Mexican Street Corn Salad

This Mexican street corn salad is one of my all-time favorite summer sides. Fresh, bright, lightly creamy & spicy, it's easy to make and sure to please.

This Mexican street corn salad is my at-home version of all the elotes we ate in Austin. Creamy, tangy, and a bit spicy, it’s one of my favorite ways to showcase summer sweet corn. If you’ve been reading the blog for a while, you know that fresh corn is one of my all-time favorite foods. Crisp, juicy, and sweet, you just can’t beat it. Of course, I’ll always love it straight off the cob, but this Mexican corn salad takes it to a whole new level. Mexican Street Corn Salad Recipe Ingredients If you’re not familiar with them, elotes are…

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Cold Cucumber Soba

A healthier noodle dish that uses spiralized cucumber in place of half of the noodles. Fresh, healthy, vegan and gluten free.

I guest posted the other day at Turntable Kitchen. Kasey and Matt are in Japan, which is one of the places Jack and I loved the most. We spent a week in Kyoto and one of the first things we set out to find was soba. It’s served in teeny tiny hundred-year-old restaurants. The noodles are handmade, and cold soba is served plain with a dipping sauce. Just dip and slurp. The louder the better. Since the soba I make at home comes from a box I, of course, add stuff. But I try to keep it simple. We’ve been…

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Green Bean & Avocado Quinoa Salad

It’s been so inspired by the bounties of spring veggies that have been available lately. I think I’m the only person on the internet that has not gotten my hands on any ramps this season (do they even grow in texas?), but I really can’t complain because I still have tons of amazing options. They key to any great salad is a variety of tastes, textures and colors. Although I find that sometimes it’s easier to come up with new ideas if I set some kind of limitation. This particular day I had leeks, green beans, and dandelion greens I wanted to use.…

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Pea & Chickpea Pasta Salad

This has been a favorite lately. I’ve made it countless times before I even thought of posting it here. It’s too easy… the ingredient list is short, and you likely already have these these things on hand. It’s super delicious and it takes no time to toss together. If I weren’t always trying to come up with new ideas, I would stop here and we would eat this most nights of the week. (Maybe switch out the veggies every so often to change it up). I whisked a little dijon with olive oil and lemon juice before tossing it with…

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Spiced Carrot & Chickpea Salad

This salad is loosely inspired by a carrot salad I ate during a trip to Morocco a couple of years ago. It was part of our first night’s dinner… a hot night (114 degrees!) on the rooftop of our Riad at sunset. There were marinated vegetable salads, flatbreads, tagines, and a bottle of moroccan rose… all while the evening prayer chanted over a loudspeaker in the distance. We might as well have been on another planet, it felt so surreal. Yet, one of the things I remember most about that night was the carrot salad. Recently, J.R. Watkins asked me to create a dish…

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Spring Kale Panzanella

spring kale panzanella

This very green salad couldn’t be more timely. Jack and I spent all weekend tasting inhaling food at the Austin Food & Wine fest. And then we spent last night in some sort of food coma. Overall, I think we showed pretty good restraint… That is until Saturday night’s “Rock your Taco” event. We rocked tacos alright… And then a few tacos rocked us. But no regrets… kale to the rescue. A big bowl of it. This salad is part marinated kale and part and panzanella. Two of my favorite salads, together as one. Kale, fennel slices, peas and feta…

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Cinco de Mango

Mango recipes! mango salsa, mango margarita spritzer, mango black bean tacos, and a mango avocado salad.

We celebrated Cinco de Mayo a little early this year with a mango fiesta. You should too because mangoes are on sale (like, $1 something) at Whole Foods until the end of April. I brought home muchos mangoes last weekend and mixed up this sweet & spicy salsa. Then (from the same salsa recipe), I made black bean tacos and an avocado-mango salad. And, of course, no fiesta is complete without tequila. I made a lighter version of a margarita – a mango margarita spritzer. Cheers!

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Lemony Chickpea Salad

chickpeas for hunger / loveandlemons.com

Today, I’m participating, in Food Bloggers Against Hunger. A movement organized by Nicole of The Giving Table, in response to the movie A Place at the Table. Today 200 food bloggers are sharing budget-friendly recipes to raise awareness about hunger in America. There is plenty of food in this country, yet most don’t realize (myself previously included) that 1 in 4 kids don’t know where their next meal will come from. One of the main points of the film is that hunger and obesity in this country go hand in hand. Ingredients that make up unhealthy processed foods (corn, soy,…

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Swiss Chard & Egg Casserole

swiss chard & egg casserole

Eggy casserole… fancy fritatta… I wasn’t sure what to call it but our “eggs for dinner” series continues with this new favorite. I realize this looks like a pile of greens (and it very much is), but there are thin layers of egg baked in between the light and flaky chard leaves. The trick is to toss the whisked eggs with the chard leaves raw. In the oven, the greens on the bottom wilt down, the ones on top stay a little bit crispy… a perfect mix of textures. The eggs are mixed with garlic and my favorite part –…

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Ginger Citrus Soba & Snow Peas

ginger-citrus soba noodles / loveandlemons.com

I realize I posted soba noodles only a few weeks ago, but I’m back with more. This time, they’re stir fried in a sweet, tangy orange-ginger soy sauce with some crunchy snow peas and edamame. While that one was best served cold, this one is best piping hot. And aside from the tedious task of cleaning the snow peas, this comes together rather quickly.  

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Brussels Sprout & Sunchoke Salad

What's your favorite sunchoke recipe? Do you have one? I love this caramelized sunchoke & Brussels sprout salad - a perfect light winter meal.

It’s hardly winter in Austin anymore, but I’m still trying to keep all of you snowbirds in mind. Enter: the winter sunchoke salad. This sunchoke recipe is full of warm, roasty goodness and brightened up with a tangy lemon dressing. Cooking with sunchokes Have you cooked with sunchokes? Do you have a sunchoke recipe to recommend? They’re new to me, but I just love them, so I was eager to develop a sunchoke recipe of my own. Sunchokes, also known as Jerusalem artichokes, have a potato-like quality. I like them both thinly sliced and roasted or sautéed with butter and…

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A food blog with fresh, zesty recipes.
Photograph of Jeanine Donofrio and Jack Mathews in their kitchen

Hello, we're Jeanine and Jack.

We love to eat, travel, cook, and eat some more! We create & photograph vegetarian recipes from our home in Chicago, while our shiba pups eat the kale stems that fall on the kitchen floor.