We ate with abandon while on vacation last week, so healthy salads like this one, inspired by Mighty Grain Salad on Happolks, are both necessary and a relief to get back onto our normal eating path. (The recipe comes from Laura at The First Mess, but she guest-posted on the first site.)

I used bulgur (about 2 cups cooked), brown lentils (about 1 cup cooked), carrots (3), red pepper (1), mushrooms (about a cup), kale (3 huge handfuls), and goat cheese (2 ounces), plus balsamic vinegar and olive oil to make my version. The trick, which J. reminds me time and again, is to dice the vegetables quite small. Yes, it takes more time than rough-chopping, but having the petite vegetable pieces mirror the size of the lentils makes this salad feel like something you’d pay for — polished and put together.

This salad is fantastic. Along with a bit of homemade hummus, it made a tasty and satisfying meal that is a far cry from the foie gras meatballs I was eating last week. But, just as delicious in its own right.

J. and I enjoyed this salad last night, alongside Slow Cooker Vegetarian Lentil Soup and grilled asparagus. It’s a nice, grain-based salad with more protein than you might expect to get in a vegetarian dish, thanks to the chickpeas and quinoa.

A. saw the quinoa cooling on the stove before I mixed it into the rest of the ingredients, and was eager to taste it. He loved it, and wound up with those cute little quinoa tails all over his lips. He had a full bowl of it, plain, exclaiming the whole time how delicious it was. G. felt compelled to ask for a taste too, but he did not care for the flavor.

I’ve always been lukewarm about liking quinoa, but I find that lemon is the key ingredient in a quinoa dish for me: it breaks up some of the grassy flavor and allows me to think of it more as a grain than as something a sheep would like to graze.

Quinoa, Chickpea, & Carrot Salad
Adapted from Bulgur Chickpea Salad

1 c. quinoa, rinsed
2 c. water
4 green onions, minced
1 15-oz. can chickpeas, drained
1 c. parsley, chopped
1 c. carrots, peeled and grated
2 Tbsp. olive oil
1 lemon
salt & pepper to taste

Combine quinoa and water in a small pot, and bring to a boil. Lower the heat, and simmer for 10-15 minutes, covered, until all the water is absorbed. Remove from the heat and set aside, uncovered, to cool.

In a medium bowl, combine green onions, chickpeas, parsley, and carrots. Toss with olive oil and the juice of 1 lemon. Then, toss in the cooled quinoa (still warm is OK, just not HOT), and season with salt and pepper. Serve room temperature or cold.

During the months that our farm share is inactive, I have to make a conscious effort to get greens other than romaine into our diet. We do well with eating cauliflower, broccoli, and even Brussels sprouts, but kale, collards, mustard greens, and swiss chard definitely are consumed less in the winter than the summer. That’s too bad, because these hearty, hefty greens are perfect for cold weather.

Aside from throwing greens into soup (try Vegetarian Navy Bean & Kale Soup or Creamy Cauliflower & Kale Soup) or making Garlicky Kale with Toasted Breadcrumbs, this crispy baked kale has become another repeat way to get greens into our bellies.

The cheesiness of “Cheesy” Vegan Crispy Baked Kale comes from nutritional yeast, an ingredient I bought specifically for this dish. It is simply inactive yeast, which means it won’t make bread rise. I had tried New York Naturals’ Vegan “Cheese” kale chips and loved them, so I was pretty sure I’d like the flavor. I bought my nutritional yeast at Mrs. Green’s, but you should be able to find it at any health food store.

I’ve made this recipe using a whole bunch of kale, leaving the leaves long and wide after I took them off their stems. I’ve also made it with bagged kale from Glory Foods, which is pre-washed, tough stems removed, and cut into much smaller pieces. Both work well.

“Cheesy” Vegan Crispy Baked Kale
Adapted from Cheesy Kale Crisps

12 oz. curly green kale (about 1 bunch)
2 Tbsp. olive oil
2 Tbsp. flaxseed meal
1 Tbsp. apple cider vinegar
1 Tbsp. nutritional yeast
1 Tbsp. tahini
1 tsp. garlic powder
1/2 tsp. kosher salt

Preheat oven to 250° F.

If using a whole bunch of kale, slice the leaves off their stems and tear them into approximately 2-inch long pieces. Wash the kale and dry thoroughly. Arrange the kale on 1 or 2 baking sheets — 1 works fine but will take longer, 2 will take less time to bake.

In a small bowl, mix together the remaining ingredients, making sure there are no lumps. Spoon drops of the mixture evenly over the kale, and then (with clean hands!) massage the kale and coating together, gently smooshing it in your hands until the kale is lightly and evenly coated. You will feel the kale leaves soften in your hands as you do this.

