The cook controls health!

No matter how your family likes to eat and will eat outside your home, the cook is the main person to determine what the family gets fed.

The health and general welfare of everyone in your family depends on you, the cook.
How you shop, what you feature, how you prepare the food, how often you serve that meal, all these decisions will impact the health of your entire family, including future members' as well, because the example you set will influence your own children's and grandchildren's methods and ways.

Today, I want to talk about our ingredients, what we feature in our meals.  I've already listed some of these things in my ten rules for food consumption. As the white/eggplant and cheese pizza above indicates, serving more vegetables will improve your family's health right away.

Vegetables are under-appreciated. Most cooks think first of all about the main entree, the meat. Then, they think about the accompaniments.  In Italy, when I was growing up, our first course, the minestra was usually a concoction of vegetables with a starch, pasta or rice or...

I grew up featuring vegetables, until I married. Then, meat became the main melody. My husband's family grew up on a ranch, in Montana. Their meals were prepared for people who expended a great deal of physical energy.  They needed lots of calories and protein.

It turns out that the Mediterranean diet is heart-friendly. You too can adopt it easily with just a few changes:

1. feature vegetables
2. include legumes such as beans, peas, garbanzo, lentils, etc.
3. incorporate whole grains
4. use lean sources of protein as fish, poultry, game

My vegetarian pizza is easy to make and can change with the seasons. Add tomatoes, zucchini, green peppers, mushrooms. Use whole wheat flour and make your own. Search my Pizza in a Jar recipe and you can have pizza any time.