Recipe for Lentil and Barley Greek-Style Salad with Tomatoes, Feta, and Capers

A wonderful meatless barley and lentil salad to welcome spring!

I bet I'm not the only salad-obsessed person who starts thinking about new salad combinations as soon as the weather gets warmer.  It's no secret that I love salads of every type, but I think grain and bean salads are especially nice in spring, when it's not really hot weather but you're getting in the mood for lighter meals.  I loved the idea of a salad combining barley and lentils, and it worked perfectly with the tomatoes, Feta, capers, and a Greek-style vinaigrette for a lovely meatless salad.  There are many types of lentils, and you can probably use any green or brown lentils here, but I used lentils du puy, a green lentil from France that holds its shape well in a salad.

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Vegan Asparagus Salad for Spring with Tomatoes, Hearts of Palm, and Chives

A lovely salad for spring with asparagus, tomatoes, hearts of palm, and chives.

I love to pull things out of the fridge or pantry and experiment to see what I can come up with, and this salad combination started with the Hearts of Palm I was so excited to find back in stock at Costco.  I had fresh asparagus in the fridge and chives growing in the garden, both of which seemed like they would be good with hearts of palm, and then I added a few of the small grape tomatoes I start buying in the spring when I'm craving the flavor of tomatoes.  Mixed with a lemony vinaigrette, this salad was a great side dish for Herb Encrusted Grilled Salmon.  And when I can have an easy meal that includes hearts of palm, asparagus, and grilled salmon, I'm a happy camper.

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Easy Recipe for Barely-Cooked Asparagus with Basil Pesto

Barely Cooked Asparagus with Basil Pesto is ultra easy and flavorful.

(Updated with new photos and step-by-step instructions in April 2012.  There hasn't been much cooking going on while I've been trying to get better, but before I got sick I cooked my first asparagus of the year and re-did the photos for this favorite recipe from 2007; enjoy!)

Lots of people love the archives section I call Easy South Beach Recipes, where I feature tasty South Beach Diet friendly recipes with five ingredients or less. This one is a combination I stumbled on by accident years ago on a day when I had fresh asparagus and noticed a jar of pesto in the fridge. The pesto turned out to be fantastic with lightly cooked asparagus.  When I made the recipe again recently to take better photos, it was even better with my homemade Basil Pesto with Lemon, something I always make and freeze when my garden has an abundance of basil.  But even if you use basil pesto from a jar, I promise that this will become one of your favorite ways to cook asparagus.

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Recipe for Southwestern Quinoa Salad with Black Beans, Red Bell Pepper, and Cilantro

Luckily this Southwestern Quinoa Salad is loaded with healthful ingredients, because it was hard to stop eating it!

Lots of people are becoming fond of the South American seed product called quinoa (keen-wah).  I knew quinoa had become mainstream when I noticed you could buy a giant bag of it at Costco, and although I resisted for a week or two, eventually I bought one of those huge bags and stored it in the freezer.  I've made a lot of tasty things with my big bag of quinoa, but this quinoa salad with Southwestern flavors in the dressing may be my favorite quinoa dish yet.  Besides the cumin-lime-chile flavors in the dressing, I loved this because the crunch of the red pepper, the softness of the beans, and the slight chewiness of the quinoa was such a nice combination of textures.  The salad stayed good in the fridge for days, so it would be perfect to make on the weekend and take for lunch during the week.  And if you haven't tried quinoa yet, this may be the recipe that will turn you into a quinoa fan.

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Roasted Asparagus Recipe with Creamy Tahini-Peanut Dipping Sauce

Delicious roasted asparagus with a tahini-peanut dipping sauce.

(For Phase One Fridays I highlight Phase One recipes from the past that have been my personal favorites.  I love the tahini-peanut dipping sauce here and think it goes perfectly with roasted asparagus!)

Don't you think there's something special about asparagus when it finally comes into season in the spring? Before I started blogging I wasn't nearly so much of an asparagus fan as I am now. A lot of my asparagus apathy was because I'd mostly eaten asparagus cooked in water, a method which can simmer out a lot of the flavor. When I fully entered the ranks of the food-obsessed and started reading lots of blogs I learned about roasted asparagus, grilled asparagus, and sauteed asparagus. Since then I've been on a yearly spring quest to find as many new asparagus recipes as I can. This roasted asparagus with tahini-Peanut dipping sauce was a fantastic success. The sauce was slightly adapted from Chicken and Quickly Roasted Asparagus with Tahini Sauce, but the added peanut butter produced a thicker sauce and I subbed agave nectar for sugar or splenda. This is a recipe I can't wait to make for guests.

