From the Vitality Food Feature 'Marvellous Meatless Meals'. Toppings can include any of the following: Ingredients Pizza sauce or tomato sauce Pepper rings or Sliced jalapeño peppers Sliced mushrooms or Zuccini Onion rings, Artichoke pieces, Sun-dried tomatoes Sliced kalamata or black olives Spinach Fresh basil leaves (or pinch dried herb) 1/4 cup crumbled feta cheese […]

From the Vitality Food Feature 'Marvellous Meatless Meals'. Everybody loves pizza and the good news is, you don’t need to weigh it down with meaty toppings to earn big praise at the table! If preferred, you can go gluten-free with a suitable substitute for the all-purpose flour. Makes 1 large thin crust, 1 medium thick […]

Tips and Recipes to Help You Lighten Up Your Menu for Early Spring Dining

All winter long, my sturdy cast iron pot serves me well as I prepare heavy stews and soups. But with the advent of spring, the stew pot is packed away and out comes the wok and saucepan as I turn to lighter fare for family dinners.

With One-Bowl Supper Salads

My grandma used to say that the best way to cool the body down and beat the summer heat was to toss up a light, bright refreshing salad.

The first green spikes poking through winter’s crusty grip seem to be my trigger for initiating all sorts of gritty tasks like cleaning cupboards and lightening up closets.

It’s been a long cold winter in this part of the world – apparently the coldest on record for many parts of Ontario and Quebec! As much as I love all of our seasons, winter included, it’s great that things have finally warmed up to seasonal temperatures since mid-April. The lengthening of the days and […]

Judging from the many fabulous ‘foraging and feasting’ books that have been published in recent decades, the movement towards celebrating nature’s wild abundance is as strong as it was in 1962 when Euell Gibbons published his celebrated book, Stalking the Wild Asparagus. Of course, humankind has survived on wild food from the beginning of time […]

The First Greens of the Season are Cleansing Bitters After a long cold winter, I get a feeling of warmth and contentment when contemplating a trek to the woods to forage for springtime edible plants. In the colder climes, this desire to seek out the first herbs of spring for cleansing and rejuvenating the body […]

September is truly a wonderful time of year because we’re able to reap the benefits of fresh Ontario produce. There is a growing trend amongst consumers toward shopping at local farmers’ markets and either drying or freezing their finds to enjoy throughout the winter months. September is also the month to consider harvesting plants that […]

Beat the Heat with These Cool and Delicious Vegan Meals My philosophy on food is rooted in natural plant-based nutrition – so it’s only natural that raw foods are a very big part of my lifestyle. In fact, they comprise a majority of my meals every day, whether in smoothies, granola, salads, or raw pizza […]

Ice cold and bursting with flavour and nutrition, smoothies are the invention of enterprising California beach shack owners, who improved on the puréed fruit drinks of Brazil around the mid-sixties. They whizzed up fresh strawberries with orange juice, bananas, and lots of ice, and called their chilled refresher a smoothie… and a multi-billion dollar industry […]

 Tiny, brilliant orbs of pure health, berries are the jewels of the fruit world. Not only are these gems beautiful in colour – they range from almost black to purple and blue to ruby-red and even orange – summer berries are rich in anthocyanins, nature’s natural antioxidant pigment. It’s those intense jewel tones that protect […]

There is a gardeners’ joke that goes something like this: Why do New Englanders lock their cars only in September? To keep them from being filled with zucchini. Like all great comedic lines, this one is rooted in the truth because the gourd family (Cucurbitaceae) of vegetables includes some 700 different varieties, of which pumpkins, […]

Winter is the perfect time to get out the crock pot (or “slow cooker,” if you will) and cook up some healthy, hearty porridges, rich soups, stews and mouthwatering one-pot dinner creations guaranteed to take the chill out of cold weather dining. When I purchased my first crock pot many years ago, it was a […]