Vegetables Abound

Recently I've been on a vegetables kick--which I'm sure just thrills my family members. Above is a photo of the vegetables I purchased for two weeks' worth of meals--not counting that I'd already put away a whole paper bag full of vegetables.

There are seasons of my life when we're eating boring boiled frozen veggies at best, there are seasons when we're living on frozen premade meals from Trader Joe's without any veggies at all, but then there are seasons when I can do a lot of cooking from scratch, including many interesting vegetable dishes. In the last couple of weeks, I've made:

Roasted vegetables, tomato-rice soup, sweet potato stew, roasted asparagus, pasta e fagiole soup, minestrone soup, spinach and chickpeas, spinach with Parmesan bread crumbs, Cuban black beans over rice, zucchini with feta, and fresh vegetable soup (which involved things like kale, savoy cabbage, Swiss chard, cauliflower, broccoli, zucchini, carrots, peppers, celery, onion--and which I won't be making again because I did not like it!).

The day before we departed for Washington D.C., I had a goodly amount of fresh vegetables remaining that I knew wouldn't last the weekend, but I didn't want to waste them. I made several recipe dishes that day: one recipe I tried with my remaining kale was kale chips.

Finished product: While I will not claim, as others have, that these are as delicious as potato chips, I will say that they taste like oil and salt, which everybody likes, and that I found myself eating most of the entire plate. Chris gave them a thumbs down.

I found a way not to throw away a bunch of basil, cilantro, and parsley. After "only" six years of running my home kitchen, it occurred to me that day that herbs freeze well! So I chopped up my gorgeous fresh herbs, divided them into ice cubes with a tiny bit of water, and froze them. Then I popped the cubes out into a labeled Ziplock bag. I've already used some of them in cooking and they work beautifully. I probably could have purchased a Gucci handbag with the money I've wasted in the last six years by throwing away most of the bunches of fresh herbs I couldn't use fast enough!