Vegetable Side Dishes

Vidalia Onion Casserole

November 15, 2021 by Lindsay 6 Comments

Make onions the STAR of the show with this classic Southern onion casserole! This version uses sweet onions, has 9 ingredients, and can be made in advance for a yummy weeknight side dish with grilled chicken or as part of a Thanksgiving or Easter dinner. Bonus points for this being a Ritz Cracker topped casserole! (aka the best kind)

close up of ritz cracker topping on onion casserole.

Onion casserole. Heard of it? Had it? It's new-ish to me; my MIL brought us a version she made earlier this summer with just "I'm bringing onion casserole" and I just immediately knew I had found my new favorite veggie side dish.

I love a casserole, as we well know. I also really like onions, and sweet onions + cheesy stuff + Ritz cracker topping? Count.Me.In.

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BEST Easy Asparagus Casserole

November 1, 2021 by Lindsay 56 Comments

Super easy and healthy asparagus casserole that comes together in just a few steps. This is perfect for Thanksgiving, Easter, or any meal that needs a yummy low carb side dish! This is one of my most popular recipes with over 200k clicks, likes, shares, and saves!

white plate with serving of cheesy baked asparagus on a blue napkin.

When it comes to Thanksgiving, there's a balance of "we always have that," and "let's try something new," you know?

This is the BEST asparagus casserole ever, but I'd also venture that it's the best Thanksgiving side dish ever. It's the perfect line between "super classic" and "a little updated," and let's just take a moment to bow to the Casserole Gods of Thanksgiving. They love us, and we love them.

So. Easy asparagus casserole! The fancy feeling of a veg that isn't green beans with the comfort of cheese and Ritz crackers.

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Vegan Marinated Mushrooms

September 30, 2021 by Lindsay 7 Comments

One of our favorite vegan mushrooms, these vegan marinated mushrooms are SO YUMMY and the perfect vegan appetizer to add to a party spread! They have just a few pantry ingredients and are done in 30 minutes, but last for weeks in the fridge!

hand holding a marinated mushroom on a toothpick over open jar of mushrooms.

I. Love. Mushrooms. Like, a lot a lot.

These mushrooms in particular will always and forever remind me of Christmas, even though my family never had them. I think this is a total throwback recipe, 80's or 90's or something - did you eat these as a kid? My next door neighbors in Japan made these for almost every holiday, and I LOVED them. I think they used Italian dressing and canned mushrooms, no shame in that game, and the chewy mushroom in the tangy vinaigrette was just my favorite thing ever.

I'm all about anything tangy or pickled, and I think these are such a great addition to a holiday party. They're so light and bright and a perfect complement to the heavier dishes that we have this time of year. I like having them as part of an appetizer spread with some pimento cheese or buffalo chicken dip; they're vegan and gluten free so everyone can enjoy them.

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Spring Salad with Asparagus

March 30, 2021 by Lindsay 3 Comments

This raw bok choy salad with asparagus and peas is the most delicious easy salad! A no-dressing dressing with lemon juice and olive oil + some fresh parmesan rounds out this gluten free side or main dish. Round this spring salad out with some favorite grilled chicken and shortcut focaccia, or serve this as a cold vegetable side dish!

It's another non-dressing salad, aka my favorite way to throw together a super quick and fresh meal.

Farmer's markets are finally coming back, which means we are in Spring Greens heaven, and so many of these ingredients are able to be found locally right now.

The gist is this: raw greens, fresh herbs, and a few choice veggies blanched super quickly in salted water that get cooled and served on top. Salt, pepper, lemon juice, olive oil, and parmesan top the dish for flavor, so we don't need to mess with making a dressing.

I LOVE salads like this this time of year, because you can customize them based on what you like or have in your fridge that needs to be used up. Literally any veggie, herb, or cheese can be swapped out here, this is just a combination that I love.

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Easy Japanese Sweet Carrots

January 28, 2021 by Lindsay 5 Comments

Just like the kind you find on hibachi plates, Japanese sweet carrots to level up your homemade Japanese fusion food! Make these super easy sweet glazed carrots a meal with my favorite hibachi steak, hibachi shrimp, and hibachi vegetables!