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Recipe for Mediterranean Salad with Hummus Dressing, Olives, Capers, and Feta

A great salad with Mediterranean flavors, made from ingredients I had in the fridge!

(Updated with step-by-step directions and better photos, April 2012.)   I first made this salad five years ago on a Saturday when I hadn't gone to the grocery store all week, and wanted to find something more interesting to eat than plain romaine lettuce salad. Luckily I found the big tub of Meza Hummus from Costco and remembered a recipe where hummus is blended with lemon juice and olive oil to make a unique dressing.  This recipe turned out to be a salad that tastes of everything that's complex and interesting about Mediterranean flavors, and it's been repeated many times since then.

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Easy and Amazing Recipe for Barely-Cooked Carrots with Tahini, Lemon, Garlic, and Sumac Dressing

Slightly-crisp carrots with a dressing of tahini, lemon juice, olive oil, garlic, and sumac.  Mind-blowingly good!

Allow me to introduce my new favorite way to eat carrots.  And if you even barely entertained the thought that cooked carrots might be a little boring, dismiss that idea immediately!  The entire time my cooking assistant and nephew Jake and I were tasting this recipe we kept remarking on how neither of us was that crazy about cooked carrots, but these barely cooked carrots with a dressing of tahini, lemon juice, olive oil, a generous amount of minced garlic, and Sumac were positively addictive.  We ate most of them warm, but I had a a few bites left that were refrigerated overnight, and they tasted fantastic cold out of the fridge as well.

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Recipe for Sauteed Asparagus with Melted Gorgonzola and Pine Nuts

This Sauteed Asparagus with Melted Gorgonzola and Pine Nuts tasted amazing

(For Phase One Fridays I highlight Phase One recipes from the past that have been my personal favorites.  This recipe was first posted in 2006 as part of Asparagus Aspirations at Seriously Good, sponsored by blogger Kevin Weeks.  Kevin passed away last week, and I'm dedicating this recipe to his memory.  His insight and cooking expertise were something he shared freely with many people, and he will be greatly missed.)

When I first made this recipe in 2006, I said "At the risk of sounding like I'm completely lacking in modesty, let me say that this was one of the best tasting things I've ever eaten in my life!"  Now years later this is still one of my favorite ways to cook asparagus, even after I lightened it up a tiny bit from the original recipe. I'm still on a bit of an asparagus binge around here, and when I made this to take new photos I ate about half of it for lunch that day.  You can see the original picture after the step-by-step photos, and if you're joining my asparagus binge you'll find lots more ideas for cooking asparagus after the recipe.

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Recipe for Whole Wheat Orzo Salad with Kale, Chickpeas, Lemon, and Feta

A delicious healthful salad with whole wheat orzo, kale, chickpeas, lemon, and Feta.  You could use brown rice or quinoa for a gluten-free version of this tasty salad.

A few years ago I discovered 100% Whole Wheat Orzo Pasta, and I've used it to make a few tasty pasta salads since then.  If you're not familiar with it, orzo is a type of pasta that's shaped like large grains of rice, and if you don't want to bother finding the whole wheat orzo or for a gluten-free version of this salad, cooked brown rice would make a fine substitute.  Of course it won't surprise anyone that I took a fantastic-sounding salad with spinach and switched out the spinach for kale.  I used regular curly kale so we trimmed it and wilted the kale for a minute, but if you had Earthbound Farm Ready-to-use Organic Mixed Baby Kales you could just give the kale a few rough chops and throw it in the salad.  We also added some cumin into the dressing for this salad, which gave it a bit of a Mediterranean flavor.  No matter what version of this salad you end up with, we thought this delightful combination of flavors was a perfect meatless meal.

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Recipe for Raw Baby Kale Salad with Apples, Sunflower Seeds, and Lemon-Dijon Vinaigrette

Raw Baby Kale Salad with Apples, Sunflower Seeds, and Lemon-Dijon Vinaigrette!

