I remember the first time I had escarole. Having spent most of my younger life in small-town West Virginia and North Carolina, I'd met many vegetables, but nothing so exotic as this pleasantly bitter green with its thick leaves and gracefully frilled edges. My early culinary escapades in my grandmothers'...

Lumpy, bumpy, often covered with dirt, the lowly potato seems wretchedly unsophisticated in the produce aisle. Compared to more elegant offerings -- alluring stalks of asparagus, the slender and elegant leaves of a Belgian endive, the graceful curves of a lush, glossy eggplant -- potatoes are downright homely. But hailing...

Of all the vegetables in the produce aisle, the onion is certainly the most patient but least understood. Months after more delicate offerings have perished on the vines, weeks after even the hardiest greens succumb to frosty weather, onions lie in wait. Even under a light blanket of snow, they...

Like most foodies, I am enraptured by seasonal and local offerings. But I live in Colorado, at the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, where our growing season is pitifully short. We brace for storms as early as October and as late as May, and many an untimely freeze has devastated...

As the zucchini season (some say thankfully) winds down, celebrate the last of the crop. If you're feeling like you can't stand the sight of one more mammoth green vegetable, try these creative approaches; they might even leave you longing for a few more weeks.

Spicy Grilled Zucchini Banh Mi

I went raw years ago, and I did it with a great deal of enthusiasm and optimism. How hard could it be, eating food without cooking it? It seemed easy: make a bunch of salads, eat lots of apples and oranges, sprout a few nuts and beans. I thought it...

By the time you're reading this, you're probably warming up to summer. The grass is green, the nights are cool, and shade-free beaches are still tolerable. But as the weeks wear on, evenings get muggy, and the soft, lush grass turns brittle and brown, summer starts to lose some of...

The last time I was standing at the grocery store checkout, I counted almost a dozen magazines with the words "weight," "pounds" or "diet" on the cover. And that was at a place that existed solely to sell food. No wonder we're obsessed with dieting!

Weight-loss books, diet programs, TV...

One of the key pieces to understanding-and changing-compulsive eating, overeating, binging or any other uncomfortable patterns with food is being deeply and fully in your body. We call that embodiment. "But," you might say, "I'm always in my body. Where else would I be?"

It's a good...

What brings you pleasure? Real pleasure, so rich and deep that even thinking about it creates a visceral response? Right now, see if you can list a dozen things that bring you shivers of excitement or delight, elicit little mmmmms of satisfaction or make your lights burn a little brighter.

I write a lot about intuitive eating and the psychology of food choices and habits. Lots of people in the intuitive eating world focus almost exclusively on why you eat, exploring the reasons behind food choices rather that the foods themselves. The idea is that if we remove all good-bad...

Every year, around the end of October, I write lots of articles about healthy holiday cookies, nutritious renditions of Thanksgiving favorites, simple ways to stay slim during the holiday season, and so forth -- you know, all the things that are supposed to help a health-conscious person navigate through a...

Can you eat a healthy, whole foods, mostly organic diet, even on a shoestring budget? As a frequent and thrifty shopper, I know it can be done -- even if you're not a vegetarian. First, a few rules:

• Eat in. Restaurant meals are pricey and rarely use the highest...

The battle against aging occupies our lives on a daily basis. You can't go to the supermarket without confronting rows of magazine covers promising to make you live longer and look younger. But is a long, healthy life a roll of the genetic dice?

Genes play a part, but many...

In my last post, I talked about my beloved cousin, who simply can't fathom being as hopelessly obsessed with food and intuitive eating as I am. She has never waxed poetic about the blush on a ripe Seckel pear, or the creamy lushness of a ripe avocado. She doesn't spend...

I recently spent a lovely week on the farm where I played out my childhood summers. Sitting in the kitchen, I was awash in memories of my grandmother stirring a pot of collard greens, putting up pickles, cutting peaches for a cobbler, shelling peas into the big tin pail that...

Think about your last meal. Were you actually there?

Were you at the table, tasting your food, smelling its aroma, feeling its texture as you chewed and swallowed? Or were you in your mind, mentally lining up the next thing on your to-do list, composing an email, fretting over an...

I've been writing a lot lately about the importance of self-love and how it relates to food, weight and health. I've talked about how you can't flog, demean or hate your body into changing, whether it be to lose 10 pounds or heal from disease. But some readers have asked...

We read a lot about intuitive eating. Just as important, and the first step in the process, is intuitive cooking. But it's hard in our world. We're pressed for time, and accustomed to looking outside ourselves to the experts -- the celebrity chefs, the cooking show stars, the charismatic cookbook...

I've been reading the work of Marion Woodman, an author and Freudian analyst who's well known for her writings on addiction and eating disorders. In much of her work, she talks about how literal the body is in its signals; in a recent interview she says, "The longing for sweets...