More hibachi! This time my favorite little nibbly side dish, the sweet carrots that come on the side of hibachi meals, mainly of the takeout variety.

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Gluten Free Baked Broccoli and Cheese

October 14, 2020 by Lindsay 14 Comments

This creamy, cheesy baked broccoli has just FIVE INGREDIENTS and comes together in under an hour. It's my favorite GF Thanksgiving side dish for this year and is absolutely replacing traditional broccoli casserole (much as I love all casseroles!). This cheesy broccoli wins the side dish game again and again.

cheesy baked broccoli in a white baking dish with sunflower in the background.

Well, HELLO. We're starting Thanksgiving side dish recipes!!

(no one asked, I realize this)

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Roasted Spiced Brussels Sprouts

November 20, 2019 by Lindsay 1 Comment

One of my best "use the oven at all times" Thanksgiving tips: plan an easy side dish that can roast or broil while the turkey rests and is carved.

EVEN IF you have a few casseroles that need to reheat at the same time, having one veggie that comes out of the oven fresh right as you're ready to eat makes a really nice balance to what can be a pretty heavy meal.

This technique can apply to tons of veggies, like this 5-minute asparagus from last year or these broiled lemon green beans. This year, I'm doing spiced, roasted Brussels sprouts. They get washed/prepped early in the week, then tossed with butter and spices early in the day. It's a raw veg, so no need to clog up fridge space. They hang out on a baking sheet prepped and ready, roast in the oven while the turkey gets its beauty treatment, and done! A vegetable for those of us that like some vegetables with our butter.

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Crispy Smashed Potatoes + Garlic Butter Sauce

July 23, 2019 by Lindsay 3 Comments

The most yummy crispy smashed potatoes from Bon Appetit! This is one of my favorite tiny potato recipes: tender boiled potatoes smashed and drizzled with garlic butter sauce, then baked to crispy, salty, buttery submission. Make. These. Now.

Don't leave me. It feels good. Embrace it. The garlic butter, that is.

Sheet pan of crispy smashed potatoes close up with white napkin on the edge.

Hello and welcome to your new favorite side dish! These smashed potatoes are YUMMY, a word that honestly should be used to describe as many of your foods as possible. You only live once, potatoes are a vegetable, and garlic butter is the savory icing on the potato cake that we all need to use whenever we possibly can.

These garlic butter potatoes are, frankly, the ideal potato side dish. They go perfectly with some easy stewed cabbage, add some fish and chicken and here we go, dinner is handled?

These are my version of Bon Appetit's smashed potatoes: they're simple to make in just a few steps and the end result is a fluffy-on-the-inside, crispy-on-the-outside cross between mashed potatoes and french fries that is REALLY yummy. Trust.

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Roasted Carrots with Bacon

June 24, 2019 by Lindsay Leave a Comment

On New Year's Eve of....last year? this year? how do we describe this? the one that just happened. Let's start again.

Roasted Carrots with Bacon from funnyloveblog.com

The last time we had a New Year's Eve, Jay and I went to a fancy dinner with our best friends. It was excellent. Will was just a few weeks old, we felt free, and the food was fabulous.

The dinner was one of those "four courses choose one thing each course" fixed price special event dealios, and for most of the courses we each chose different stuff so we could try everything. And almost without fail, the vegetables were the best things on the table. I'm talking pate vs a raw cauliflower thing, greens vs pork belly - on paper, the meat stuff should have been the best.

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5-Minute Broiled Asparagus {vegan}

November 13, 2018 by Lindsay 3 Comments

What do you do for your Thanksgiving re: green things or health considerations?

Some people are all balance every day and some are more just casseroles is fine, thanks. We fall somewhere in the middle with a lot of "we do this every year" and me trying to shove new things into the mix. One thing that is normal for us is that my dad always does a "plain" green veg. Something free of bacon or cheese or condensed xx of yy soup, and it works so well with some of the heavier flavors we have on Thanksgiving.

This is that! A super simple, mostly pure veg. Lemon juice and olive oil and salt go so well with asparagus, and you can broil this right at the end of your meal prep right after you carve the turkey - seriously last minute stuff, even after the casseroles are reheated. The result is a charred lemon flavor that adds a ton to the asparagus without overpowering it, and the health benefits of, you know, anything green.