There's no doubt about it, I'm seriously smitten with the Earthbound Farm Baby Kale Mix that suddenly appeared at the Fresh Market store by my house.  I've been buying it every time I see it at the store (and so is everyone else apparently, because about half the time they don't have any.)  Making a salad with the raw baby kale was a snap and I loved this combination with raw baby kale, apples tossed in a lemon-Dijon vinaigrette, and crispy sunflower seeds adding a little crunch.  The dressing for this is slightly sweet, so maybe this would be a good one to try out on family members who are on the fence about raw kale.

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Recipe for Spicy Stir-Fried Sugar Snap Peas with Soy Sauce, Sesame Oil, and Sriracha

If you love sugar snap peas like I do, you have to try these Spicy Stir-Fried Sugar Snap Peas.

(For Phase One Fridays I highlight Phase One recipes from the past that have been my personal favorites.  I'm crazy about sugar snap peas, and this easy stir-fry is one of my favorite ways to use them in a cooked dish.)

Recently I talked about my profound affection for sugar snap peas, and I decided it might be fun to experiment with them as the starring ingredient in a stir-fried vegetable side dish.  Not that I hadn't stir-fried sugar snap peas before, but never like this with them sliced diagonally to reveal the tiny peas inside.  I have no idea where I got the idea of slicing the peas for a stir-fry, but I loved the results.  The pods cooked more quickly, and a few tiny peas spilled out, adding visual interest and a lot of sweet pea flavor to the finished dish.

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Easy Recipe for Cucumber Salad with Balsamic Dressing

This Easy and Slightly Unusual Cucumber Salad is one of my Favorites!

(This favorite cucumber recipe was first posted in 2006 and updated with step-by-step instructions and better photos in May 2012.  I'm still on vacation but luckily I have my cucumbers planted at home so it won't be long before I can make this salad with fresh garden cucumbers.)

I think people who haven't had a garden where the amount of produce suddenly spins out of control can't fully appreciate what a dilemma it is to search for new ways to use up tomatoes, squash, and of course, cucumbers. It seems like every summer I add at least one or two new recipes to my collection for these garden veggies. Recently I came upon this recipe for cucumbers on a site called RecipeZaar. It looks similar to some other recipes for cucumbers that I've posted, but the flavor is very different.

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Spicy Grilled Eggplant Recipe with Red Pepper, Parsley, and Mint

This spicy grilled eggplant is a favorite of my brother Rand, who does the fun headers for Kalyn's Kitchen

 
(For Phase One Fridays I highlight Phase One recipes from the past that have been my personal favorites.  I'm on the road driving home from Los Angeles, where I've been visiting my brother Rand and attending Camp Blogaway.  This Spicy Grilled Eggplant is Rand's very favorite recipe on Kalyn's Kitchen, and I'm glad I have my eggplant planted this year so I can make it later in the summer.  Meanwhile, if you have eggplant from the supermarket or Farmer's Market, I highly recommend this recipe.)

If you saw my last garden update, then you know I'm growing eggplant this year, and my first one was ready to harvest recently. I've grilled eggplant before, but I'm certainly not what you'd call an expert at cooking it, so I consulted a couple of cookbooks and settled on a recipe from Williams Sonoma Complete Grilling Cookbook, one of my favorite cookbooks, which I return to every summer for more grilling recipes. I followed their recommendation for salting the eggplant to remove some of the water before grilling. I sliced my eggplant about 1/2 inch thick, but next time I might slice it even thicker.

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Easy Thai-Flavored Raw Broccoli Salad Recipe with Red Onion, Mint, and Peanuts

This Thai-Flavored Raw Broccoli Salad was an experiment that was a happy success!

When I made Thai-Style Spicy Cabbage Slaw with my nephew Jake, we were both absolutely captivated by the spicy Thai flavors in the dressing.  I started thinking about what else might taste good with that combination of lime, fish sauce, sweetener, and red pepper flakes, and next time Jake showed up to cook I proposed trying it on a broccoli salad.  For our first try we blanched the broccoli, which was definitely not a good idea.  But we persevered and ended up with this amazing raw broccoli salad with red onion, mint, and peanuts and the spicy Thai dressing.  If you're wondering about mint and broccoli together, so did we, but the whole combination really worked.  If you like Thai flavors and raw broccoli you must try this salad. 

