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 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.
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.
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.
Double the honey, please! Roasted Honeynut Squash has been a favorite for me this season. They are just so cute, easy to peel, and have such a sweet flavor that they taste like a mini concentrated butternut squash—which is exactly how they were designed!
As a mom of a busy toddler, I know the struggle to come up with quick healthy meals, so I have a lot of love for anything I can throw on a baking sheet like this roasted butternut squash and onions dish. While the squash and onions are roasting, you can make the rice, and then toss it together for a complete vegetarian meal.
Did you know that carrots were originally purple, yellow, and sometimes white? But in the 1700s the orange carrot was born, and it was preferred because it had higher amounts of beta carotene. Fascinating, right? Well, the Honey-Glazed Carrots recipe I’m going to share with you today is so flexible that you can make it with orange carrots, yellow carrots, or purple carrots. You can also mix it up and add parsnips!
