Simply Recipes Vegetarian
Mom's Warm Potato Salad
I don't know about you, but summer around here has us making potato salads more often than in other seasons. This is the latest one my mother put together; my father has made her make it several times since, and my brothers have devoured it with raves for mom. No mayo, just a simple rice vinegar olive oil dressing.
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Grits with Corn and Onion Greens
A dear friend of mine from Alabama called me recently and demanded to know, "why aren't there any grits on your site?!" Uh, because I'm not Southern and I don't know what the heck I'm talking about when it comes to grits and I can't even try to fake it with our readers? Well, not knowing what we are doing has never stopped us in the past, and my dear ole dad found a recipe for grits he couldn't pass up. This was so good I made him make it twice. What I have learned in researching grits is that people who grew up eating them are passionate about how they like them - white corn, hominy grits, with syrup for breakfast, etc. So, if you have a particular way that you like your grits, please let us know about it in the comments.
By the way, according to NBC, Michael Phelps eats grits for breakfast, along with several fried egg sandwiches, an omelet, three slices of French toast, and a stack of chocolate chip pancakes. Breakfast of champions.
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Wax Beans with Mint
Every weekend during the summer, if we are lucky, there will be a good supply of wax beans at the farmers market. These golden yellow (and sometimes purple) versions of green beans are harvested young, and are sweet and tender. Here is a simple way to prepare them, with the subtle flavor of a mint infusion.
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Blueberry Peach Fruit Salad with Thyme
Please welcome Garrett McCord of Vanilla Garlic who shares this delicious cancer-fighting fruit salad with us. ~Elise
Recently my mom, Suzanne McCord, was diagnosed with breast cancer. I was surprised when I heard the news, my mother is in her early sixties, but is insanely active and healthy. The woman recently participated the AIDS lifecycle event; a 6 day, 550 mile bike ride. A few days after, she was off to Egypt and Russia. I get tired biking to work, and my last big trip was Napa which is only an hour away. In fact, her main concern after being diagnosed was that the surgery would get in the way of her bike riding.
After hearing about mom, I went to work doing some research about ways I could help using what I know best - food. I wanted to put together something that was easy to prepare, full of flavor, and packed with cancer fighting vitamins and antioxidants. After a bit of research into cancer smart foods and what seemed to work well, I developed this recipe.
This simple fruit salad works at the start of the meal or as a dessert. The fruit is lightly glazed with either a simple syrup or agave syrup. Ginger, a bit of lemon, and some savory thyme which pairs amazingly with summer fruits accents the tartness of the berries and the sweetness of the stone fruit. In recognition of my awesome, kicking cancer-butt mom, Ive nicknamed this a Suzanne Salad.
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Grilled Tomatoes
Mid July is about the time of year when tomatoes start coming full steam into season. I have 5 tomato plants in my garden that are now producing more tomatoes than we can think up ways of using them. (Gazpacho anyone?) One quick and easy recipe that I played around with this week is to simply grill the tomatoes, cut side down, and season with olive oil, salt, pepper, and sliced basil. When you are working with garden fresh tomatoes, sometimes doing less is more, because the produce is so good to begin with.
Do you have a garden that is full of tomatoes? What are your ways of using up the bounty? Please let us know in the comments.
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How to Make Fruit Leather
When you have your own fruit trees (or access to someone else's) sometimes you can feel a bit buried in fruit, whatever happens to be dropping off the trees at that time. Summer becomes a mad dash of canning, jamming and freezing, trying to preserve the bounty to enjoy throughout the year. One thing you can do with excess fruit of the season is to make fruit leather, sort of the beef jerky of fruit. I used to love this stuff as a kid, made for a great snack and instant energy, and was easy to pack. Last fall I made fruit leather with the leftover grape mush from making grape juice, and this week it was fruit leather from our neighbor Pat's apricots (Pat's apricots are so ripe that when you go to pick one, two more fall off the branch). What follows is a general guideline to making fruit leather, no set recipe. So much of it depends on the specific fruit you are working with.
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Grilled Corn Salad
There are, I think, three essential ingredients to this salad - corn, which you can grill or even prepare by toasting frozen kernels on the stovetop, onions, and cumin. The rest is a medley of whatever fresh vegetables you might have on hand. In this case I had zucchini and a serrano chile pepper from my garden and a big red bell pepper. I tossed in some cotija cheese for good measure. Although this is a grilled corn salad the other vegetables benefit from some searing heat as well. A simple seasoning of cumin, salt, pepper, olive oil and vinegar or lime juice pulls everything together. I made this for my parents today and my father insisted that "this one needs to go on the site" while polishing it off. Enjoy.
