Broccoli and Brussels sprout slaw with olives

Broccoli and Brussels sprouts slaw with olives and almonds: a healthy, easy, make-ahead side dish for Thanksgiving or any festive dinner.

If you saw my homemade "canned" cranberry sauce recipe last week, you'll understand that we often celebrate a little something I call "Fakesgiving" around Casa de Ninj. This year, we had our Fakesgiving last weekend, just before The Big Day, as we'll be traveling to a relative's house to spend the actual holiday.

But I love our annual Thanksgiving dishes (and the legendary leftovers!) so much that I couldn't bear to miss them this year. So I had my own pre-Thanksgiving Thanksgiving: Fakesgiving.

(I'll note, it sounds better than a friend's alternative -- "Freaksgiving" -- which, scarily, I think just means dinner with her family.)

Each year, I try to add one new or modified dish to the line up to keep things fresh. Last year, it was apple and herb stuffing muffins. For this year's Fakesgiving, I forwent the traditional green beans almandine for something a little fresher and crunchier: broccoli and Brussels sprout slaw with olives and almonds.

Light broccoli slaw pasta salad

Light broccoli slaw pasta salad: Two of everyone's favorite summer sides and pot-luck staples combined into one healthy meatless meal salad.

Spring is in the air, peeps: We've finally had some warmer weather, the flowering trees are tinged with green buds and I'm preparing to plant my garden. Squeeeeee!

I cannot wait for fresh summer veggies. As much as I love cold-weather squash and root vegetables, I'm once again really ready for some leafy greens, crunchy brassicas and sun-ripened tomatoes.

Booyah.

To get you psyched for the bountiful days that are coming (complete with all those gorgeous CSA veggies for which I happily supply you with delicious, good-for-you recipes), I made this lightened broccoli slaw pasta salad.

Yes, slaw and pasta salad in one. This dish combines two of everyone's favorite summer sides and pot-luck staples -- broccoli slaw and pasta salad -- into one lightened, meatless meal salad.

11 delicious ways with broccoli (CSA Share Ninja Rescue 2014)

Enjoy these 11 delicious and unique recipes for broccoli, one of the healthiest crown jewels of the late summer / early fall harvest.

ERMERGAHD, peeps: Where the heck has the summer gone? Labor Day is next week, which means that summer is unofficially over, kids are headed back to school and all the bloggers except The Ninj are going to start inundating you with freakin' pumpkin recipes.

Pumpkin, apples and Halloween ... oh my.

Why can't we all just respect produce seasonality??!!!

One more week until Labor Day means means one last huzzah for the 2014 CSA Share Ninja Rescue, my annual summertime feature in which you tell me each week what produce from your CSA share, garden or farmers market has you at a loss for ideas and I rescue you the following Tuesday with fun, creative recipe ideas, from me and my favorite fellow food bloggers.

As we come up on fall, it's time to enjoy crisp, crunchy broccoli -- a fave of The Ninj, a nemesis of Mr. Ninj, which is why you'll see that so many of my recipes involve disguising it in a pasta dish.

Asian-inspired chicken and broccoli salad

Asian-inspired sweet-and-tangy chicken and broccoli salad, topped with apricots and cashews. A quick and easy recipe, perfect for weeknight dinners.

Hey, hiya! The Ninj's move to Kentucky is complete.

Well, let me clarify. Things completed are the the physical moving of goods from Vermont to Kentucky in a big-ass tractor trailer and my arriving in Kentucky by pulling off a spectacular pre-murder OJ Simpson run in high-heeled flip-flops through three concourses of the Charlotte airport to avoid (just barely) missing my flight, which had been dramatically re-routed out of my way by the good folks (kidding, really, they're asshats) at American Airlines who bumped me from my original flight to Louisville from Chicago in order to give my seat to a standby "medallion" passenger (oh no, I'm not bitter -- I love being treated like baggage by people who refuse to look you in the eye or answer your questions directly), thus arriving in Kentucky -- sweaty, stressed and sans luggage -- about 20 minutes ahead of my movers.

But I made it. And then so did our stuff (oy, the stuff -- so much stuff, even after giving so much of it away before we left Vermont). So, I am currently knee-deep in cardboard moving boxes and endless reams of packing paper on this end.

More than knee-deep, actually.  Let me show you my new kitchen.

Baked ziti with tomatoes, broccoli and olives

Cheesy baked ziti, loaded with good-for-you veggies -- roasted tomatoes, tender-crisp broccoli and tangy green olives -- makes a hearty meatless meal!

I love pasta way too much.

If you've browsed my recipe index at all, you'll understand. Not that loving pasta is bad, but all those carbs aren't the best for my quickly-approaching-middle-age waistline.

