Fruit and cheese make a perfect pair, especially with the weather heating up and long, lazy summer days setting in – days spent soaking up the sunshine and balmy evenings spent outdoors, in good company, not labouring away for hours over a hot stove. 

This Cantonese classic is traditionally served to women post-childbirth, and is shared with friends and visitors in celebration of the arrival of a baby. As per Traditional Chinese Medicine philosophies, the dish is heralded for its ‘blood-building’, ‘re-building’ and ‘warming’ properties. According to our understanding of modern nutrition, I’d say that it’s incredibly nourishing for a number of reasons, as a rich source of:

Who wants to pay upwards of $40 for a body scrub when you can home-brew your own for a couple of bucks? Cheap and cheerfulness aside, making your own skin products also means you can control exactly what’s going onto and into your body – your skin is porous and will soak up anything you slather on it, so needless to say additives and excess chemicals aren’t a great idea. If it’s good enough to eat, you can be sure it’s good enough to put on your skin (and perhaps bake with later, no?).

The French have consommé and glace de viande, the Vietnamese have pho, the Japanese have ramen, and so on – nearly every culture has traditionally included broths and stocks made from animals bones in their diets. 

Sitting down to a big bowl of vegetables might make you feel smugly ‘wholesome’, but if you’re not getting a decent bit of fat along with it then you’re missing out on many of the vitamins and minerals that make those vegetables so nutritious in the first place. 

That old and dusty hypothesis that dietary cholesterol causes a significant increase in blood cholesterol, thereby correlating with heart disease has long been put to rest. Many studies have confirmed that dietary cholesterol in fact has very little to do with cholesterol seen in the body, and that serum cholesterol levels may not be indicative of heart disease risk as once presumed1. Eggs, like most cholesterol-rich foods, are jam-packed with important nutrients, especially fat-soluble vitamins and essential fatty acids.

Roasted, stuffed pumpkins adorned with hearty kale, creamy feta and bursts of fresh pomegranate provide a little seasonal colour and comforting carbohydrate as the weather gets a bit nippier (here in the base half of the globe, anyway). It’s sweet, deliciously satisfying, and healthy to boot.

The names ‘squid’, ‘cuttlefish’ and ‘calamari’ are often used interchangeably, but they’re not the same thing. They’re closely related molluscs found virtually all over the world, ranging from very small in size to huge, deepwater giant squids (not recommended for eating, they taste overwhelmingly like ammonia apparently). Cuttlefish have an internal ‘cuttlebone’, which differentiates them pretty easily from squid and calamari, and calamari have slightly longer fins than squid.

I’ve never been a mayo lover. I’ve avoided it since I was a kid because I thought I didn’t like the taste. Then I shunned commercial mayo because I realized it was super high in poor-quality polyunsaturated vegetable oils (usually canola or soybean). But today I decided to give homemade mayo a chance, and it turned out well!

Fats have become something of a pet topic for me. They’re the macronutrient that everyone loves to hate, unfairly persecuted by myths still perpetuated by the marketing of commercial food products and the diet industry. I suppose I’ve made it a bit of a personal mission to get the word out there about beautifully nourishing, natural fats. But of course, not all fats are created equal. Here’s a brief run down on four main types of fat that we consume.