeah-yeah, tomatoes are really fruit not vegetables. But go with me, okay?) Last year, we harvested our first tomato in late June – and then not one more until late August! Most years here in Missouri and much of the Midwest, our best tomatoes are harvested in September and in good years, even well into October. That means that when the food blog world is humming Christmas carols obsessing over fall apples and all-things-pumpkin, our garden is still spitting out beautiful tomatoes. And yes, such bounty can be overwhelming. By mid September, we've had our fill

Fresh Three-Bean Salad ♥ Recipe

The traditional three-bean salad – or hey! a wonderful two-bean salad when yellow beans are nowhere to be found as in my recent photo update! The recipe comes from Cook's Illustrated, they did a "recipe makeover" with fresh green beans instead of canned green beans. Me? I took Cook's Illustrated's recipe and did an even bigger makeover, making it lighter with way-way less oil and way-way less sugar. The results? Fabulous. Low Carb. Weight Watchers Friendly. Not just vegan, Vegan Done Real . Naturally Gluten Free. ~recipe updated, first published way back in 2007~ ~ more recently updated recipes ~ How is it that so many great potluck dishes rely on canned vegetables? Maybe it's because they're dashed together before church or an afternoon gathering? No matter. Making a three-bean salad with fresh beans – when you can, with a mix of yellow and green beans, is especially pretty! – does take longer but the outcome is, well, praise-worthy. In fact, it wo

Turkish Cucumber-Tomato-Olive Chopped Salad with Sumac ♥

Today's gorgeous summer salad: A colorful crunchy mix of fresh-fresh summer vegetables in a lemony dressing spiced with the delightful sourness of sumac plus cumin, smoked paprika and oregano. It makes a great supper salad or better yet, a salad for a Mediterranean or Middle Eastern meze platter. Weight Watchers Friendly, just 1 Freestyle point. Low Cal. Low Carb. Gluten Free. Paleo. Primal. Vegetarian. Not just vegan, " Vegan Done Real ". And naturally, completely delicious. So yeah, call me summer's broken record. Every year about this time I am surprised to experience the same thing: just how easy and fun it is to cook when tonight's tomatoes were picked from the garden this morning, when we've been waiting/watching patiently for just the right moment to pluck an expanding green pepper from the vine, not too big, not too small. Not that there's any cooking to throw together this little gem of a salad, just some quality time with a knife and cutting

Quick Summer Squash & Tomato Sauté ♥

A simple-simple skillet sauté, an answer to the summer vegetables that pile up from the garden-grocery and appear in mounds in the corner-grocery. It's just barely cooked summer squash (for color, both green-skinned zucchini and sunny-colored yellow squash) with a pile of garlic and a little tomato. Low Carb. Very Weight Watchers Friendly. Not just vegan, Vegan Done Real . Naturally Gluten Free. Whole30 Friendly. Holding out on you? Not intentionally! Way back in 2013, I concluded that this quick, summery vegetable sauté was just "too simple" for A Veggie Venture. But I kept making it, one summer after another. And five years later? I t-h-r-i-v-e on simple recipes! Maybe readers do too? Call me a recipe minimalist : a funny description for someone who's been collecting and sharing recipes since she was about 10 years old, an unlikely orientation for someone who's called herself a food writer / food blogger since 2002. But I find myself wanting fewer, not mo

Cauliflower Steaks with Warm Corn & Poblano Salsa ♥

Today's easy summer supper: Thick slices of cauliflower ("steaks" we call them) roasted until golden and topped with a warm salsa of summery vegetables, poblano and corn. Very Weight Watchers Friendly, just 2 Freestyle points. Not just vegan, Vegan Done Real (with a vegan dressing). Naturally Gluten Free. It took me – oh dear, this is embarrassing – seven years to embrace cauliflower steaks. There's photo evidence, way back in 2011. In 2018? It's Cauliflower Steaks over and over again. They're just so, well, thrifty! When I cut up a head of cauliflower for Roasted Cauliflower (A Veggie Venture's very first recipe back in 2005!), the florets shrink so much that the cauliflower doesn't seem to go far. Cauliflower steaks are totally different! They seem meaty and substantial, even though after the steaks are cut, there's still lots of cauliflower left over for something else. You'll definitely be looking for ways to use up the rest of the h

Eloisa’s Jicama & Orange Salad ♥

What a special find, this jicama salad recipe from a reader in Mexico! It's quick to make and easy to keep on hand. Low Carb. Weight Watchers Friendly, Zero Freestyle Points! Not just vegan, Vegan Done Real . Naturally Gluten Free. Whole30 Friendly. And wonderfully refreshing during hot weather! Nothing like seven years of procrastination before taking proper note of a recipe a reader left in the comments in this recipe for Jicama Slaw . "My family in Mexico loves this recipe," Eloisa wrote. "Children love it. We take it on picnics, in lunch boxes, or as a snack in hot weather." But we were a few days into our Deep Mexico: Ingredient-Driven Mexican Meal Prep eating and cooking adventure last month so sure enough, we had not one but two jicamas in the fridge, oranges to boot. Eloisa's Salad Time! That's the thing about focus, one of our big lessons from that month-long deep dive into Mexican (and plenty of Mexican-ish) cooking. Good eats, all month l