My Therapist Cooks

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Vegan Potato Salad

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This vegan potato salad with no mayo is a super easy summer side dish that comes together with just a few ingredients! It tastes just like salt and vinegar potato chips, has tons of fresh herbs, and can be served warm or at room temp. I love it with cast iron skillet salmon for a delicious weeknight dinner, or as a summer potluck side dish offering.

bowl of vegan potato salad

Hello, hello flavors of middle school chip dreams wrapped up in some adult ingredients.

LOOK!  It's a no mayo potato salad!

Listen, I love super fatty, carby side dishes in the summer.  Seriously.  A lot. BUT, I'm also into dishes that can feed a variety of dishes and are light enough that we can Eat All The Things and not feel uncomfortably full.

Like this vegan potato salad! This is one of those side dishes that goes with ANYTHING all summer, and the flavor combo is riiiight in the middle of salt and vinegar and sour cream and onion potato chips, aka heaven.

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Vegan Tabouli Salad

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Delicious, easy vegan tabouli salad with marinated chickpeas that is the perfect light lunch! We serve this often as a side dish for grilled chicken or baked tofu, or take it to summer potlucks for a yummy vegan side dish.

gray pottery bowl of vegan tabouli salad topped with parsley and marinated garbanzo beans with blue napkins

I. Love. Summer.  

I love the feeling of school being out. I love the heat and humidity, even when I bitch about it. I love the longer days, the smell of gardenias, going to hear music downtown, the whole cliché shebang.  

I especially LOVE summer-feeling food.  Grilled meat with fresh or raw side dishes, that great mix of healthy and decadent, salads so fresh and crisp that they somehow quench your thirst, you know?  

This tabouli is one of those salads for our family, and I can't get enough.  My mom used to make picnics of hummus and tabouli and pita long before those things were cool, and bring them to the pool late swim practices in the summer.  She made both with a heavy hand of lemon, one of my favorite flavors for dishes like this.

This version of tabouli is a teensy bit jazzed up with marinating the chick peas, but that's super hands off and can be done way in advance - the longer in advance the better, actually.  The garbanzos end up creamy but still with texture and so much flavor from the lemon juice, garlic, and crushed red pepper.  I honestly can't even.  

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Vegan Pasta Salad with Roasted Veggies

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Yummy vegan pasta salad is the perfect summer side dish! I make this with any seasonal veggies I have on hand, pine nuts, and lots of fresh herbs and lemon vinaigrette for brightness. Change up the veggies, pasta shape, and herbs each time for a fresh take on this yummy, healthy side dish!

large serving bowl of vegan pasta salad with asparagus and tomatoes

I just finished the book Hello, Summer and tbh want to start all recipes like this with OH, HELLO SUMMER, but it feels kind of redundant.

Know that I'm thinking it, though.

This is, to me, the pasta salad to end all pasta salads. It's light, fresh, and full of summery flavors. I love that it's vegan because lots of different types of eaters can eat it, and almost every aspect of it can be switched up based on what you have on hand. Different nuts, veggies, fresh herbs, it all works.

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Watermelon Juice with Lime and Mint

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The best homemade mocktail for summer! Homemade watermelon water (or watermelon juice) blended with lime and fresh mint is the most refreshing, hydrating, electrolyte-packed drink to sip on. It's a homemade agua fresca in 15 minutes, done and done!

top view of watermelon water with mint leaves

For summer!  A drink.  A refreshing drink.  

I loathe the Starbucks refreshers.  I realize that's a harsh word considering I've never actually had one, but I can all but guarantee they're full of sugar and also refresh isn't a noun and shouldn't be made into one.  Is my opinion.  

But!  This blended watermelon drink is actually refreshing.  It is incredibly light, incredibly quick to throw together, and so very good for you.

I first had this years ago at the yoga studio where I worked; we called it watermelon tonic and it appeared all summer every summer.  Watermelon and lime are a great combination, the ingredients are good and good for you, and fresh mint just screams summer to me.

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Pan Fried Tofu with Thai Peanut Sauce

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Our 100% favorite plant-based weeknight dinner that we eat at least every other week! Perfect spicy peanut sauce (make it in advance!), crispy pan fried tofu, and slaw with whatever greens you have make for the most delicious vegan rice bowl dinner that is healthy and comforting.

tofu rice bowls

I don't think I've ever said this about anything before (I probably have), but this is hands down our favorite dinner.

We have other things that we love, other things that are in regular rotation, for sure, but this is our dinner. One that we've tweaked and crafted over the years and every time we have it we kind of sink into this "it's healthy but comforting" haze of joy.

