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Seasonal Soup & Salad Recipes ♥ January

Seasonal Soup and Salad recipes, ideas perfect for the month of January, all from A Veggie Venture's decade+ collection of 1300+ vegetable recipes. January's recipes are mostly veg(etari)an and call for easy-to-find ingredients. And healthy! It is January after all! Find your January salad (and soup!) inspiration here ... plus a life-changing meal-prep bonus! And hey, Weight Watchers, these winter-ready soups and salads include my WW's rainbow of green, blue and purple points. About January's Recipe Collection Back in 2006 (on Day 280 of that first year that gave A Veggie Venture its very name, when I tried a new vegetable recipe every day for an entire year), I wrote: "I tend to forget about vegetable salads during the winter. My mistake!" So true! And so January's list of salad recipes is shorter than I'd think – and two of the five were posted last year, the other three in the prior twelve years . (Shocking, that!) Are we all eating more winter s

Seasonal Soup & Salad Recipes ♥ December

Seasonal Soup and Salad recipes, ideas perfect for the month of December, all from A Veggie Venture's decade+ collection of 1000+ vegetable recipes. December's recipes are mostly veg(etari)an and call for easy-to-find ingredients. Find your December salad (and soup!) inspiration here ... Let's Give the Gift of Salads! There's a meme flying around Facebook that upends holiday expectations. "Give Presents" turns to "Be Present." "Make Cookies" converts to "Make Memories." My mantra? Give The Gift of Salads , celebrating the season and gifted with abandon. Somehow salads embody the "hygge" of the kitchen in a way that even summer's freshest garden salads cannot. Simple but sumptuous. Bright with winter color. Wondrous with tastes that are too rich except during the holidays, fresh, crisp greens paired with dried fruits and glazed nuts and tiny bits of pungent cheeses. And so welcomed, before and after resplendent

Seasonal Soup & Salad Recipes ♥ November

Seasonal Soup and Salad recipes, ideas perfect for the month of November, all from A Veggie Venture's decade+ collection of vegetable recipes. The recipes are mostly vegan, quick to make (make all but one in under 20 minutes) and perfect for healthy, everyday eating. This is a "loaves and fishes" recipe collection, of sort. Its origin is a newish (twelve months or so) meal prep practice that makes my meal planning, shopping, cooking and even clean-up life so so so much simpler. It's an uncomplicated premise: just keep a soup and a salad in the fridge all the time. ALL.THE.TIME. When stuff life happens, at least there's dinner in minutes. Is it a meal prep routine that might work for you? Maybe. I'm thinking (hoping!) the answer is yes so without further ado, here are my favorite recipes for Soup & Salad meal prep inspiration for November. By happenstance, most are vegan, most take no more than 15 or 20 minutes prep time, and lucky stars, most are W

How to Cook Quinoa ♥ for Meal Prep

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

Vegetables 101 ♥ The Beauty of Asparagus Berries

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

Sweet Pumpkin Seed Crumbles ♥

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

Warm Lentil Salad with Spinach & Goat Cheese ♥

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 saut̩ed 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 Рand 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