Meatless Monday: Purple Cabbage & Green Onion Slaw

So Thanksgivng has come and gone, and if your holiday was anything like mine, then you're probably wishing you had packed more macaroni and cheese and ham in your "to go" Tupperware while simultaneously regretting your decision to eat half your body weight in meat, mac n cheese, stuffing and 3 types of cakes during the last 72 hours.  And you may or may not have eaten the skin off of half the turkey all by yourself. I plead the fifth!

If there's one thing I've learned in my 25ish years of Thanksgiving gluttony, it's how to pace myself so that I don't overeat to the point of hating myself and everything around me. Why it took me that long to learn that lesson is beyond me. However, it's also taken me 25 or so years to learn that when it comes to the holidays, and Thanksgiving especially, that I am inevitably and unabashedly going to eat nothing but meat, cheese, bread and sugar, for at least 3 consecutive days. It's just a fact of life.

Meatless Monday: Fire Roasted Corn Salad

S U M M E R T I M E

and the livin' is easy....

If only that were true. I love summer, but even if the livin' were easy, it would still most certainly be busy, almost to the point of absurdity, especially for a sun worshiper like me. You see, during late fall through early spring, I suffer from a mild form of Seasonal Affective Disorder, otherwise known as the I hate everyone and everything because the sun went down at 4:30pm and I have to walk home and then walk the poodle when it's 25 degrees outside not counting the windchill, it's too cold to anything fun and tomatoes are out of season, when the EFF is it going to be summer again?! blues.  Then, after I spend the better half of a year wishing for summer, it finally arrives, and before you can say sunscreen, I'm practically running around outside waving my hands over my head, shouting Ke$ha lyrics at strangers because THIS PLACE'S ABOUT TO BLOW-OH-OH-OH-OH-OH-OH-OH-OH  it's summer! During the 90 glorious days in which sunshine pours from the heavens in copious quantities, I make it my personal mission to eat, drink, laugh, splash, and frolic my way into summer bliss at any and every given opportunity. Yes, it's that serious.

So I decided that the epicurean-focused portion of my quest for summertime bliss could not and would not be complete without a fabulous picnic at the Reggae Wine Festival. That's right, reggae bands+wine+bougie picnic=Awesome. Naturally, I felt that my fabulous picnic spread would be nothing less than uncivilized without a fantastic summer salad, and thought it nothing less than divine intervention when I came across a video of Chef Marcus Samuelsson making a roasted corn salad, and then found the perfect recipe from Williams-Sonoma.