Something to explore as the temperature outside rises & I try to cool off the kitchen.

http://ohmyveggies.com/50-vegetarian-slow-cooker-recipes/

Summer Garden Offerings

 Gardening in the Texas Panhandle is an extreme art, between crazy temperature swings, drought, and grasshoppers we were able to harvest enough handfuls to create a few summer meals this year. 

 This first one is olive oil sauteed chard and leeks, solar cooked red lentils, and 4 eggs sprinkled with Turkish vegetable spice (a chili blend with strong mint & paprika tones).   6 ingredients

 Zucchini oven fries were fun, but there's a learning curve, too thin or too hot an oven yielded a pan full of deliciousness I had to scrape off with a fork.  It's too bad I had to eat all of the ugly chips. 
3 ingredients

 Gluten & Dairy Free Pizza with squash, potato, garlic, pine nuts, and basil.  I highly recommend America's Test Kitchen gluten free bread recipes, and I love using our cast iron skillets for pizzas.  Now we need one that's 4 times this size. 

This is a fig and plum salad adapted from the latest post on  101 Cookbooks.  We did indeed have some fresh figs instead of dry, but substituted plums for pluots, basil for the herb mix, leeks instead of shallots, agave for the honey, and pine nuts instead of peanuts.   It was a lovely way to use up some less common ingredients in our Bountiful Basket this week and some of the last offerings in our garden.  The dressing might be a keeper & definitely a good one for Asian dipping sauce. 

Good Causes

 Good and Cheap: Eat Well on $4/Day

You may have seen this kick starter project traveling around Facebook recently, and yay it was funded!  While not all of these recipes are vegetarian, there are quite a few great plant based meals, awesome ideas, and I really believe that fresh food should be available to everyone. Click on the title above to download Leanne Brown's free PDF.