This is my favorite collard greens recipe. The blend of spices with the ground meat (lamb or beef- both work well), tomatoes, and collards is an adventure for the taste buds. I find heavily spiced dishes like this invigorating and satisfying. I made this for our first dinner on the Whole30 diet. It is free of grains, dairy, added sugar, and legumes. It is wholesome, filling, and delicious. I’ve already enjoyed eating leftovers twice for lunch.

This meaty cobbler is an impressive, comforting, and satiating meal. It’s pretty wholesome too. There isn’t much bread overall, with the bulk of the dish made of tomatoes and beef (you can sub turkey). If you’re limiting carbohydrates, you can easily leave out the corn, but I like it for the fiber and nutritional boost, not to mention the pretty color. The abundance of spices—cinnamon, allspice, ginger—gives the dish fun flavor. Spiced beef cornbread cobbler is delicious, works with my diet plan (yay for the flexibility of weight watchers!), and is pretty enough to serve to company, as I often have.

This recipe comes from a small, unassuming, and rather generic looking spiral-bound cookbook, 101 Things to do with a Tortilla. I received this book as a gift a few years ago, and at first totally dismissed it. It uses a lot of canned ingredients, which usually isn’t my thing, and it has no photos. But somewhere along the line, I decided to give it a go, and was immediately impressed. The recipes are very easy, very fast, and very inexpensive. While I’m not usually into cooking from cans, which so often contain soggy and gray produce that barely resembles the fresh version of the same, sometimes it’s just so easy! And certain foods actually taste good from a can, such as tomatoes and beans.

For this recipe, I paired the canned goods and supermarket produce with ground beef from our favorite local beef farmers, Bass Farms, who use sustainable growing techniques and minimal chemicals. They have a little farm stand off the highway just outside of the Shawnee National Forest, nested amongst rolling hills and forests of tall, bright green trees with thick undergrowth. The stand sells beef as well as a variety of summer produce, including tomatoes and peaches, and flowers too. We try to get to their stand at least once a month during the summer.