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Bruleed and Curried Carrots

November 7, 2018 by Lindsay Leave a Comment

Continuing our Thanksgiving prep! Enter...a newish way to eat veggies with lots of butter in them. I like carrots in almost all forms, but they can definitely feel like an afterthought or boring vegetable. We roast them at home a ton with olive oil, salt, and dried dill - that's probably my favorite way to eat them.

My family never did carrots at holidays, but I think the boiled-in-sugar version is common, or at least was in the 80's, in many families. I think carrots (I always picture them at cafeterias like this) boiled in butter and sugar are delicious, and that was kind of the impetus for this recipe. We boil the carrots in stock, butter, and spices, then broil them with some coarse sugar for a fake brulee effect. The end result is tender, flavorful, and so warming from the spices.

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Whole Roasted Cauliflower in Butter

October 15, 2018 by Lindsay 1 Comment

I've started joking with my family when they're like mmmm love those potatoes, and I'm all, you mean the butter with a little potato? Yeah, it's local.

I use local butter and buy it in two pound logs and that makes it healthy, and environmentally friendly, and community-conscious, and an all-around good choice. Showing you this recipe is doubly relevant today because we watched the "Fat" episode of Salt Fat Acid Heat last night and HOLY COW HOW INSPIRING. The show itself is phenom, the setting is gorgeous, we learned a ton (I think I safely speak for Jay when I say that we, as a couple, like learning about food in all the ways all the time), and I came away with about ten new ideas for holiday cooking specifically. Highly recommend you watch it this week all the way through so we can discuss.

So, given the fat theme, it makes perfect sense that we roast our cauliflower in butter. Good butter, enough butter so that you know it's there, butter butter butter. The concept here is super easy: some raw ingredients (literally salt, fat, acid) in and on a whole cauliflower, some liquid and cherry tomatoes to bring everything together, roasty toasty, and fresh herbs to finish. We served this a few weeks ago with some chicken and veggies, but honestly I could eat half of this cauliflower with a hunk of bread and call it dinner. I use chicken stock here because we aren't vegetarian, but veggie stock would be wonderful for a truly vegetarian option.

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Sugar Snap Pea Salad

July 24, 2018 by Lindsay 1 Comment

This Southern-style sugar snap pea salad is WHAT YOU NEED for hot summer day. Perfect for meal prep, a cookout, or potluck, the creamy dressing, salty bacon, and crunchy, snappy peas form the most delicious summer side dish ever. This version is gluten free!

Southern = it has bacon.

Here's our new favorite summer side dish! We are all about sugar snap peas, and this time of year when they're actually GOOD and we have a chance of finding them locally we have them around all the time. We eat a lot of raw veggies as snacks with hummus or ranch, but turning them into quick side dishes to go with grilled meat or to take to a potluck is another favorite thing to do with peas especially. There are tons of variations of this salad, and I made mine with a combination of classic Southern flavors (bacon, mayo) with some extra brightening flavors from lemon juice and fresh herbs. The combination of creamy/salty with herby freshness is SO good, and of course it goes without saying that while not a perfect superfood, this is a better choice than, say, the exact same salad base with potatoes or pasta instead of a raw veg.

Raw veggies balance bacon, is my aesthetic.

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Pimento Cheese Squash Casserole

July 9, 2018 by Lindsay Leave a Comment

Oh hell yes.

Hi! How was your weekend? We had a great one, including being at home with Beck all day Saturday and not leaving the house. We did yard work, hung some remnants back on the walls from the construction on our house, watched TWO movies, and cooked a boat-load, which was fun but also a benefit to eating out on the weekends means the kitchen isn't so ridiculously dirty all of the time. Cue me spending Monday undoing our all-at-home weekend.

So this casserole. This time of year we seem to find ourselves with tons of squash and zucchini, all of the time. My grandparents grow it, it is super cheap at the farmer's market, cooks quickly, lasts for awhile in the fridge, reason after reason to keep it around at all times. Mostly we saute it with onions and salt and pepper for a quick dinner veg, but sometimes, especially when we have a ton of it, we need to go old-school and decadent, you know? This is that. It's definitely a vegetable and definitely vegetarian, but other than that I'm not going to scream at you about health benefits.

