This Mediterranean bean salad is one of my all-time favorite salads and sides. Bold claim, I know, but I can back it up. I’ve been loving this recipe for ten years running now!

This salad is crisp and satisfying, fresh and full of bright Mediterranean flavors. The recipe features hearty kidney beans and chickpeas, which balance crisp cucumber, celery and red onion. The remaining simple ingredients—lemon and olive oil, garlic and lots of fresh leafy herbs—yield truly irresistible results.

This Mediterranean-style salad is perfect for spring picnics, summer potlucks and cozy fall get-togethers. It’s a crowd-pleasing salad or side dish that suits most special diets, too. The recipe is vegetarian, vegan and gluten free.

With how quickly this salad comes together, it’s an easy addition to your weekend menu! It’s a simple chop, whisk and stir situation that’s ready in about 20 minutes. I hope this dish becomes one of your standby recipes, too.

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This recipe is coming from a longtime crepe enthusiast. I’m so pleased to share my tried-and-true crepe recipe today. You might assume that crepes are difficult to make or require special equipment, but fortunately, it’s not true! In fact, these crepes are a cinch to whip together in a blender. From start to finish, they come together in under 30 minutes.

This recipe is easy to make in a regular skillet. These crepes are a more manageable size to make at home than the large traditional crepes you’ll find at a real creperie. This recipe is quite versatile, too. Use it to make sweet crepes or savory crepes, with regular flour or buckwheat flour. You’ll find all of my tips below, plus a short video that shows the cooking method.

Crepes are similar to pancakes, but thinner and much lighter. You could say that they’re more sophisticated. They are indisputably lower in carbohydrates. And they’re definitely a lovely option for Mother’s Day brunch or any weekend breakfast or lunch.

As an American, my first taste of crepes took place in high school, when Madame Gordy showed us how to make them in French class. During my college semester in France, I sampled crepes across Bordeaux and Paris, with one particularly memorable experience by a fountain in the Latin Quarter.

These days, I satisfy my crepe cravings at one of our favorite local restaurants, French Market, or I make them at home with this recipe! Our toddler loves crepes with Greek yogurt and sliced banana. I hope you enjoy these crepes as much as we do.

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Y’all know I’m from Oklahoma, right? I grew up eating cowboy caviar, also called Texas caviar. It’s a classic bean salad recipe popular in the South. You can serve it as a side salad or as salsa. Either way, people go crazy for cowboy caviar at potlucks.

Cowboy caviar is made with black-eyed peas and black beans, chopped tomatoes, corn, bell pepper, onion and cilantro tossed in tangy Italian dressing. I typically think of cowboy caviar as a warm weather salad, but it’s made with ingredients that are readily available year-round.

Cowboy caviar is actually perfect for New Year’s if you’re craving something fresh yet hearty, and trying to hit your black-eyed pea quota!

I have one issue with most cowboy caviar recipes—they’re often swimming in store-bought Italian salad dressing. As such, they can be way too oily and contain some unnecessary preservatives. Instead, I whisked together a simple, homemade Italian dressing from scratch. It’s easy to do and tastes fantastic.

This recipe yields a big bowl of dip, but I don’t think you’ll have any trouble polishing it off. I hope you enjoy this cheekily titled delight!

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This blue cheese dip just might convert blue cheese skeptics into fans. Yes, it really might. You can trust me on this because I’m a little iffy on blue cheese myself. Sometimes I love blue cheese, like in this peach and avocado salad, and sometimes it’s just too much.

In this dip, it’s perfect. This blue cheese dip recipe is cold, creamy, and savory with an unmistakeable—but not overpowering—blue cheese funk. It’s easy to stir together and tastes even better after a brief rest.

In addition to blue cheese (try a mild one, like gorgonzola), you’ll need just a few basic ingredients to make this dip: sour cream or Greek yogurt, chives or green onion, fresh garlic, salt and pepper. Rarely do I suggest Greek yogurt as a worthy alternative to sour cream, but it really works here and yields a lighter dip. For a different flavor profile altogether, try feta cheese instead of blue.

Serve your dip with Buffalo Cauliflower, or simply with raw vegetables like celery, carrot and bell pepper. Please let me know how you like it in the comments!

Watch How to Make Blue Cheese Dip

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This buffalo cauliflower recipe has been a long time coming. I’m glad to get it to you just before the big game! This recipe is a vegetarian spin on buffalo wings, featuring caramelized roasted cauliflower with an irresistibly spicy coating. It’s the perfect watch party appetizer.

Restaurant-style buffalo cauliflower is typically deep fried (and delicious), but I wanted to make homemade buffalo cauliflower in the oven. I tried it every which way to get here, and many renditions were simply not good. The cauliflower was either soggy, too saucy, too salty, or otherwise not quite right.

I gave up on the idea last year after I landed on buffalo Brussels sprouts instead.

Here’s what I ran into along the way. Many homemade buffalo cauliflower recipes feature cauliflower tossed in a flour and water mixture before baking, with the promise that it produces a deep fried effect. It would be cool if that worked, but it doesn’t. Simply roasting the cauliflower on its own doesn’t yield crispy-enough results, and tossing the cauliflower in sauce after baking negates all crispness anyway.

