We enjoy plenty of our own recipes, but I also have fun browsing recipes online and copying down recipes we might like.  Here are 7 that have earned pages in our recipe binder.  If you are vegetarian or vegan or have given up meat for Lent or are observing Meatless Mondays or meatless Lenten Fridays, you’ll appreciate that none of these recipes contains red meat or poultry, only one contains fish, and the last 4 contain no animal foods at all.

UPDATE IN 2020: The original sources of 3 of these recipes aren’t there anymore.  I have posted my version of 2 of the recipes and shared the updated links here.  For another recipe, we later created a photo tutorial showing how to make our version.

1. Lemon Creamy Salmon with Macaroni and a Salad from Crest Cottage Creations

This actually is a recipe for chicken, but we made it with salmon (and vegetable broth instead of chicken broth), and it was fabulous!!  Just open a can of salmon, take out the bones if you prefer, and use it in place of the chicken.  We also used whole-milk yogurt in place of the cream, and the sauce was delicious.  This is a recipe for a full meal: fish in creamy sauce, pasta, and greens with dressing and dried cranberries.  We used kale as our greens–lightly cooked in the oil and vinegar.  My seven-year-old assistant chef appreciated having all his meal components in separate dishes (he even ate the dried cranberries separately) while his parents mixed everything together.

UPDATE: Here’s our Lemon Creamy Salmon photo tutorial!

2. Cheesy Walnut Burgers from Taste of Home

This is the recipe my brother found when trying to replicate a burger he’d enjoyed in a restaurant.  These are pretty high in fat but no worse than a hamburger, and boy are they scrumptious!  They are easy to make, freeze well, and after defrosting (or refrigeration) can be reheated on a George Foreman grill.  This recipe works fine with pecans instead of walnuts, if that’s what you have.

3. Creamed Kale with Caramelized Onion from Budget Saving Mom

This is intended as a side dish, but in my enthusiastic opinion, you can stuff a baked potato with it and call it a meal!  The nutmeg really makes it perfect.

UPDATE: This recipe is gone…and we lost our paper copy…but a quick search shows me many similar recipes on other sites.  I’m not going to link to a specific one until I’ve tried it and determined it to be equally good.

4. Brown Rice Salad from My Sweet and Savory

This recipe is ideal for summer picnics or potluck dinners, but it’s also good at any time of year as a side dish or snack that you can make in advance, stash in the refrigerator for a week or so, and eat cold.  The flavor improves as it soaks.  The combination of ingredients may sound odd, but it’s really good.  I’m not a big fan of brown rice, even though I know it’s healthier than white rice, so I was thrilled to find this recipe just after I had bought brown rice on sale.

UPDATE: Here is The Earthling’s Handbook version of Brown Rice Salad.

5. One-bowl Pumpkin Bread/Muffins from Kitchen Stewardship

This is easier than most pumpkin bread recipes yet is the best of any of the several recipes we’ve tried!  Katie’s post includes a “healthy remake” version (that’s the one we use, substituting sorghum syrup for molasses) and helpful suggestions for using up excess pumpkin–although my solution to that problem is just to double the recipe!

6. Garlic Kale Sweet Potato Soup from 365 Days of Kale

This soup is packed with nutritional super-foods and is hearty enough to make a meal all by itself!  (Why, yes, we do eat a lot of kale in our family.  It’s nutritious, it’s cheap, and we’re not worried about it being “goitrogenic.”)  Between the sweet potatoes and the beans, this tasty soup is starchy enough that even I feel full without eating bread or crackers.  We’ve made it several times and think it’s even better with slightly more sweet potato than suggested.  It also works with pinto beans when cannellini beans are too expensive.  It has a rich, tasty, Italian flavor.  Don’t worry about the huge quantity of garlic; it mellows with cooking.

UPDATE: Here is The Earthling’s Handbook recipe for Sweet Potato Soup with Beans, Kale, and Garlic.  (We didn’t reduce the amount of garlic at all, just adjusted the recipe name to reflect what’s most memorable about this soup.)

7. Vegan Ginger Cookies from Food.com

These are the cookies we baked last fall when one of our son’s friends celebrated his birthday with a cookie competition: Each guest brought a batch of homemade cookies, we all watched as the birthday boy sampled each one and conveyed his impressions, the guests snacked on the remaining cookies while the birthday boy and his parents prepared the award certificates, and then the certificates were presented with much pomp.  Our cookies won Most Crunchy, a high compliment in this boy’s opinion.  He is vegan and allergic to corn, which ruled out several of our favorite cookie recipes, so we were thrilled when this one worked so well.  Now it has joined our favorite cookie recipes!