One Pot Meals

Put a healthy, hearty meal on the table without using every pot and pan in your kitchen with these nutritious one-pot meals. Most use only one pot for cooking, though some include the option to serve over a grain. Some blender or food processor use may be involved.

Swiss Chard with White Beans and Job’s Tears

May 10, 2012
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I first went in search of Job’s tears a couple of years ago when a reader recommended it as a gluten-free replacement for barley. After striking out at the local natural foods store, I thought for sure I’d be able to buy some on the internet, but a Google shopping search pointed me to a [...]

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Spicy Apple-Walnut Salad with Fat-Free Balsamic-Raisin Dressing

March 28, 2012
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There’s an unwritten rule of food blogging that says, “When you don’t have anything else to write about, blog your lunch.” Or at least that’s been my formerly unwritten rule, and it’s served me well because it’s led me to create some of my favorite lunches: Balsamic-Glazed Chickpeas and Mustard Greens, Hot Skillet Salad, and [...]

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Ridiculously Easy Vegetable Gumbo and Cooking From Your Pantry and Freezer

January 16, 2012
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Near the end of the first week of my KISSS healthy-eating plan, calamity struck–or at least what passes for calamity when you are trying to cook and eat healthy soups every day. I went to the pantry and found that I had no onions. No onions! Take a look at almost any of my savory [...]

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Eat the Rainbow Black Bean Soup

October 18, 2011
Eat the Rainbow Black Bean Soup

Well, after three weeks of posting other people’s recipes, I’m back with one of my own. It was a lot of fun cooking dishes that had already gone through the testing process and learning more about cooking in general (and slow-cooking in particular) from three expert cooks. In the process of posting the reviews and [...]

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Hearty One-Pot Meal Miso Soup

September 19, 2011
Hearty Miso Soup

Usually I serve miso soup as part of our “sushi meal.” I make or buy vegetable sushi rolls, cook some edamame, toss some green leafies with some tahini dressing, and make a simple miso soup. On a recent rushed weeknight, I decided to skip all the separate dishes and just throw everything into the soup.

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Pesto Primavera Pasta and Other Fresh Basil Recipes

June 17, 2011
Pesto Pasta Primavera

Every summer, our small back patio turns into a miniature basil farm with large pots of the fragrant herb filling every available inch. As soon as the plants shoot up a few inches, I start snipping off their leaves and adding them to just about everything I make. By this time, mid-June, the plants are [...]

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Curried Cauliflower and Sweet Potato Soup

December 2, 2010
Curried Cauliflower and Sweet Potato Soup

When daytime temperatures dip into the 40′s, I want soup.  Every day. For every meal.  Suddenly, eating a lunchtime salad has all the appeal of chewing ice, so at the beginning of each week, I make a big pot of vegetable-filled soup and portion it out into glass containers to be reheated for lunches throughout [...]

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Brussels Sprouts and Shiitake Mushroom Soup

November 11, 2010
Brussels Sprouts and Shiitake Mushroom Soup

Brussels sprouts, rice, and perhaps some white beans.  I was planning a soup for dinner, but there seemed to be something missing.  Carrots?  No.  Potatoes?  No, the rice would provide enough starch.  I needed something to give the broth depth and flavor.  I was strolling through my back yard and considering my options when I [...]

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Ridiculously Easy Lentil and Vegetable Stew

October 28, 2010
Ridiculously Easy Lentil and Vegetable Stew

I’d hoped to be sharing a Halloween recipe with you, but life has been getting in the way of cooking lately.  The other night I went into the kitchen to make a last-minute dinner of my Dirty Little Secret Soup but wound up making so many changes that it took on an entirely new character.  [...]

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Ridiculously Easy Southern Succotash Stew

March 22, 2010
Ridiculously Easy Southern Succotash Stew

From a nutrition standpoint, I’ve never felt bad about using frozen vegetables; I’ve always believed (and new studies back me up) that vegetables that are frozen just after harvest actually retain more nutrients than fresh vegetables that have been shipped long distances. In the winter months, when the only fresh, local produce I can get [...]

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Tortilla Soup with Pinto Beans

February 25, 2010
Tortilla Soup with Pinto Beans

I’m coming up for air. I’ve spent the past couple of days working on the redesign of Fatfree Vegan Recipes, the website that spawned this blog. Although the really tricky stuff like coding and css and, for all I know, nuclear particle acceleration was done by a very talented web designer at E. Webscapes, I’ve [...]

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Tropical Black Bean and Collard Green Soup

January 20, 2010
Tropical Black Bean and Collard Green Soup

One of my favorite ways to cook collard greens—and the best way to get my daughter to eat them—is to simmer them in soup. There’s something magical about adding a huge pile of greens to a pot, an amount so big that the lid can barely be squeezed shut, and then coming back a few [...]