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Easy Black Beans and Rice

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This gluten free black beans and rice recipe has just 8 ingredients and is done in about half an hour! I love rice and beans for a quick vegetarian dinner, and make these black beans in advance often for an even faster meal-prepped dinner. If you have some extra black beans, black bean salsa is great to have around for snacks!

rice and beans easy recipe

Weeknight vegan dinner idea, here we go! Weeknight vegan/dairy free/gluten free/BUT NOT SAD dinner, to be exact.

Free of some things people avoid, not free of joy, etc.

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3-Ingredient Smashed Cucumbers

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Easy, light, and refreshing, this 3-ingredient smashed cucumbers recipe is done in just 30 minutes. The result is the most delicious, juicy cucumber bites. These are vegan, gluten free, and dairy free.

3-Ingredient Smashed Cucumbers

Oh heyyyyyyy not really a recipe recipe!

That's honestly all the brainpower I have in quarantine week, 8,276 you're welcome.

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Easiest No-Knead Bread In A Dutch Oven

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Mark Bittman's no-knead bread (easy dutch oven bread) is the easiest, most foolproof path to artisan-style bread at home with just 4 ingredients and a little time. No special equipment, no kneading, this is the best homemade bread ever!

baking bread in a dutch oven

Mark Bittman does it again! I have been waiting and waiting to show you this.

Much like my favorite pancakes that we make at least weekly, this homemade no-knead bread recipe was a real game-changer for me.

It of course started in quarantine, as so many carb endeavors have, but I waited a few months to write about it because I wanted to be sure it worked every.single.time.

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Summertime Green Curry {vegan}

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Today in Quick Dinners With Four-ish Ingredients:

And also What To Do With Baked Tofu!

This is a dinner that I made specifically to pair with the baked tofu from Monday, and one that we make all the time. We love Thai food, and Thai green curry is something that I order almost every time I go to a Thai restaurant.

Curry, though, can take some time to simmer and build flavors. I love doing that BUT definitely only on weekends. Weekdays aren't the time to add little pinches of this and that or be dealing with whole lemongrass and jalapenos, nope. So THIS Thai Curry is the polar opposite in terms of effort: Vegetables, coconut milk, green curry paste. Full stop, done and done.

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Easy Baked Tofu

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Hello and welcome to your Monday! I made us the easiest marinated baked tofu bites ever.

File this one in your "things to make all the time" list of fave recipes. 

This, my friends, is baked tofu. We make some version of tofu two or more times per week, and even more since both kids started eating solid foods. Jay and I both eat meat, but the meat in our food system is, let's say, dicey at best. We try to buy lots of local meat, and with that comes a higher food cost. SO, we offset that by eating vegetarian several days per week, so that when we do eat meat we feel good about it while not completely going broke on fancy groceries.

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Cauliflower Adobo {vegan}

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This recipe was last updated February 2021.

Cauliflower Adobo: A perfect dinner, comin' atcha! One of our favorite vegan cauliflower recipes is here for all of our weeknight dinner needs.

We are always on the hunt for light and/or vegetarian dinners, and this one kept popping up on my Instagram several weeks ago. I'm a huge fan of Chicken Adobo, a soy/vinegar Filipino dish. This vegetarian adobo version features cauliflower as the main ingredient and is different + much lighter.

The sauce here is suuuuuper umami and bright from the vinegar, which I love. There's some sugar here as well, and I love how pungent the sauce gets after it simmers a little bit.

The method here is so simple: sear some cauliflower for tons of flavor, then simmer it in the adobo sauce for a few minutes until it's cooked. The whole dish is done in 30 minutes, maybe less, and YES PLEASE extra sauce all over some rice you'll serve this.

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Favorite Summer Sauce: Chimichurri

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Just in time for summer! Which starts in June I know but the pools open this weekend and I'm a pool rat and pools mean summer and the pools open this weekend so this weekend is summer.

You get it.

This summer! We are going to keep cooking, but we are cooking light in two senses of the word: lighter food calorically, sure. It doesn't feel as great to inhale three plates of pasta when it's 95 degrees outside. But also, light on the actual cooking.

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No-Chop Posole Verde (and Cinco de Mayo menu!)

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NO CHOP. This is how we dinner. No fresh, no chop, no effort, just massive flavor with pantry staples that we know and love. 

Posole verde with hominy, chilies, and salsa verde. From funnyloveblog.com, how to make posole verde for cinco de mayo.

With Cinco de Mayo on a Sunday this year, I'm definitely not going to be drinking/eating tacos all day and night. I'll be doing laundry and packing lunches and I'm completely fine with that, you know? This, to me, is a perfect Sunday meal. Cozy and comforting but still light, and full of flavor.

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Spicy Peanut Chopped Salad

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MEAL PREP THIS FOR SURE. 

Spicy Peanut Sauce with red cabbage chopped salad. Perfect for meal prepping!

