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!
The winter months are such a joy for cooking, especially if you grew winter squash the year before. Since winter squash, like butternut, honeynut, and delicata, can last months in the right environment, you can grow enough to feed your family all winter long—and that’s exactly what I like to do. It’s also why I have a dozen roasted delicata squash recipes up my sleeve, but today I’m going to share with you the one my family loves the most.
As a kid, I played this game with my friend where we’d blindfold each other and take random food or condiments from the fridge and get the other person to guess what it was. It would always end in tears when one of us reached for the hot sauce. All of this by way of saying, I’ve always been interested in weird things you can actually eat.
Have you ever made homemade strawberry soda? In our home, we try to limit the amount of processed foods we bring in, and that includes everything from bread to soda. We almost never have soda in the house, though I do worry that my husband has a mineral water addiction that’s being left untreated and may need intervention.
I’ll be honest, I’m not a cucumber sandwich kind of person, generally, I don’t eat cucumbers un-pickled at all, and if I didn’t love pickles so much I probably wouldn’t have them in my garden. But I sure do love pickles, in fact, I like them so much that I rarely bother with canning them.
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.
In the northeast, strawberry season begins in June, and if you’re lucky, lasts through August. I’ve always been envious of those who live in warmer climates and can simply garden year-round and make a recipe like this strawberry chocolate chip sorbet whenever they want. I love having four seasons, but that still sounds like utopia to me!
Do you remember being a kid and hating vegetables? I don’t think any child was exempt from the green bean gag reflex, and canned vegetables were purely to blame. For decades, kids were brought up on mushy watery veggies in cans that might have been on the shelf longer than they were alive. The lie that veggies were gross was carried from generation to generation for most families…except by those with gardens. Trust me, this recipe for cold roasted vegetables is entirely different! The veggies in this recipe are crisp, seasoned, and full of flavor!
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!
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.
If you ever wanted to play Russian Roulette with peppers, Shishito can be a bit of fun, my fellow daredevil. One in 10 Shishito peppers are hot while the others are barely hotter than bell peppers. They range from 50 – 200 Scoville Heat Units on the Scoville Scale, with 200 being more like pepperoncini, so still not Jalapeno level. They say the peppers that get the most sun are the ones that get the hottest.
