About Healthy Eating by Keitha Fisher

Cornwall Ontario — Fact*: There are over 70 million websites about healthy eating. (*Facts not necessarily accurate.) Each of these websites tends to tell you the right way to eat. Some make sense and some are downright insane. Because I feed people lunch every day, many of them tend to ask me questions about food and/or these websites. I’m pretty careful to mention that I’m neither a nutritionist nor an expert in navigating through often complicated meal plans and regimens. I like to follow the rules my grandmothers followed: If you grow it, it will be more delicious than if you buy it. If you use quality ingredients, you can prepare them simply and they will be delicious. (Delicious is a theme I’m pretty big on…)

The oft-quoted food expert Julia Child had this to say about cooking:

“You don’t have to cook fancy or complicated masterpieces – just good food from fresh ingredients.”

 As I write this article, the Food Network is on in the background. There’s a commercial advertising some sort of tortilla chip. They actually take a plate of naked chips out of the oven – and put them on the table beside salsa in a bowl – and they call it supper! I don’t even know what to say about this commercial except that nothing about that “supper” could be considered a meal, healthy or otherwise. I absolutely understand hurrying at the end of the day. However, chips and salsa are not a meal. (I would imagine at least some of the 70 million websites mentioned above would support this opinion.)

Over the next few weeks I’ll give you ideas for fast and easy supper that don’t involve removing tortilla chips from the oven. This week’s is so simple I can tell you the “non-recipe” in the remaining few words of this article.

One of the most popular Dish To Go dishes at the shop is Sausages with Peppers and Zucchini. You can grill this or roast it – but literally all you do is use bite sized pieces of sausage, mixed peppers, zucchini and red onion. Use a bit of olive oil with salt and pepper. That’s it! You can be eating in about 20 minutes (or even less if you’ve pre-grilled these things – which we tend to do at home for an almost instant meal on the table.)

I’ll leave you with another (fantastic) piece of advice from Julia Child: The only real stumbling block is fear of failure. In cooking you’ve got to have a what-the-hell attitude.