I finally picked up a new tip from a loosely-written Bon Appetit recipe—cornstarch. Cornstarch helps make my baked sweet potato fries extra crispy, and it does the same for this cauliflower, offering a crispy outside to a high-moisture vegetable without frying. That means that this recipe is gluten free as well. Hooray!

It’s way too easy to eat this buffalo cauliflower straight off the sheet pan before it makes it to the serving platter. You have been warned.

Watch How to Make Buffalo Cauliflower

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Have you met my all-time favorite chickpea salad recipe? Sure, I have many beloved chickpea salads on the blog already, but this is my tried-and-true favorite from my cookbook, Love Real Food. In the book, I called it the “Outrageous Herbaceous Chickpea Salad,” which is exactly right!

“Here’s a simple chickpea salad that I could eat every single day. It’s bursting with fresh Mediterranean flavors, thanks to chopped bell pepper, parsley, red onion, and celery. Lemon and garlic take it from tasty to transcendent. This salad packs well, so it’s perfect for potlucks and picnics. It’s also a great lunch option, so long as your serving is large enough…”

I love this recipe as much today as I did when I created the recipe several years ago. In fact, I stand behind all of the cookbook recipes, and it makes me so happy to hear that you’re cooking from the book!

I’m truly a healthier eater when I have this salad in the fridge. It’s the perfect hearty side salad or mid-afternoon snack. Pile it onto a bed of greens, or cooked whole grains like farro or quinoa, or even onto your scrambled eggs or cheese nachos. You can’t go wrong with this one.

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I love ranch dressing. There, I said it. As a kid, I adored Hidden Valley, but as an adult, I only get excited about made-from-scratch, real-deal ranch dressing. This recipe is exactly that.

Earlier this year, as I navigated my first trimester, I found myself craving my favorite comfort foods. Naturally, I made my own ranch dressing and happily drizzled it over my salads, and my pizzas, and even my quesadillas (why not?).

This ranch dressing recipe is the end result of my experimentation. It features fresh herbs, real buttermilk, and a creamy sour cream base. It tastes gourmet, and it’s certainly not too heavy. I hope you love it as much as I do!

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Let’s talk about roasted red peppers! Roasted red peppers are one of my favorite recipe components. They offer rich, deep bell pepper flavor and a lovely, tender texture. I love to add roasted red peppers to dips, salads, sandwiches and more.

Homemade roasted red peppers taste the best, no doubt about it. Since it’s bell pepper season, I’m sharing my tested and perfected roasted red pepper recipe. Now that I’ve finally nailed down all the factors, I’ll be roasting my own more often!

Roasting red peppers is a fairly simple process, though certainly not as simple as reaching for a jar of store-bought roasted red peppers. The downside to using jarred roasted red peppers is that they vary significantly in flavor—grab the wrong brand and you just might ruin the whole dish (been there, done that). Divina and Whole Foods 365 are reliable winners, in my experience.

Grab a helper when it comes time to peel the peppers, and your homemade roasted red peppers will be ready before you know it. They’ll keep in the fridge for over a week, too, and liven up all your dishes in between.

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Have you ever tried roasted tomatoes? Specifically slow-roasted cherry tomatoes, the best of all roasted tomatoes? If not, you have really been missing out! Last summer, our garden produced more cherry tomatoes than we could eat fresh, so I roasted several batches over the weekends.

You might be thinking that it’s hard to beat fresh cherry tomatoes (and I agree), but roasted cherry tomatoes are even nicer. The flavors and textures condense in the oven, yielding spectacularly sweet-tart, rich tomato flavor.

Once roasted, these tomatoes keep in the refrigerator for over a week, so this is a great way to preserve tomatoes a little longer. Commenters report that these tomatoes freeze wonderfully for winter time, too—Chris says you can pull them out of the freezer bag and add them to salads!

Honestly, I eat these tomatoes like candy. I have to stop myself from eating them all straight off the pan. Unlike most other roasted veggies, which I typically serve as a side dish, these roasted tomatoes are the perfect addition to many summer meals. They’ll turn a simple pasta with basil into a highly memorable dinner.

You’ll be happy to hear that roasting these cherry tomatoes require a much lower temperature than normal (just 250 degrees Fahrenheit). While they do require a couple of hours in the oven, you can throw these in the oven on a hot day without overheating your kitchen.

Tomato lovers, gardeners and weekend meal preppers, this roasted tomato recipe is for you!

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Have you tried the baked feta pasta that took the internet by storm earlier this year? That simple recipe inspired this delicious summer dip, which features some of my very favorite flavors—creamy feta, tangy cherry tomatoes, olives and plenty of fresh basil.

Baking these ingredients together near the heat source yields maximal flavor. The feta softens and turns golden, the cherry tomatoes burst and naturally sweeten, and the olives become even more intensely olive-y. Swirled together and finished with a generous sprinkle of basil, the combination is sublime.

This dish also bears a resemblance to a classic Greek dish called feta fournou, or baked feta. That dish typically features feta with bell pepper, tomato and oregano.

The flavors in today’s dip are also delicious raw, as you’ve seen in my Mediterranean Tomato & Feta Dip—make that one if you don’t want to turn on the oven! Either one will be a perfect light meal or summer evening appetizer.

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