Asian Greens ♥ (How to Cook Fresh Greens with Asian-Style Taste)

An easy way to cook fresh greens (such as kohlrabi leaves, beet greens, chard, and other greens) and then season with Asian-style flavors. Low carb. Weight Watchers zero points or just one point. Not just vegan, "Vegan Done Real".

So maybe I should set up a challenge, "Never again throw away fresh greens".

We all know the drill, right? We love the fresh beets from the farmers market. We're enchanted by the perfect globes of kohlrabi in our CSA box. But the greens? The beet tops? The kohlrabi leaves? Not so much.

Last week, after making a big batch of Roasted Kohlrabi, I started to throw away the kohlrabi leaves – and then stopped myself, knowing that it was wasteful, financially and nutritionally. But what to make with kohlrabi leaves? I considered the technique from Greek Greens, my favorite way to cook greens when they're fresh, to hold for a day or two, then took inspiration from a recipe by Ivy Manning published on Culinate.

Yay – an Asian twist to cooking fresh greens! In fact, while I used the recipe for cooking kohlrabi leaves, I would recommend this simple technique for the many greens found in Asian markets.
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Warm Black-eyed Peas with Yogurt & Ginger ♥

Today's recipe: A side dish made with black-eyed peas and gentle spices, served warm.

It seems a sorry shame that black-eyed peas are relegated to New Year's fare. All the good fortune that black-eyed peas are supposed to deliver during the new year? We could use a little of that year-round, don't we think? What with the Gulf oil spill, the European financial crisis, home foreclosures, the battle forming along the U.S.-Mexico border, the continuing recession ... well, if all it takes is a few black-eyed peas to turn any one of those corners, to put just one behind us, I'm in.

This is a great little side dish, familiar ingredients mixed in an unfamiliar way. It's best served slightly warm but can be made ahead of time and then rewarmed, albeit gently. For a vegetarian entrée, I'd serve it with a yogurt sauce on the side, like the cilantro sauce in Veggie Burritos with Cilantro Sauce. If you'd like a black-eyed pea salad, one that can be made in advance and served cold or at room temperature, I recommend the very good Lucky Black-eyed Pea Salad published a couple of New Year's ago on Kitchen Parade.

REVIEWS
"I tried your warm black eyed peas and yogurt yesterday, delicious." ~ Betty

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Lemony Broccoli & Lemon Vinaigrette ♥ Recipes for an Easy Salad

Today's easy salad recipe: Think lemon on lemon, broccoli tops soaked in lemon juice atop lettuce dressed in a creamy lemon vinaigrette. Only two or three points for Weight Watchers and low-carb too. Simple and surprisingly substantial.

While visiting my father earlier this month, one objective was to provide Olga, his loving companion since my mother died, a 'vacation' from cooking and clean-up. Given the unseasonably warm temperatures and our light appetites, suppers were more about assembling salads than actual cooking.

This salad was a surprise hit, including for me, the cook. ;-) That first night, we added some leftover grilled meat to the salad plates (Note to Vegetarians) and found the meal surprisingly substantial: we ALL skipped dessert that night.

I've made it at home twice now since returning and am completely hooked on the simple combination of lemon on lemon. The broccoli tips soak up the lemon, the greens are dressed in a creamy lemon. I tried one version with asparagus but the spears just can't absorb the lemon flavor as well as the broccoli tops.

To my taste, the salad is more than a sum of its parts.
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Strawberry Rhubarb Smoothie ♥ Two Recipes!

Today's smoothie recipes: Two ways to make smoothies from rhubarb and strawberries, one with raw rhubarb, another with a quick stove-top strawberry-rhubarb sauce.

Last week, I went dumpster-diving freezer-diving and spied one last bag of frozen rhubarb. Zip, zip, I worked up a couple of rhubarb smoothies starring one of spring's magical seasonal combinations, strawberries and rhubarb.

RAW RHUBARB For Smoothie Numbers One & Two, I used the rhubarb in its raw albeit wet and freezer-softened state. It had a tang, a sourness, that I especially liked, but some of rhubarb's natural stringiness survived the trip through the blender – not everyone would overlook this.

