Hearty Veggie and Brown Rice Salad Bowl

I love copycat recipes. I've made a couple before and google them often. One of my current favorite salads is Starbucks' veggies & rice salad bowl, but it costs about $8 each time I buy it (which is very often). I decided to make it for myself and spent about $15 on ingredients that made about five salads! The recipe is below and makes two salads.

Garlic Butter Spaghetti Squash

I've made approximately one million spaghetti squash recipes in the past few months, and I'm not stopping now. I picked up a small squash for this awesome recipe with two of my favorite things: garlic and butter. This recipe serves two and was inspired by a recipe over at livelovepasta.

Baked Spaghetti Squash

I've made a couple spaghetti squash recipes before and, when I was given a fresh garden squash from a good friend this week, I almost made one of the ol' faithful recipes. I'm glad I decided to go rogue and try something new. This recipe was delicious, portioned, and easy to make. Oh, and spaghetti squash is much healthier to eat than spaghetti noodles! I got the idea for this recipe from a food blog called Cooking with my Kid; the only differences are that my recipe is meatless and I cooked it on my own (no kids here!). My recipe makes two servings.

Guest Post: Row House Gardening

My friend, Steve, has an awesome vegetable garden that he tends to every year and because he currently lives in a row home, I've become pretty interested in how he is so successful with it (I tried some of the veggies from last year & they were great!). He's taken the time to outline how he plants and tends to his garden throughout the warm months, and hopefully he will be back throughout the growing season to give us updates and tips!

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Spring! Finally a chance to get outside and enjoy some warmer weather. That’s actually how I got started with my garden a few years ago. Being a transplant from Texas, where there are essentially nine months of summer followed by three months of not-summer, by mid-March I’m getting antsy to get outside and do SOMETHING. While March is generally too early to plant annuals and vegetables in Maryland, I can at least get the indoor part started and get to work on my planting areas outside (…errr, not that that’s actually happened yet).

Like many in Baltimore, my wife and I live in a pretty standard-sized row house with a small backyard. My planting area basically consists of an 8’x 4’ raised planter (which was super easy and very inexpensive to build even without any carpentry skills), a 7’x 11’ in-ground planter and about a dozen large plastic tubs which I use for everything from lettuce to carrots and radishes. The tubs are 10 to 20 gallon containers and if you know a landscaper, you can probably get them for free, as they’re commonly discarded after the trees or large shrubs which they contain are discarded. You might even ask at Lowe’s, Home Depot or a local nursery if they have any extra. Help keep some plastic out of a landfill and grow a plant in it instead!

Guest Post: Veggie Quesadilla with Baja Sauce

Here's another guest post, this time from the wonderful Ben! There is more information about Ben at the end of this post. Thanks so much for sending this recipe in, Ben. I hope you all enjoy!
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Quesadillas are my comfort food. I love that there are so many possibilities and you can cater to a wide variety of cravings. Having the quesadilla in my corner is very comforting since I can often use extra ingredients from previous recipes. Using as much of the vegetables in the refrigerator's crisper before it spoils for as many meals as possible is both exciting and frugal. So once a week, I can usually clean out my crisper and have a delicious meal in the process.

For this week, I had several bell peppers, an onion, a handful of mushrooms, and some cheese, all of it leftover from a pizza I made. I also had some leftover corn and rice from a meal the other day so I reheated that for a side. The ingredients below made two large quesadillas. 

Spaghetti Squash topped with Maple-Glazed Tofu

After my last spaghetti squash recipe went so well, I definitely had to do it again. This time, I decided to search for a different topping and found maple-glazed tofu. Magical. Also, if you sub the butter for vegan butter, it is a completely vegan meal. This recipe makes about three to four servings (depending on the size of the squash).

Spaghetti Squash & "Meatballs"

I have heard of this mythical vegetable called the spaghetti squash, but I didn't know that it actually existed until today. It is surprisingly easy to prepare, and it is a perfect substitute for actual spaghetti noodles; it is a healthy (read: lower calories & fat) and tasty alternative. I am not yet ready to completely give up pasta, but this meal has really changed the game for me. This recipe makes four servings.