Bake for 45 to 75 minutes, or until dry and crispy, using a spatula to turn the kale every 15 minutes or so. Make sure it does not burn.

This recipe is best eaten immediately, but it can also be stored, once cooled, in an air-tight container.

This is a tasty, vegan winter dish. Although I don’t care for fennel raw, I really love it roasted.

Warm White Beans with Roasted Fennel & Red Pepper
Adapted from Cooking Light

2 medium fennel bulbs, trimmed and cut in 1/2″ slices
1 red bell pepper, seeded and cut in 1/2″ slices
2 Tbsp. olive oil, divided
2 cloves of garlic, minced
1 small onion, sliced
2 15-oz. cans cannellini beans, drained (or any white bean)
7 oz. package of fresh baby spinach, washed (about 4 c.)
1/2 tsp. cayenne pepper (optional)
salt & pepper to taste

Preheat oven to 450° F.

Toss fennel, red pepper, and half the oil on a baking sheet, and bake for about 20 minutes until vegetables soften and begin to brown.

While the fennel and pepper are in the oven, add remaining oil to a large skillet and saute the onions over medium-high heat. Cook for 10 minutes, until they caramelize. Add beans to the onions and cook for an additional 5 minutes; add the fennel mixture when ready. Stir in the spinach and continue cooking for a few minutes over medium heat until the leaves wilt slightly. Season and serve warm.

Arugula is not my favorite green, but I do aim to eat everything I get from my farm share. There is almost always a preparation that makes a ho-hum vegetable into something closer to palatable. Several readers told me they love arugula raw in a salad, but that route is not for me. Since I also had a lot of potatoes from my CSA, I thought this light potato salad — Potato Salad with Yogurt, Arugula, and Dill — would be a good accompaniment to a dinner of soup.

J. doesn’t like mayo, so I adjusted the recipe by using a 6 oz. contained of non-fat Greek yogurt plus 2 Tbsp. of apple cider vinegar to thin it out and add some acid. I also used green onions instead of shallots. The combination of yogurt and dill screams “tzatziki!” to me, so I think this side dish would be a nice addition to a Greek-flavored chicken (lots of oregano and lemon) or just to round out a meal of a Greek salad.

The flavor is surprising, because your brain expects mayo when you see a creamy potato salad. But the taste is far from that traditional dish; it’s very springy and light, and super-tangy. We liked it well enough to finish leftovers, but it is probably not a dish I’d repeat. Still, if you like dill and yogurt, you’ll probably like this easy, fat-free dish.

I first tried gigantes at Lefteris Gyro, a local Greek restaurant. “Gigantes,” which is both the name of the large white beans used to make the dish and the name of the prepared beans themselves, means “giant” in Greek. And these beans are enormous. In the past I was able to find gigante beans locally; most recently I could only find large lima beans which are slightly smaller. I love Greek food, but no one else in my immediate family does so I rarely get to eat it when we go out. Once I’d tried gigantes at Lefteris, though, I couldn’t get them out of my mind. I had to try to make them at home, since I knew it would be a long time until I could have them again at the restaurant. Now that I know how easy they are to make, I’ve made them several times. They keep well in the fridge so even though I make a large batch, I can eat them over the course of the week — even if no one else shares them with me.

I use Closet Cooking’s Gigantes Plaki recipe and I think it’s perfect as written, though I tend to add a little more dill (that’s my mom’s influence… she loves dill!). Even though the beans are soaked overnight and then baked, the finished dish is light and has a very fresh flavor thanks to the herbs. This recipe is naturally super-healthy: minimal oil, lots of vegetables, and protein from the beans. Better yet, it is seriously delicious. (I have eaten a bowl of gigantes for breakfast — it’s that good.) You could serve gigantes as a side dish for roasted chicken or grilled fish, but I like it best as a vegetarian meal unto itself.

When I was growing up, there were many special things I looked forward to at my grandparents’ apartment in Queens. For instance, my Grandpa Alfred, who had been a pattern maker for Simplicity and was an excellent tailor, had made a custom fabric clubhouse that cleverly spanned the small space between the arm of a couch and the spindles on a wall divider between the living room and dining room. When it was up, it was like a magic tree house — a perfect, private spot for me to hide. Then, with just a quick undoing of fabric ties, it could fold away until my next visit.

Visiting my grandparents also meant Alfred’s Delights, the only food I remember my grandpa cooking aside from making charoset at Passover. He’d cut a potato into quarter-inch slices, and then blister them in a cast iron pan, without any oil. A sprinkle of salt finished them off. I remember them being scalding on the outside, and just cooked and chewy on the inside. It wasn’t so much that I loved their flavor, but I loved that my grandpa made them for me, and they were a special location-specific treat. I can’t help but thing of Alfred’s Delights whenever I am slicing potatoes, so he was on my mind as I prepped the spuds for this side dish.

