Basically my favorite way to cook veggies: sauteed with olive oil or butter, salt and lots of pepper, one or two additional herbs or spices. In this case, Mexican squash (not much different than zucchini) with paprika, toasted walnuts and rice. It's a very simple meal. I would usually add an egg, but the egg went in with the rice--I beat the egg, added rice, salt, pepper, oregano, and then scooped and dropped in a pan to make rice cakes.
Kale for the first time! Sauteed with salt and pepper, sprinkled with almonds, it was so good.
Mark Bittman's pad thai--except it was "ghetto" because we don't have tamarin paste, so I added lemon juice. And I used mung bean noodles instead of rice noodles. It was good, but it would probably be better if I followed the recipe more closely and if we had had cilantro on hand. I left out the garlic and scallions. With omitting garlic all the time (garlic is in the flavor base for pretty much everything!), I'm making an effort to draw more from other herbs and spices. We made the investment and went in on a bottle of white truffle oil, but I'm trying to save that for sauces and things, and for other things build complexity with other ingredients. Asian and Indian-inspired foods have been easier to modify and get that complexity than with Italian or French-based recipes. 
Sweet potato stir-fry, another Mark Bittman recipe. I love sweet potatoes. Once again, the garlic was left out. Cayenne, lots of black pepper, cumin went into the seasoning, and once cooked, the stir-fry had lemon juice squeezed over top. This was Shanna's plate, so she got chopped scallions too. Peanuts, rice, baked mexican squash, fried egg finished it off---and the weather was nice enough to eat outside!
The leftover stir-fry got mixed with egg and pan-fried into patties. Yummy!
The same egg-and-pattie treatment with leftover wild rice pelof, zucchini and mushrooms.
Shanna made this pureed roasted pepper soup for me. So far pureeing has worked the best for making soups without onions and garlic. Otherwise the broth just doesn't seem very interesting and the veggies float around forlornly without the flavors locking together.
Roasted chick peas, baked sweet potato and rice. The chick peas were so much fun to bake and to eat!
Eating out of the house is tricky because onions and garlic are in everything; it's difficult to enjoy anything containing them when you know you're going to feel awful afterwards. But over spring break, the three of us went to Seattle. We ate at favorite vegetarian-vegan restaurant of Shanna's family--the food was all so fresh and simple that it was easy to get the garlic and onions left out. The food was very good: the bell peppers were stupendous, perfectly cooked, with good flavor. And the plating was well done.
