Oh friends, we are so going back to meal prep basics here, just some quinoa, some salt, some water, one pot and one stove. Follow this simple technique – just rinse, simmer, rest and fluff – for full, light-textured quinoa every time. Quinoa = A Year-Round Kitchen Staple. Great for Meal Prep. Low Fat. Weight Watchers Friendly & Freestyle Friendly, quinoa is one of Weight Watchers "free" foods. Not just vegan, Vegan Done Real . Naturally Gluten Free. I remember searching high and low for quinoa for the first time twelve years ago – my cousin Lynda had sent the recipe for Acorn Squash with Quinoa & Cherries . I'd heard of quinoa but it was a new-ish thing then and none of the big grocery stores carried it. I finally found a dusty container in what we then called a "natural" food store. (Hmm, have natural food stores gone by the wayside? Who's been in one lately?) Back then I even mispronounced quinoa "KWIN-oh-ah" or "kwin-OH-ah&qu

It's no puppy cam or funny cat video but we interrupt the usual vegetable recipe programming to get up close and intimate with ... asparagus berries. Not to eat, just to look at! and learn about! Aren't the fronds and berries just so delicate and pretty? WHAT ARE ASPARAGUS BERRIES? Asparagus "berries" appear in the fall on the fronds of female asparagus plants. Female plants??? Yes, there really are separate male and female asparagus plants, that makes asparagus one of numerous "dioecious" plants. [Dioecious is pronounced die-EE-shus, it means "two houses" in Greek.] Another dioecious vegetable is spinach; other dioescious plants include cannabis, date, mulberry, ginko, persimmons and currant. WHEN DO ASPARAGUS BERRIES APPEAR? Asparagus plants produce feathery fronds near the end of the growing and harvest season. Then in late summer and early fall, green pea-sized berries begin to appear on the fronds. As autumn progresses, the berries turn br

Crunchy clumps of oats and pumpkin seeds, more akin to a nut brittle than a breakfast-y granola. Honey-sweetened ... you can actually taste the honey that sweetens and binds the clumps! Seasonal, Absolutely Perfect for Fall. Great for Meal Prep. Hello, October ... in some circles also known as Pumpkin Month, that precipitous head-first dive into the internet's obsession with all things pumpkin. But it's fun, yes?! (And heaven knows, we can certainly use an apolitical distraction.) I hardly know where to start, except, well, with my already burgeoning collection of pumpkin recipes , where a surprising number fall into the "savory" category. That said, it's the everyday pumpkin pancakes and muffins and donuts and quick bread which garnered the biggest smiles when I took a table poll last week. Go figure. And because there are oats in Sweet Pumpkin Seeds Crumbles, you might even call this a granola. But I already have a recipe for Pumpkin Granola that

Oh people, what a salad! Better news still, it's made with common pantry ingredients, you may well have all of them in your fridge right this very second. It's just familiar lentils, the meaty ones that have such a great chew, paired with still-crunchy sautéed vegetables and barely cooked spinach and laced with pockets of melting goat cheese. Warm Lentil Salad is way more than the sum of its parts! Year-Round Kitchen Staple. Great for Meal Prep. Low Fat. High Protein. Naturally Gluten Free. Weight Watchers Friendly & Freestyle Friendly. Vegetarian. All this and dee-lish! Way way wayyyyyyyy back in 2007, I shared an earlier version of this wonderful Warm Lentil Salad. It was A Veggie Venture's second anniversary – and April Fool's Day, hence the "apparent" recipe, Ooey Gooey Caramel Chocolate Marshmallow Triple Cream Ricotta & Marcarpone Cheesecake in a Brioche Puff Pastry Baklava Crust with a Double Layer of Lemon Curd and Topped with Candied Raspb

Cauliflower Meal Prep! Turn a head of cauliflower into a stand-in for rice for Taco Tuesday and so much more. We love this dish, so healthy, so flavorful. Low Carb. Weight Watchers Freestyle Friendly. Not just vegan, Vegan Done Real . Naturally Gluten Free. Whole30 Friendly. LET IT BE SAID Mexican is a totally food-prep friendly cuisine! When we did a month-long deep dive into Mexican cooking last spring, what fun – and the easiest cooking I've ever done in my entire life. (Want to know more about that project? See Deep Mexico: Ingredient-Driven Mexican Meal Prep . ) A big reason is that I'd do some meal prep every day. After that, dinner (and lunch and especially breakfast) kind of made themselves. One of our favorites then (and still, four months later) was Mexican Cauliflower "Rice" – not rice at all, of course, but one of cauliflower's many low-carb chameleon acts. Cauliflower doesn't just masquerade as rice but also as potatoes, even chickpeas. The

One of my very favorite summer stews, vegan and delicious and a great way to use a collection of vegetables from a CSA or the farmers market when the produce season is at its peak. Seasonal. Low Carb. High Protein. Weight Watchers Friendly & Freestyle Friendly. Not just vegan, Vegan Done Real . Naturally Gluten Free. Whole30 Friendly. Paleo. ~updated for a little late-summer weekend cooking inspiration~ ~ more recently updated recipes ~ By design, most vegetable recipes here on A Veggie Venture are simple and thus nearly always feature a single vegetable at a time. But there are times – now! – when the market's vegetables are so plentiful, eyes exceed appetite and soon it's almost Saturday again and the vegetable bin is still overflowing from last week's purchases. This Summer Vegetable Curry is an Indian-spiced riff on 2005's Summer Vegetable Stew . Like many vegetable stews, it's perfect way to use up a lot of vegetables all at onc

Never know what to do with chickpeas aka garbanzo beans? (Except making homemade hummus. You do make hummus, right?) Or on the other hand, maybe you're always looking for brand-new ways to cook with chickpeas? Find new inspiration right here in this collection of Chickpea Recipes / Garbanzo Bean Recipes from A Veggie Venture and Kitchen Parade, my food column. Many Weight Watchers friendly, vegan and gluten-free recipes from simple for every day to special for occasions. IN A RUSH? Prefer Another Vegetable? Skip Straight to the Chickpea Recipes or Switch to the A-Z of Vegetables . Chickpeas 101: THE BASICS Pronounced [chik-pee]. Other Names for Chickpeas. Also called Chick Peas and Garbanzo Beans. Also known as Gram or Bengal Gram and some times as Egyptian Peas. Also called Ceci, Cece or Channa or Chana or Kabuli Chana. What Are Chickpeas? Chickpeas are legumes – legumes, of course, being plants in the bean family – and thus cousins to soy beans, mung beans, lima beans