This casserole is made on the stovetop and includes almost all of the seasonings from my favorite pimento cheese and traditional squash casserole. Ritz crackers are a must for topping, and you can bake the casserole for a few minutes and eat it immediately or keep it in the fridge for a few days and heat it up for dinner one night this week. Make-ahead friendly!

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Skillet Tomatoes and Corn with Pancetta

July 5, 2018 by Lindsay 1 Comment

Ok, here is our detox-but-its-still-a-holiday-week compromise dish for the next few days/weeks/months.

How was your fourth? We did a party on Tuesday and yesterday with friends/toddlers/grilling, I ate way too much beef and loved slash regretted it, and I feel like I can't shower enough times to become not sweaty. Suggestions welcome for that one. The humidity around here is quite excessive.

So let's talk about this compromise food. Wonderful veggie base, corn and tomatoes that are getting just so good this time of year. Garlic for your health and happiness. Then for mental health and protein pancetta and cheese because you're worth it, basil at the end because of course there is. The best part of it is that it's made super quickly so the ingredients stay super fresh and not mushy at all, and we have a healthy + worth it meal in half an hour or so with very little fuss.

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Momofuku's Pan-Roasted Brussels Sprouts w/ Vinaigrette

April 26, 2018 by Lindsay 1 Comment

I almost hesitate to tell you what kind of vinaigrette because half of the earth will immediately be like EW GROSS NO X OUT.

Because, folks, the utter magic of this dish comes from a heavy hand of fish sauce, which I'm perfectly aware freaks people out, even though I don't pretend to understand why. I think most fear is really just fear of the unknown, though, so if you get to know fish sauce, you will love it and not be scared of it. Boom.

The fish sauce in this application alllmost acts like soy sauce, just a salty earthy umami flavor, not fishy at all, similar to Caesar dressing which gets its flavor from anchovy but doesn't taste like fish either. The dressing here also features garlic, hot peppers, and lime juice, and the huge punch of flavor with the stinky-in-a-good-way Brussels is absolutely wonderful.

The Brussels sprouts, for their part, are cooked half in the skillet half in the oven, super quickly, to get some crispy edges + tender but not mushy insides. The sprouts get dark at the edges and bright green throughout, and tons of fresh herbs add to the brightness of the flavors.

My friend Emily introduced me to this dish, and I've made it three times in as many months, which is a lot for us because we cook a bunch of different things AND like Brussels lots of different ways. The last time I made these I actually had leftover dressing and sprouts so the next day I shredded the Brussels on my mandoline and tossed them raw with some of the leftover dressing, and they were GOBBLED up. I may have liked them more than the cooked version of the recipe, I honestly can't tell.

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Marinated Grilled Artichokes {vegan}

March 29, 2018 by Lindsay 1 Comment

I mean, could there be a more appropriate springy recipe? I'm thinking no, but this one isn't trying too hard with excessive amounts of green stuff. Or any green stuff, really. It is, however, a super simple snack/appetizer/side dish that happens to be VEGAN and takes all of 20 minutes to make.

It is also full of flavor and texture and just feels like warm-weather with the help of an indoor grill because our grill is under the house out of the way of the never-ending construction.

I love marinated artichokes straight out of a jar, especially on cheese plates or as a snack before dinner with nuts/wine, etc. We recently went to a new Italian restaurant in town and their antipasto platter had something similar to these: artichokes that tasted tangy and marinated and familiar but that were charred on the outside and served warm. I loved them (and ate them all, Jay can go either way on artichokes); the contrast of the tangy marinade and charred grilled bits was so good. HOWEVER, when I decided to make them there was no way in hell I was going to mess with a gazillion fresh artichokes even though they are in season. Trimming and choking fresh artichokes takes forever and I always find myself injured. Plus, Trader Joe's has frozen artichokes, so the texture is a little more firm than a jarred version and they hold up really well on the grill.