I've been experimenting quite a bit with lower-carb, gluten-free pastas made from things like brown rice and quinoa, and I really do like them. In certain dishes. Like my beet pesto and greens pasta.

But there are some hearty pasta dishes for which I have to stick to the real McCoy.

This baked ziti, loaded with good-for-you veggies (and no meat!), is one such dish. While it's familiar name is "baked ziti", I actually recommend rigatoni for this dish.  Rigatoni is larger than ziti, which means a larger tube opening to hold the thick veggie sauce -- to which I'm afraid a more delicate brown rice pasta just wouldn't be able to stand up. Additionally, I think the thicker rigatoni lends a heartier element to the whole dish.

And speaking of that hearty veggie sauce...

Pasta with butternut squash, broccoli and cranberry beans (guest post)

Hello fellow Ninja followers. Let me introduce myself. I am Sandra, and today we get to hang out together here in Julianne’s space. She was awesome enough to play a little blogger switch with me. That’s right, I am a fellow food blogger, but also a huge fan of The Ninj. I don’t have to tell you why she is so awesome because you frequent here regularly, too. The Ninj and I happened to connect the way most bloggers do, by chance. I quickly learned how cool she is by reading through a bunch of her recipes I found out we had a lot in common.

We like to cook. We like to can. We like to have fun. Not every food blogger is fun, believe me I know. We live a few states away, I’m in New Jersey, but I wish I lived in Vermont. I guess that doesn’t count. If we lived closer I’d like to think we would be friends that would hang out every so often. Hang out in a sense that I would raid her orchards the second she went grocery shopping. Like all good friends do, right? Seriously the Ninj is not only awesome, she is “I have fruit trees in my orchard” awesome! (I’d hit up the cherry tree first, who’s with me?)

Broccoli mac and cheese

Broccoli mac and cheese

I love my husband.

Marrying him was probably the single greatest decision I have or will ever make.

But his aversion to vegetables can sometimes really try the Ninj's patience.

Wait, I take that back. (Not the patience part, that still stands). He does not have an aversion to vegetables, per se: he has "texture issues."

(I know some of you are nodding in understanding here, while others are thinking he's pscyho. He's not, I swear.)

Case in point: he loathes asparagus, doesn't even like to be in the same room with it let alone see it on a plate. But when I got him to try pureed asparagus soup, he loved it. So it's the texture of asparagus that he hates.

Ditto with Brussels sprouts. And collards. And broccoli.

So when I saw a recipe for a delicious-looking (and weeknight easy) stovetop mac and cheese with broccoli (I love dishes that kill two birds with one stone: no need to make a separate vegetable!), I knew he wouldn't eat it. Dag: it would become relegated to the list of Dishes To Make When Mr. Ninj Is Out of Town.

But then I had an idea.

CSA Share Ninja Rescue: rhubarb and broccoli rabe

Rhubarb, in my garden right now

This year, I'm really enjoying the differences in requests for CSA Share Ninja Rescue help that are coming in based on a reader's geographic location. For example, this week we'll be tackling not only rhubarb, which is in season (albeit a short one) in the northeast, but also  broccoli rabe, which is plentiful for a reader in Colorado but generally more of a fall offering here in Vermont.

So keep those requests coming, no matter where you live.

As always, if you need help with a veggie, leave a comment below or send me an email before this coming Friday. Recipes suggestions are posted on Mondays.

On to this week's recipes...

Rhubarb

My sister calls it "that stuff that looks like red celery" in the store. Yep, that's it. If you buy it from a store, farm stand or farmers market, you will get stalks only; if you pick your own, be sure to remove the leaves as they are extremely toxic.

Detox January, Week 3: "Chef Boyardee" Broccoli Pasta

Broccoli pasta (it's like pesto!)

I realized that I've given you little other than dessert recipes during Detox January ("Let them eat cake!"), so I think that needs to end today.

But it doesn't end in a bad way, I promise. It ends with a lovely, easy pasta dish that I guarantee will become part of your weeknight repertoire, based on the easiness-to-awesomeness ratio.

Loyal reader Cristina turned me on to this one last year after hearing the story on NPR. Turns out "Chef Boyardee" was a real person: one Ettore "Hector" Boiardi (apparently there needed to be a phonetic dumbing-down of his Italian last name so that waspy America could pronounce it ... sigh).

Boiardi was an accomplished chef and had a successful restaurant in Cleveland when he decided, in true entrepreneurial fashion, to bottle and sell his popular sauce -- which eventually led him into a food manufacturing and importing business.

His whole family, apparently, were and are no slouches in the kitchen, his chef-niece Anna Boiardi included. Last year, she published a cookbook-cum-memoir, Delicious Memories: Recipes and Stories from the Chef Boyardee Family, which includes some of her family's best-loved recipes -- including this broccoli-centric one from her mother.