Alternative Title: The Time Beck Discovered Chow Mein Noodles and Now That's All She Wants To Eat. 

And honestly, who can blame her? This spicy peanut chopped salad is one of my favorite things to do with the Spicy Peanut Sauce I posted on Monday. We use it in hot and cold dishes which allows it to taste super different aka behave like two sauces aka two for one aka measure twice cut once? I don't know.

I posted on Monday. We use it in hot and cold dishes which allows it to taste super different aka behave like two sauces aka two for one aka measure twice cut once? I don't know.

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Pepita Salsa

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Delicious homemade pepita salsa (salsa with pumpkin seeds) in just 5 minutes! Blend up a batch of this and serve alongside sour cream guacamole for a super yummy chips and dip spread.

It is three and a half weeks until Cinco de Mayo. And, in very inappropriate cultural appropriation, I'm super into this holiday for zero reason besides I REALLY like Mexican food. Like, top three flavor profiles for sure. Indian food ranks too. 

Pepita Salsa with Chips and Cilantro

It's also, of course (not to most people, I know), Master's week, and snacks for this weekend are an absolute must. This pepita salsa is gluten free and vegan (if you eat honey or use agave) so can appeal to a ton of people, but has huge flavor and SPICE because we use a whole jalapeno, we don't take the seeds out, and we live for it, JVN style. 

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5-Minute Broiled Asparagus {vegan}

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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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Quick + Easy Focaccia

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I couldn't wait. As promised, after we watched the first episode of Salt Fat Acid Heat (why are the episodes not in the order of the words in the title?), all I could think about was making focaccia. Ok maybe more all I could think about was eating focaccia, because the filming of the episode was so lovely and the language used with the imagery was just so compelling, I NEEDED to experience salty, oily-in-a-good-way bread ASAP. 

The obvious hiccup being that I 1. don't bake and 2. have literally never made anything with yeast. Ever. And if we're being honest, 37 weeks pregnant with a messy house and full-time toddler and part-time job is really not the time to get all LET'S TRY NEW THINGS. Having a second child is new enough. Eating bread was the goal. Luckily, I had a package of pizza dough in the fridge that had all but tripled in size in the few days it had been in my fridge. Tripled! I bought it on a whim thinking that I'd make pizza for Beck as a treat, but I hadn't done so yet or told her about it, so I took to the interwebs to see if other people make focaccia with pizza dough. 

THEY DO. 

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Fresh Tomato Butter Sauce + Spaghetti Squash

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Raise your hand if you recently had surgery and ate all of the things while not moving for nearly a month!!!

Jay is raising his hand right now. We've had the weirdest few months - we were all three sick in increments so basically someone in the house was sick for over a month, then Jay traveled for work, then had surgery, and in that time frame we decided that CARBS AND DAIRY GOOD and KALE BAD. Which honestly emotionally was exactly what we needed, but still. Can't do that forever, sad aging bodies don't work well that way. Now, let me be super clear that I think Jay looks no different and he's maintained a super duper great outlook on health and food in 2018 so far, BUT, I definitely get that sometimes after a slump it feels great to eat especially lighter or healthier meals. For us, that means less/no red meat, fewer carbs, and smaller portions. We aren't cutting out anything exactly, but more fish + veggies + vegetarian options feels great to us right now. With cheese on top. 

So to continue our Whole30-is-over-but-white-carbs-aren't-great way of eating, spaghetti squash is back in the house with a fun vengeance, because we both love it. The idea for this fresh sauce came from Pinch of Yum, which I read all the time and adore, and serving it over spaghetti squash seemed like a no-brainer. The way to make this delicious is a teeny bit of butter in the sauce, parm on top, and LIBERAL use of salt and pepper. Unsalted anything isn't great, but an unsalted healthy-on-purpose meal is just the most sad. Salt for president! 

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Spring Veggie and Farro Soup

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One of our favorite easy vegetarian soup recipes, spring veggies with farro! This recipe is easily made vegan AND gluten free, and the herby, lemony broth is absolutely delicious. I love this as part of a weekly meal prep session; it keeps really well in the fridge for lunches.

spring vegetable soup topped with lemon

Because apparently we are a sick house and I only want to eat broth-based things ever. 

Our week of healing is going well, thanks to incredible amounts of support from our friends and family and narcotics for Jay. I, on the other hand, have gotten some kind of cold-on-top-of-a-cold and can't stop craving salty brothy things to make my throat feel better and my nose unclog slightly.

Doing a surgery recovery with a toddler while sick and doing regular work has been a struggle; we feel like we.just.can't.quite. catch up on sleep and housework, but we're getting there, one day at a time. 

The good news is that the Porta Potty was picked up from our FRONT YARD where it has been for nearly 6 months, so small victories, you know? 

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