My mom recently gifted me a new cookbook that I absolutely love and just have to share it with you! The cookbook is Eating Well Vegetables The Essential Reference. It is 496 pages filled with gorgeous pictures of mouth watering, healthy recipes covering a wide variety of vegetables. I’ve only had the cookbook a little over a week and already made three recipes from it that our family loved! 
Healthy Seasonal Vegetable Meal Planning Made Easy
The Eating Well Vegetables cookbook is organized alphabetically by vegetable names. When I first opened the cookbook, I started reading through it page by page. After about 20 pages I was practically drooling on the cookbook and so hungry for some of these delicious recipes! At that point I realized I needed to finish up my meal planning for the week and didn’t have the time to read through all 496 pages at once.
I then shifted to looking through the “Contents” section in the front of the cookbook. This lists out every vegetable in the book with the correlating start page. I looked up the specific vegetables that are ripening now at this time of our growing season in Montana. Then I planned out our menu list of meals for the next two weeks to incorporate recipes from the cookbook that use seasonal vegetables. As other produce starts to ripen during our growing season, I plan to continue looking up each specific vegetable to find some new recipes to prepare for our family.
It’s More Than Just Vegetables!
One of the other things that I really love about this cookbook is that although the title says “Vegetables”, not all the recipes are solely vegetarian. There are some recipes that include meat or optional ways to include meat if you choose. We do eat wild harvested or locally raised meat and my husband prefers meat in most of his meals. Sometimes I get in a rut and have a hard time finding new recipes that include meat that don’t seem too “heavy” for summer. This cookbook saved the day, or I should say it saved my summer meal planning!
The recipes we tried so far are:
-Kale Salad with Bacon-Blue Cheese Vinaigrette (page 283)
-Pea, Pancetta & Tarragon Crostini (page 361)
-Chinese Chicken Salad (page 129)
Tonight I am making Fusilli With Yellow Squash and Grape Tomatoes (page 423) and Green Salad with Peaches, Feta and Mint Vinagrette (page 297). So far every recipe we’ve tried has been delicious!
I’m looking forward to being able to use this cookbook year round to spice up our family’s meal planning. I don’t know about you, but sometimes I get stuck in a rut and feel like I make the same few recipes over and over. What once was a loved meal, turns into a disliked meal because we’ve eaten it so much. With an in-depth cookbook like this, I can use it year round to prepare healthy, delicious meals for our family. We can use our above ground “root cellar” to keep produce that stores well like potatoes, winter squash, cabbage, etc to use in a bunch of the recipes in this cookbook throughout the long, cold Montana winters.
My mom found this cookbook at a local store but you can also find it here online. Happy cooking!
If you have this cookbook, which recipes are your favorite? Do you have another favorite cookbook to recommend?
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