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Mexican Green Bean Salad
One of our favorite ways to eat green beans is with salsa. The tomatoes, onions, chiles, spices, and vinegar perk up the beans in the most wonderful way. This bean salad recipe is sort of a riff on the salsa theme, taking it up a notch with pickled jalapeños, cilantro, cotija cheese, and avocados. It would make a perfect picnic salad for a Mexican themed potluck. If you love Mexican food, I'm willing to bet you'll love this salad as much as we do.
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Sautéed Zucchini with Gruyere
After several years of observing the results of my feeble gardening attempts, my next door neighbor Pat (76 and still going strong) graciously responded to my pleas for help and has been guiding me this spring with soil amendments, starter plants, seeds, and all around gardening advice. As a result, here it is early June and I have a zucchini plant that is growing with wild abandon (amazing what a little water, sunshine, and organic fertilizer can do). The plant produces almost one zucchini a day and has been for about a month. Blessed with this new bounty, we now have a very good reason to try out new zucchini recipes, so be warned, you may be seeing more zukes on this site the summer than usual. (Have a favorite zucchini recipe? Please let us know in the comments.)
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Fava Bean Dip with Goat Cheese and Garlic
Fresh fava beans require patience. You have to shuck them twice, once to remove the thick shell, and then again, after cooking the beans, to peel the outer skin. Are they worth the effort? You tell me. Fresh favas, or broad beans, are only available for a short time in spring, so it's not an effort that you have to, or get to, make that often. I kind of like the meditative aspects of plopping out the beans from their pods like mini-green-bean rocket ships. Cooked in salty water, they taste a lot like edamame, and can be just as deliciously addictive. Here is a recipe for a simple fava bean dip with garlic and goat cheese. It's terrific with jicama, and cucumber slices. The cool crunchiness of the jicama or cucumber works well with the creamy beany-ness (for lack of a better word) of the dip. Many thanks to fellow Sacramento food blogger Hank Shaw for supplying me with bunch of fava beans from his garden.
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Soba Noodle Salad
Please welcome guest author Garrett McCord of Vanilla Garlic who prepared this fabulous salad for us the other day. Big, big hit. ~Elise
"Very tangy and sweet! With just enough crunch from the peanuts."
"It's so colorful and aromatic, you can just smell the mint and garlic!"
The compliments Elise and I praised this salad with are plentiful. Really, this is a wonderful spring and summer salad, with Asian inspiration. Soba noodles, if you are not familiar with them, are thin Japanese noodles made with buckwheat flour, and are often served cold. Soba noodles can be found in the Asian aisle of many markets; they have a nice body to them and an earthy, old world taste. In this noodle salad, the mango, mint, and various other flavors contrast and match well with each other, giving the whole salad a good balance.
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Jicama Salad
Are you familiar with jicama? This tuber looks like a seriously overgrown radish and is the root of a vine native to Mexico and Central America. The flesh is crunchy, mild, and even faintly sweet, and is often served with a little lime juice and chile powder to accompany Mexican dishes. I first encountered jicama (pronounced HICK-ah-mah) years ago in cafeteria salad bars, and on its own (how they typically serve it in those places), jicama can be a little boring. With some seasoning and lime juice, however, it comes alive, and is wonderfully refreshing, especially along side tacos and refried beans. This recipe comes from my friend Arturo who suggested to me the ingredients. (Thanks Arturo!)
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Roasted Asparagus
Have you ever had roasted asparagus turn out tough and stringy? Here's a tip from my friend Alanna: use the fat spears, not the skinny ones, for roasting. This is a quick and easy recipe for beautifully roasted, tender asparagus.
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Mustard Greens
Have you ever tried mustard greens? Related to kale, cabbage, and collard greens, they are the peppery leafy greens of the mustard plant and are used frequently in Chinese, Japanese, and Indian cooking. I find them less bitter than kale or collard greens, and more peppery, like arugula. Just one taste of a raw leaf and you'll know it came from a mustard plant. Cooked, they taste a lot like spinach, but with more body. My father recently discovered mustard greens at our local farmers market and they're his new love. I like them with a dash of dark sesame oil, but you could easily just cook them up with a little garlic and olive oil.
Do you have a favorite way to prepare mustard greens? Please let us know about it in the comments.
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Curried Potato and Vegetable Soup
In honor of my friend Barbara and her efforts with the food blogger Taste of Yellow event raising awareness for Lance Armstrong's LiveSTRONG Day, I set out to make a vibrant, yellow soup. This curried potato soup is filled with Yukon Gold yellow potatoes, cauliflower, yellow bell peppers, yellow onions, corn, and yellow summer squash. Can one possibly get more yellow than that? Wait, the butter is yellow too, and turmeric stains everything it touches yellow. This recipe uses a couple summer seasonal ingredients - the corn and squash - but you could easily substitute a sweet potato (put it in early with the Yukon Golds).
My mother and I both loved it, especially with some cilantro mixed in. My father doesn't like curry so his vote doesn't count.
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