COOKED RHUBARB For Smoothie Numbers Three & Four, I cooked the rhubarb and strawberries together, letting their flavors meld, and sweeten, overnight before making the smoothies. The taste here is more like a traditional smoothie, fruity and sweet and well, yes, this is why they're called 'smoothies', smooth.

These recipes are so quick and easy that I'm adding them to a growing collection of easy summer recipes published all summer long in 2009 at Kitchen Parade, my food column, and now again in 2010. With a free Kitchen Parade e-mail subscription, you'll never miss a one!

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Homemade Greek Salad Dressing Recipe ♥

Today's easy homemade salad dressing recipe: How to make Greek salad dressing, a vinaigrette, really, with a short list of pantry ingredients.

So the English chef / food activist / TV personality Jamie Oliver has a crusade, he calls it Jamie's Food Revolution. But I have one too, it just doesn't come with a television show and a marketing budget. But it does fit right in with the Food Revolution's idea of changing one thing, just one thing, in our diets – to the good, by the way!

My crusade is to persuade home cooks to never buy salad dressing again. HA - I've actually accidentally written 'never MAKE salad dressing again' often enough that I've wondered if there might be a counter crusade mounted by the salad dressing manufacturers. But no, we don't make salad dressing at home because we're too busy, we don't know how, the bottles are convenient (albeit expensive), everyone can have their own favorite, we're not eating salads anyway – and on and on, just pick one.

This is such an easy dressing, I made it twice for the gorgeous Greek Bread Salad with Toasted Pita Chips. Oh so good and kid-friendly too! For the dressing, I was able to drop the oil to almost nothing, just a teaspoon, because of all the flavor and creaminess from the feta cheese.
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Greek Bread Salad with Toasted Pita Chips ♥ A Kid-Friendly Recipe

Today's vegetable salad recipe: A whole pile of vegetable color and crunch, interspersed with crisp homemade toasted pita chips. Kids like this! Low carb. Weight Watchers 1 point.

My friend Ann put out a stunning array of food for our book club last month. But it was the salad — oh, the colorful salad! — that caught my attention first. "My kids devour this salad," the mother of two preteen boys said. Really? A salad with so many vegetables and kids gobble it down?

Turns out, the trick is the Toasted Pita Chips. Now I may be a grown-up but here, I'm with the kids. The pita chips really do add something special: without them, this salad would be just some chopped vegetables tossed in Greek salad dressing. If you like Panzanella, the Italian bread salad, you'll love this one too.

BOOK CLUBS & READING GROUPS Speaking of book clubs, have you seen my reading group's book list? We've been reading together since 1994!
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Tofu-Salad Sandwiches ♥ Recipe for Vegan 'Egg' Salad

Today's vegetable sandwich recipe: A mixture of tofu and the usual suspects for egg salad, mayo, celery and the like. It makes up in just a few minutes and is surprisingly good! Better still, it's eminently variable based on what's on hand. Not just vegan, "Vegan Done Real". Low carb and just 1 or 2 points for Weight Watchers.

Is this feeling familiar, the feeling that you're just a little bit stuck, a tad bit uninspired, to cook? (Now baking, that I could do every day. But who needs another recipe for something sweet? Our recipe boxes, our waistlines, they're already plenty full of desserts.)

So I've been scanning my favorite cookbooks, hoping for inspiration then naysaying one recipe after another. Too fussy. Too expensive. Too many pots. Ingredients I don't have. Ingredients my usual groceries don't have. Too much fat. Too fru-fru. Yesterday I nixed every other recipe in the brand-new issue of Food & Wine (don't worry, it's a great issue, it's just me, right now) but then jumped on this simple mixture of silken tofu to make a chunky white sandwich spread, vegan! and just one Weight Watchers point, too. I expected to like it so-so, but thought it might give me a jump-start (aka a good ol' kick in the you know what) to get 'cooking' again.

Instead, I loved this stuff and already I've started thinking of ways to make it differently next time. I made open-face sandwiches for lunch yesterday but think it'll be great on toast for breakfast and might even slip into an omelet, say. I may never cook again.
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