All of my recipes are:
* vegetarian,
* gluten-free, and
* dairy-free.

Most of my recipes are also egg-free, vegan, and have no refined sugar.

I specialize in healthy, whole-foods cooking that tastes great!

I sweeten desserts with pureed fruit, especially dates — which are a surprisingly good substitute for refined sugar. Processed sugar makes me suddenly fall asleep and has other uncomfortable effects on me. I worry about the safety of artificial sweeteners. And I haven’t had good success with stevia. But pureed dates or raisins work surprisingly well in a lot of recipes, plus they include the nutrients of fruit, which are stripped out of refined sugar, so food sweetened with fruit is vastly healthier — in addition to tasting great! Pureed dates or raisins in a recipe don’t taste like dates or raisins — they just taste sweet.

My son Corbin has a soy allergy, so I don’t use a lot of soy in my recipes, though sometimes I do use it, and serve Corbin something else instead. I don’t have health concerns about soy. John Robbins wrote a well-researched article about it, called What About Soy. In the article he examines the breadth of research about soy and concludes that non-GMO soy is a safe food to eat.

My kids and I have celiac, so we are carefully gluten-free.

I don’t use much coconut oil. It is a saturated fat, which is unhealthy to eat. I’m a longtime subscriber to Nutrition Action Healthletter, a wonderful publication that gives you lots of well-researched information about nutrition. Here is their article about coconut oil. The article doesn’t begin to address all of the myths about coconut oil that circulate on the Internet, but it covers the basics. Did you know that the recent flashy headline articles claiming that saturated fat is good for you were based on a flawed meta-analysis, and the authors have retracted them? Saturated fat is still bad for you. There’s a good summary of what happened in this article from Nutrition Action Healthletter – look under number 3.

I love leafy greens, especially chard and kale. My kids don’t, but they will contentedly eat broccoli — especially Corbin, who loves broccoli. I grow an organic garden each summer. Chard and kale are always prominent there.

I’m a longtime vegetarian. When I was a child, I wanted to be a vegetarian, but my mom said that it was too hard. Then in college I made friends with a vegetarian named Neal, who gave me a copy of a lentil recipe that he liked. I tried cooking it, and was surprised to find that it tasted great. And I was even more surprised that after eating it my whole body felt great! I continued experimenting with vegetarian food, and found that I liked it, so I kept going. That was 1987. I am still a vegetarian today, because of the health benefits, to avoid animal cruelty, and because it is better for the planet.

I try to eat all organic. It’s better for the planet. It’s better for our bodies. It does often cost more, but I think it is worth it. Your food dollars are your vote: Whatever you buy, producers will make more of it. So if you buy organic, then growers will grow more organic foods. And the more they produce, the less it will cost – and then the whole planet and everybody on it benefits.