Making these chips was an experiment. The first potato was sliced on a mandoline, at about a 1/8″ thickness. But I thought these would be too thick. I sliced the next potato by hand, using my super-sharp santoku. I don’t normally love this knife, but for this type of work it’s perfect — I was able to easily halve the thickness of the first batch and make semi-transparent, 1/16″ slices of potato.

Potatoes are naturally really wet, and I wanted to make sure that they’d crisp up like a proper chip when I baked them. So I let all the slices dry, in a single layer, on some tea towels on my kitchen counter. I left them out for 3 hours, until they were all dry to the touch. Yes, they did discolor a bit, but once they are baked you won’t notice it.

I preheated the oven to 450° F. I arranged the potato slices in a single layer on a non-stick cookie sheet, and then lightly brushed each slice with a scant amount of olive oil. I use a silicone brush, which I love — no bristles left behind! You need to be sparing with the oil, because it won’t really absorb into the potato and you don’t want them to be greasy. Flip each slice and brush them again. Sprinkle with salt, sparingly — you can always add more later. My 1/16″ chips were done in 18 minutes, but start checking at 15 minutes. The 1/8″ chips took longer, about 22 minutes.

My motivation for making potato chips was simply to see if I could prepare some of our farm share potatoes in a way my boys would try. My friend Jen suggested chips, and she was right — they tried them. Unfortunately, I did over-salt them a bit, and that was the boys’ complaint. They were pretty impressed that potato chips came out of our own oven, though! The chips stayed crispy stored, sealed, on the counter overnight.

I spent a weekend in Boston earlier this summer and my dear friend Rachel showed me this simple, delicious dish. Use a vegetable peeler to make ribbons out of your yellow squash and zucchini, rotating the squash after each ribbon or two so you get even pieces. Leave over the seeded middles. Blanch the squash ribbons (that’s dropping them into boiling water briefly and then dunking them in ice water to stop the cooking) and drain them well. Toss with your favorite pesto.

Please don’t pretend you’re eating pasta, because you won’t be impressed. However, as a vegetarian side dish or a way to highlight your CSA or farmer’s market finds, this simple dish is perfection. Slightly salty and rich from the pesto; fresh and light from the squash. With some sliced CSA tomatoes, it’s a perfect summer dinner.

The recipe for this Roasted Eggplant & Red Pepper Dip (or spread) comes from the beautiful blog The Cilantropist, and I am not surprised the author says it is one of her favorite foods to make in the summer.

I followed the recipe as written, except that I doubled the quantities of everything but the oil — I kept that at a third of a cup in the doubled recipe. I did have to puree the dip in two batches, as my Cuisinart couldn’t handle all of it at once. That gave me an opportunity to go a little heavier on the tomato paste in one batch, and lighter in the other — the one with less tomato paste was better, with more of the roasted eggplant flavor shining through.

I knew this spread would be a hit with my mother-in-law, who adores eggplant, but it went over well with all of the adults in my extended family. We ate outside on a hot night, smoothing this creamy, tangy spread over bagels. I served hard-boiled eggs and a salad made from romaine lettuce, marinated onions, feta, and sliced beets, too. It was indeed a perfect summer meal.

We received a big head of bok choi in our farm share a couple of weeks ago, and I usually just do a simple stir fry when I get this vegetable. It combines well with red pepper and onions; saute and add a splash of soy sauce and you’re done.

This time I went a bit further and made Stout Oak Farm’s Bok Choi & Sesame Noodles. I didn’t have any pea shoots, so I omitted them. I also used a smaller noodles-to-bok choi ratio than the recipe calls for, and subbed whole wheat spaghetti in place of the buckwheat noodles. I do like buckwheat soba and can get them at the Mrs. Green’s (a local Whole Foods-type store), but the spaghetti works just as well.

Whenever possible, I serve noodles separately from whatever is being mixed in to make the meal. So, a nice big bowl of the bok choi, and noodles on the side. This way my kids will at least eat the noodles, and might try the sauce, meatballs, or whatever else makes the pasta a complete dinner. They’re both much more willing to try green vegetables lately, but declined the bok choi at this dinner. Then, a couple of hours later when J. got home and was eating, A. decided the combined recipe did indeed look tasty. He got his own bowl and although he picked out most of the vegetables, he slurped up the sesame noodles and loved it. Since he eats my Spinach Lasagna Roll-Ups greens and all, I’m pretty sure I could make this recipe again with spinach and have him eat the whole thing.