© 2008 Culinary Concepts, Inc., Boulder CO

THIS MONTH’S VEGETABLE

Take a VAM Tour:

Mary Collette Rogers is excited to serve as the guide for your vegetable journey.  The Vegetable a Month Club is a natural extension of  both her personal and business experience over the last 30 years:

• Enthusiastic farmer’s market shopper for 20 years; knows practically every farmer and regularly gleans whatever insights they will share about their vegetables and fruits
• Healthy eating speaker for over 10 years, inspiring audiences with talks and workshops at venues ranging from Kaiser Permanente, Covidien and Boulder Community Hospital to teen, church and parenting groups
• Raised two vegetable-loving children from picky eaters who would barely touch anything green
• Recipe developer and cooking instructor for Wild Oats Markets and Share Our Strength and also in many private private venues
• Time management and organization coach in the kitchen, specializing in how to optimize speed and taste while cooking.
• Author of Take Control of Your Kitchen, the essential guide to organizing the kitchen and managing our cooking time, as well as the Dinner! meal management software program.
• 30-year kitchen veteran and tinkerer, experienced equally with cooking delights and kitchen disasters
• Most important of all:  Vegetable Aficionado, who even eats vegetables for breakfast and lunch!  (Check it out on Twitter)   Continually trying, researching and experimenting with new vegetables and new ways to prepare familiar ones.   

If there is one thing I hope to share after 20 years in the healthy eating business, it is the joy and delightful deliciousness of real food–especially vegetables.  

I entered the health and nutrition field in 1990, at the dawn of the low-fat movement, and quickly became an enthusiastic advocate of all things low in fat.  But then, along came the high-fat,low-carb, movement, with both its bacon, cheese and burgers and its disdain for all things made from grain.  One day it dawned on me:  How could “bad” foods become “good,” and visa versa, practically overnight?

I became suspicious.  Surely there must be some eating approach that could guide us more reliably–and more easily–than fad-of-the-day diets.  By this time, I had been preparing wheat- and dairy-free meals for my family for nearly a decade because of my children’s food allergies.  Without all the bagels, donuts, pizza, burritos, cheese and myriad packaged foods in the typical American diet, we relied on lots of vegetables and fruits, unprocessed meats, alternative grains (which were mostly in whole form), and beans and nuts.  

As I searched for an easy, fool-proof way to eat, it struck me:  We were already eating the perfect diet!  It was colorful and completely delicious.  It kept us amazingly healthful.  It kept us all at a healthy weight, without trying.  It was easy to understand and wonderfully creative.  Getting out of the bread and cheese rut had opened our eyes to the incredible diversity of foods that nature has given us, which led to my second big revelation:  Maybe we were just meant to eat the foods that were put on the earth for us.  

That sounds amazingly obvious.  Every other creature on the face of the planet sticks to the foods nature provides, and they are all blessed with good health and a healthy weight, without any dieting!  Maybe we should follow suit.

I summarized this simple, real food eating approach in The Simple Prescription for Good Eating that was laid out right at the beginning of my book, Take Control of Your Kitchen.   It has now become popularized in books like Omnivore’s Dilemma, How to Eat, and so on.  And no wonder, because it’s just the way things were meant to be.  It’s like coming home to rightness because it’s so easy and natural.  

Except that we live in a toxic food environment and hyper-busy culture which  makes it extremely challenging to follow this simple prescription.  For 20 years, my business has been devoted to helping busy people organize their time, kitchen and thoughts to make healthy meals manageable, even with our insanely busy schedules.  During this time, I noticed that one part of the Simple Prescription was particularly difficult to execute:  Eating a lot of vegetables.  

Practically every health study that hits the newsstands reinforces the miraculous benefits of eating more and a greater variety of vegetables.  But only one in ten of us eats the recommended levels–and that’s often only because potatoes are counted as a vegetable!  

So now, finally, my life-calling has become clear:  Vegetable Guide.  It’s been a long time coming, but I’m excited to fill the position.  My 20-year vegetable journey has enlightened me: I now know that far from being foods we put on the plate only because we should, vegetables are a gift of color, texture, flavor and interest that can make all of our meals a celebration.  And don’t forget all the good things they offer for our bodies.

Can I share this gift with you?  Please accept my invitation to begin a vegetable journey today.  I will be happy to serve as a guide to get you started and to stick with you as long as my services can be of help.  But it won’t be long before you begin soaring on your own!  

Welcome and Wishes for Many Happy Vegetable Meals,     

The Vegetable a Month Club:  Who’s In Charge?

An Invitation. . .

Mary Collette Rogers

Certified Vegetable Guide

Besides just cooking them, I’m learning to grow vegetables, too

But my fall harvest was mostly squash and a few tomatoes.  Thank goodness for the Farmers Market!