So! We make a super quick marinade. You can do this the day before or right before grilling, the flavor is great no matter what. A few minutes on the grill just for some blackening, and then we serve hot, warm, room temperature, or cold after a day or two in the fridge. There is no wrong way to serve these, and I'd suggest making a massive batch because extra things to go with wine and cheese is not a bad thing ever. See also: Easter brunch/lunch.

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Simple Pan-Seared Parmesan Brussels

March 15, 2018 by Lindsay 1 Comment

Five ingredients, 20 minutes, perfect side dish, boom.

But let's back up. I went to brunch at this new hipster place recently for a friend's birthday, and it was .... predictably brunchy yet good. Beermosas, runny eggs on everything (no thanks), and the promise that "if you like this you should come back for dinner," which I totally want to because I don't like eggs. Make no mistake, the brunch itself was fabulous, I was child-free, the conversation was amazing, and we ordered some dish that included fried Parmesan Brussels sprouts as a base to a grit cake and a poached egg. My friend (we were sharing) got the whole egg, I got extra sprouts, all was right with the world.

The gist was this: the Brussels were definitely fried, but then tossed in COPIOUS amounts of Parm after the cooking process, so there was this great contrast between the cooked veggie and shredded cheese, which I loved. For this method, I did a pan-sear + oven cook to avoid the fat and stink of frying. The result is similar but healthier, and extra parm and crushed red pepper over everything makes this our new favorite way to eat Brussels. You will need an oven-safe skillet, usually cast iron or stainless steel, but I have some nonstick skillets that can be in the oven at high temperatures, so there are lots of options for cooking this dish.

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Mascarpone Risotto with Stewed Wild Mushrooms

February 20, 2018 by Lindsay 1 Comment

I, shall we say, stewed (heh) over what to call this. First, it's delicious. Second, it's vegetarian. Third, though, it's basically some risotto and some mushrooms thrown together to make a meal OR to go with a larger meal with some meat or another veggie side dish.

So I almost posted them separately, but they go so well together that I wanted to present them to you as a complete meal, which they totally are.

Unless you make them separately and serve them at different times, which also works great. You see the problem.

I first had this idea after reading this similar recipe from Love and Olive Oil, and I couldn't get it out of my mind. I adore mushrooms and Jay hates them, it's one of the very few things that we difer on. There are plenty of foods that one of us prefers over the other, but a whole dinner of rice and mushrooms for someone who is mainly low-carb and hates fungus was just not happening. So, I made this for lunch for myself and then ate it again that night for dinner. Jay had some mushrooms and a little rice and I added steak and sauteed spinach for him. Everyone was happy, but I could honestly eat an entire plate just like this.

It's so simple: very basic risotto with mascarpone added right at the end; use veggie stock to make this vegetarian. The mushrooms are vegetarian as they are; a mix of fresh and dried mushrooms for a variety of textures and flavors. Onion, butter, and tomato paste make a super rich flavor combination, and the mushrooms sear then stew while you stir the risotto together. This is SO good.

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Black Bean Salsa with Avocado

September 13, 2017 by Lindsay Leave a Comment

Delicious black bean salad with corn and avocado! This recipe can be used as black bean salsa for scooping with chips or black bean salad to serve as a side dish or over salad greens for a yummy lunch or main dish salad dinner. This black bean salsa is vegan and gluten free and can be made in advance - just stir in the avocado right at the end.

Because snacks.

Jay, it should be said, was very misleading about how much he liked sports when we were dating. Looking back, I could have SWORN that he didn't care a ton, was all hippie and cool, cared about random bands and comedians and thought that too much money was injected into sports. He loved golf, but that was different.

Love is blind, people, love is blind.

Between Fantasy Football/NFL and college, the football time of year has us talking about football daily and watching it several times per week, mind you Jay will claim up and down that he hardly watches it and "most guys like watch so much more, we don't even have CABLE!" The last part is true, we cancelled cable because Jay begged me to.

To get around the sportswatchingthatwedontreallycareabout, I handle The Foods. This is a definitely vegan and gluten free Mexican appetizer, filled with tons of wholesome ingredients and you are definitely not required to eat it with chips. I call it a salsa because it's GREAT with chips, but it's also great cold over rice, as a black bean salad side dish for tacos or burritos, or over greens as a salad. Maybe some feta or sharp cheddar on top, I don't know.

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