July 11 Vegetarian Cooking Demo and Tasting with The Chubby Vegetarian at Sprouts Farmers Market in East Memphis

This post and the event it details are both sponsored by Sprouts Farmers Market.                                              As always, all opinions are our own. 

Okay, so folks have been asking us when we're doing our next pop-up restaurant in Memphis -- possibly because they remember this $5-an-item TCV menu and set-up at Iris Etc. from one summer a little while ago. We've been working on a couple of fun opportunities, and we hope to share at least one of them with you soon. But right now, we have a pretty immediate way for y'all to let us cook a little something for you. 

Come get the first look at the new Sprouts Farmers Market on Poplar in East Memphis with us on Tuesday, July 11 at 5pm, the evening before the official grand opening of the store! We're going to demo two recipes from our cookbook, The Chubby Vegetarian: 100 Inspired Vegetable Recipes for the Modern Table (Susan Schadt Press, 2016), let you in on the specific Sprouts brand products that we like to use, and offer samples of two dishes toward the end of the presentation. 

We're so happy that Sprouts is going to have a spot closer to where we live because we're willing to drive out to the ones in Germantown and Bartlett, but this is going to be so much more convenient.  Hope you're as excited as we are to have another option for grocery shopping out east!

      There are 50 spots available for this event; please check out    

     more details and register for the event at Sprouts HERE. 

New Recipe Video: Simple Salsa

Hey! So we're still figuring this recipe video stuff out, but we're moving right along. For our second one, here's how to make a super-flavorful homemade salsa that's perfect with a quesadilla, over some BBQ Tofu Nachos, or just as a dip with your favorite chip. This time of year, all the ingredients you need are fresh and in-season. You'll never buy salsa in the summertime again.

(And to answer your main question...yes, that really is Justin's real hair.)

First TCV Recipe Video: Young Coconut Ceviche

So we've been talking to each other about doing more step-by-step, how-to recipe videos for y'all, and this weekend, we got to it! We're excited to share the latest installment of what we believe will be a new weekly feature this summer.

So in the video below, we have two ideas about how to serve the perfect hot-weather dish, our vegetarian ceviche made with young coconut and a hearty amount of diced vegetables. The Young Coconut Ceviche recipe is in The Chubby Vegetarian cookbook on p. 41, you know, along with 99 other vegetarian recipes that made the cut last year when we were finishing and editing the manuscript. Get your copy and cook along with us this summer!

Check out The Chubby Vegetarian YouTube channel HERE to see our other videos and subscribe so you're first to see what's new or just go on and watch us make our version of ceviche here:

Julie Taboulie's Lebanese Kitchen

This past week, St. Martin's Press sent us a complimentary copy of a soon-to-be-released cookbook to preview, and we enjoyed it so much that we wanted to share our take on it with you. 

As always, all of our opinions here are our own. 

Julie Taboulie's Lebanese Kitchen by Julie Ann Sageer was a revelation for both of us. There are some modern preparations of dishes that we already knew we loved, like hummus, baba ghanaouj, pita bread, and fattoush, along with a ton of great desserts we're going to make.


Julie's writing is interesting and spot-on, and we really connected with the narrative that she tells in the introduction. She drifted from her roots and then circled back with a new appreciation for her grandmother's cooking and Lebanese classics. We had a similar journey with Southern American food. To us, years ago, Southern food and vegetarian food didn't seem to mesh all that well. As kids, we kind of started to think that Southern food wasn't really for us. We strayed, too, finding curry, stir-fry, falafel, sushi, and a world of possibilities before circling back around to the South, and transforming Southern favorites makes up a part of our cooking today.

We appreciate Julie's amazing new cookbook and really feel that it comes from a true place. We were so inspired that we made a feast the first night after we'd both read it cover to cover. Our table quickly filled up with freshly spun hummus, smoky baba ghanaouj, homemade Lebanese pita, taboulie with tons of parsley and lemon, yogurt with mint and cucumber, olives, and tangy feta.

This book can really help the home cook transform everyday ingredients into 'wow' Lebanese dishes. We loved the inspiration and look forward to Julie's success with the book (to be released on Tuesday, June 6) and with her cooking show on PBS!