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Sweet Potato, Okra, and Chickpea Gumbo

September 29, 2009
Sweet Potato, Okra, and Chickpea Gumbo

With okra, as with most things in life, size does matter. When you’re talking okra pods, smaller is better—tender and tasty. Let them grow too big and they become tough and woody. However, when it comes to the plants themselves, bigger is definitely better. After a summer of more garden failures than I care to [...]

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Irish White Bean and Cabbage Stew

March 11, 2009
Irish White Bean and Cabbage Stew

What makes a dish Irish? Ask the average person on the street and he will probably tell you “corned beef and cabbage,” although I have it on good authority that corned beef is not a traditional Irish food. I’m certainly no expert; though I’d like to believe that at least some of my ancestors came [...]

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Skillet Gardener’s Pie

May 22, 2008
Skillet Gardener's Pie

“If everyone lived on mashed potatoes, the world would be a happy place.” –EV, Food Philosopher and Potato Lover I have a confession to make, the kind of deep dark secret that I would tell only a very close friend, preferably a non-judgmental one who doesn’t cook or care about food. Here goes: For the [...]

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Pink Bean, Quinoa, and Spinach Soup from Vegan Express

February 13, 2008
Pink Bean, Quinoa, and Spinach Soup from Vegan Express

Just after my copy of Vegan Express, the new cookbook that features my photographs, arrived, I was paging through it looking for something quick, low-fat, and–most importantly–comprised of ingredients that I already had in my house. As it turned out, several recipes fit those criteria, but the one that leaped out at me was this [...]

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Watching Your Weight? Eat Soup! (Dirty Little Secret Soup Recipe)

January 27, 2008
Eat Soup!

Green on Green Soup I love soup, especially during cold weather. In the winter, about every other meal I make centers around soup. I tend to favor thick, chunky, meal-in-a-bowl soups, primarily because I’m too lazy to make lots of different courses. But if I had all the time and energy in the world, I [...]

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North African Chickpea and Kale Soup

November 3, 2007
North African Chickpea and Kale Soup

If it seems to you like I’ve been making lots of soup lately, you’re right. Not that it’s been especially cool here, but once there’s even a hint of Fall nip in the air, I crave nothing more than a hot bowl of soup. I haven’t wanted to even glimpse a salad; give me all [...]

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White Bean and Garlic Stew

April 11, 2007
White Bean and Garlic Stew

This week I had a request from my husband to make an old favorite that we haven’t had for a while. This stew is different from anything else I make because it uses a whole head of garlic. Now, if you’ve tasted my baba ganoush, you know I can tolerate some garlic. But even I [...]

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Collard Greens and White Bean Soup

March 27, 2007
Collards and White Bean Soup

I know someone out there is probably saying, “What, another soup that looks like grass clippings?!” I have to beg your indulgence because yes this soup does, in a way, contain grass clippings or, more precisely, garden clippings. You see, I have a small garden plot that’s filled with collard greens that need to be [...]

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Rainbow Stir-Fry

December 6, 2006
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I had planned to write about a pasta dish today, but I’m under strict orders to post this recipe immediately. I don’t really mind; in fact, I’d love to use the phrase “guest post by my daughter” right now, but the truth is, E. likes to cook the food, photograph it, and eat it, but [...]

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Ethiopian-Inspired Red Lentil Soup

November 20, 2006
Ethiopian Red Lentil Soup

I’ve been busy lately, working on several projects at once and preparing for the holidays, and I haven’t had much time to develop new recipes. So this weekend I decided to adapt an old favorite, Berberé Stew, and turn it into a lentil and vegetable soup. I’m a big fan of “meal in a bowl” [...]

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Yellow Split-Pea Soup with Sweet Potatoes and Kale

October 14, 2006
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I may have the only child in the world who begs for split pea soup as an after-school snack, but I’m not complaining. Yesterday I needed to cook dinner early because we were going out to dinner. To you non-vegetarians, that statement probably makes no sense at all, but the vegetarians and vegans out there [...]

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Orange Couscous Curry

August 14, 2006
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It was 9:00 on Sunday morning, and I needed to have a potluck dish ready by 10:30. To complicate matters, I had little desire to cook or even to attend the potluck–I was thoroughly immersed in a mystery novel and could have happily stayed curled up in the recliner with it all day. Nevertheless, I [...]

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Vindaloo Vegetables

February 16, 2006
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I’m a big fan of one-pot meals. If I can put a lot of veggies and some beans into a stew and serve it over a whole grain, it’s less work for me to prepare the meal and less clean-up for my husband, so we’re both happy. Last night I fell back on one of [...]

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Garden Vegetable and Bean Soup

February 3, 2006
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I tend to find a recipe I like and stick with it, so I’ve fallen into a vegetable soup rut lately. I’ve been making the same Bean and Vegetable Soup for a long time–it’s easy and we all like it–but sometimes I have to remind myself that there are other options out there, and some [...]

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