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Homemade Vegetable Beef Soup ♥

Today's hearty soup: Homemade Vegetable Beef, all about the vegetables but made with homemade beef stock. Fresh & Seasonal, Packed With Winter Vegetables. Great for Meal Prep. Naturally Gluten Free. Weight Watchers Friendly.

Light Red Cabbage & Carrot Slaw ♥ for Late-Winter Color

Today's easy coleslaw: A quick mix of grated carrot and red cabbage tossed with a super-light dressing. This colorful slaw makes a great side salad but is also wonderful tucked into a taco or sandwich. Low Carb. Low Fat. Weight Watchers Friendly & Freestyle Friendly. Vegetarian Not just vegan, Vegan Done Real . Naturally Gluten Free. Skip Straight to the Recipe Oh! The color! I so remember the color! I wasn't long out of university – though settled into my first apartment, my first grown-girl suits and pumps and even my first first job – when one Friday night, I fell into a string of potent cocktails. Singapore slings, I think they were although unsurprisingly due to time and said-string, my memory's a little fuzzy on the detail. What I do remember is the appeal — the outright seduction — of the bejeweled color of those sweet cocktail concoctions. Those looooong-ago cocktails popped into my brain as I grated first cabbage and then carrot the other night. Like da

Seasonal Soup & Salad Recipes ♥ February

Seasonal Soup and Salad recipes, ideas perfect for the month of February, all from A Veggie Venture's decade+ collection of 1300+ vegetable recipes. These late-winter soup and salad recipes are mostly veg(etari)an and call for easy-to-find ingredients. Find your cold-weather salad (and soup!) inspiration here ... This week's polar vortex has turned much of the country into ice cubes. My hometown in Minnesota? It hasn't been above zero for days and hit minus 36F on Wednesday – I'm reminded of the old adage, "At forty below, it's all the same." Whether Fahrenheit or Celsius, that's C-O-L-D cold! And cold weather calls for soup ... kitchen-scenting, belly-warming and life-sustaining. Stay warm, all! About February's Recipe Collection I'm loving these intense look-backs into recipes from A Veggie Venture's archives! Too long forgotten? Homemade Vegetable Beef Soup , just one of four recipes from this page revisited recently. So good! But F

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