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Recipe for Heart of Palm Salad with Tomato, Avocado, and Lime (with or without Cilantro)

I've been infatuated with this Heart of Palm Salad with Tomato, Avocado, Cilantro, and Lime.

I love combining beloved ingredients in slightly different ways, and this Heart of Palm Salad with Tomato, Avocado, Cilantro, and Lime was the happy result when I arranged a marriage between my favorite Vegan Heart of Palm and Avocado Salad and Colorful Tomato Salad with Hearts of Palm.  This offspring salad had all the good qualities of the parents, plus some new qualities of its own!

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Recipe for Baby Kale, Mozzarella, and Egg Bake (and Ten More Ideas for Starting Your Day with Kale!)

I loved this combination so much I made it several times in a row for a heat-and-eat breakfast!

A couple of months ago I came up with a recipe for Spinach and Mozzarella Egg Bake, which turned out to be one of my personal favorite breakfasts.  Then I discovered the fantastic Earthbound Farm Mixed Baby Kales at the store near my house, so of course I had to try the recipe using kale.  I loved that version as well, and at first I just thought about adding a note to the spinach recipe saying that I liked it with kale.  But I really wanted all my fellow kale fans to find this recipe, and knowing how the internet works, I decided this version deserves a recipe post of its own.  How much did I love this cheesy egg bake with baby kale?  When I tested the recipe I ate this for breakfast three weeks in a row before I finally switched to something else!

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Spicy Stir-Fried Broccoli Stems Recipe

This recipe is for everyone who likes to nibble the broccoli stems when they're cutting up the broccoli!

Broccoli stems are one of those under-appreciated vegetable parts that don't get much respect, yet when I'm cutting up stalks of broccoli, they're my favorite part to nibble on.  After I realized how much I liked them, a few years ago I started to save the stems in the vegetable crisper.  I've mostly used my broccoli stem bounty in salads, but this idea for cooking the stems with a spicy sauce is something I came up with when I had a whole pound of stems saved up.  I cooked them in a wok, but a large frying pan will work, and if you've never eaten the broccoli stems, this recipe just might turn you into a fan.

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Baby Kale Greek Salad Recipe

All the flavors of Greek salad, plus baby kale!

Yes, the infatuation with Earthbound Farm Organic Baby Kales  is still going strong around here, and last week my local Fresh Market store had the baby kale mix on sale, so there's been a lot of baby kale on the menu.  Of course that's perfectly fine with me since I love this baby kale, especially for salads.  Not only is the flavor milder, the baby kale mix such a nice combination of flavors and shapes.  I like the crunch that kale gives to this version of Greek salad and I loved the way all these flavors worked together.

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Recipe for World's Easiest Grilled Vegetables (How to Cook Vegetables on the Grill)

These easy grilled vegetables are something I make all during grilling season!

(For Phase One Fridays I highlight Phase One recipes from the past that have been my personal favorites.  These easy grilled vegetables are something I make at least once a week during grilling season!)

I regularly get comments from people who tell me they are learning to cook from my blog.  Feedback like that is partly what's motivating me to share this simple not-really-even-a-recipe way that I cook grilled vegetables all during the grilling season.  Whenever I'm cooking grilled chicken, meat, or fish, there will usually be one of these grill pans full of vegetables cooking alongside it.  Memorial Day weekend marks the beginning of grilling season for many people in the U.S. so I'm sure there will be vegetables on the grill at my house over the weekend!

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Recipe for Baby Kale and Mozzarella Quesadillas with Sriracha-Ranch Dipping Sauce

Quesadillas with baby kale and mozzarella, served with a spicy Sriracha-Ranch Dipping Sauce.

Some of you guys who haven't yet joined the Baby Kale Fan Club might think I've gone a little too far with this recipe for Baby Kale and Mozzarella Quesadillas with Sriracha-Ranch Dipping Sauce.  It was just an idea that popped into my head when baby kale had been on sale and I had an abundance of it in my fridge, and when Jake and I were making the first quesadilla I wasn't sure it was going to be anything special.  But oh my, the quesadillas were so amazingly good with the dipping sauce.  I don't know if this is something you could get a green-veggie phobic kid to eat, but it would certainly be easy enough to make a plain cheese quesadilla for the kids if you made this for a family dinner.  And if the adults in the family like leafy greens, I promise this will be a hit!

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