Is there anything more soul-soothing than going out into your garden to pick fresh peppers or tomatoes to wash and chop up for dinner? Garden-to-table dining is right at your fingertips when you become a food gardener and start making our easy healthy recipes.
Beyond the delicious benefits of growing your own food to make easy healthy recipes, you benefit from choosing what to grow and the unique varieties you can’t find in a grocery store, which can lift your culinary spirits. Take heirloom vegetables, for example. Even though they aren’t bred for it specifically, heirloom varieties are adaptable to their environment, meaning you can save seeds, and each year you’ll likely get healthier plants that are more resistant to disease and pests. The more you grow them, the better they get.
Even if you don’t have a lot of space to work with, you can start a kitchen garden (a smaller garden that mostly has herbs and a few choice veggies) or a container garden (great for growing indoors, on patios, and balconies). You’d be surprised how much you can grow in a small amount of square footage, especially with plants that climb.
If you love to cook easy healthy recipes, you’ll do well to plant an herb garden and even a spice garden so you can always harvest fresh herbs and spices on hand. Then, let your palate guide the rest of what you plant. Tomatoes become tomato sauces and catsups, cucumbers become pickles, lettuce becomes salads, onions and garlic go with just about everything, and a bounty of squashes will serve roasted squash all winter long!
We have lots of garden-fresh easy healthy recipes below, and we welcome you to also read our Recipes from Your Garden freebie. Enjoy!
I firmly believe that there is a section of heaven piled high with end-of-summer beefsteak tomatoes and a shaker of salt. Just thinking about it makes my mouth water. But what is the best beefsteak tomato variety to plant? The answer may have just become a bit simpler! Beefsteak tomatoes are the kings of the […]
Summer squash is one of those vegetables (botanically speaking, a fruit) that seems to grow, and grow, and grow. There have been summers where I don’t even plant it because I simply don’t have enough neighbors to give it all away to!
Did you ever think you’d be looking at a green juice recipe for kids? What’s wrong with the “purple stuff” we all grew up on, huh? Let’s talk about it. It’s not often as parents that we feel successful, or like we’re doing something right. My daughter was a micro-preemie and I spent the first […]
The great thing about growing New potatoes or “New Baby Potatoes” is that they’re exactly as they sound, potatoes that are still young (about 10 weeks old), which means they can make a great spring planting and early summer harvest instead of waiting all summer long for them to grow into larger potatoes. About three […]
Usually, when I write recipes from my garden, I’m referring to a surplus of tomatoes, or squash, or even peppers that all come at once and you feel like you have to quickly rush to consume. But even though corn has a similar shelf-life (about 5-7 days in the fridge if it’s still in the husk), I never worry, I just plot out how I’m going to use it all. To me, there’s never too much corn!
There are lots of edible spring flowers, but where I live in the northeast, the first three to arrive are usually Dandelions, Violets and Forsythia blossoms. So, if you’re up for a little foraging in your backyard for a free salad, you might already have everything you need to make this Dandelion Greens Salad! Plus, your friends will think you’re either really really cool or really weird when you post photos of it online, and both are compliments in my book.
Everybody loves a butternut squash soup, but what if you have a variety of sweet winter squash nearing the end of their shelf life, and you just want to use it all up at once? Good news – you can! In the roasted winter squash soup recipe below, I’ll show you an exact recipe for using up a bulk of your different varieties of winter squash, but fear not – if you don’t have the exact squash I do, it’s totally adjustable, just use 6lbs of any type of sweet winter squash you have.
Chicken Cacciatore is a spicy, saucy dish that uses chicken, cherry tomatoes, bell peppers, and onions as the primary ingredients. It’s typically made in a skillet, but if you don’t yet know how to make Chicken Cacciatore in a Crock-Pot, you’re in for a real treat.
Green beans are such a delight to have in the garden. They don’t require a ton of sun to grow, pole beans can double as decoration on a trellis, and in terms of a side dish for dinner, they’re one of my favorites. Probably because they go so well with my other two favorite ingredients: lemon and garlic. And this roasted lemon-garlic green beans recipe is so easy to make—especially necessary when you have a heaping portion of green beans harvested—that it’ll become a weeknight staple in no time!
Root vegetables are notoriously shamed for their high starch and sugar content, but coming up with balanced meal ideas is easier than you think! Below are three really easy recipes you can make on the fly with just a few added ingredients.
