Dana Jacobi has authored ten cookbooks and written for Food & Wine, Cooking Light, and the New York Times. Her work has won a Gourmand World Cookbook Award and has been twice nominated for a James Beard Foundation Book Award. Her new cookbook, The Essential Best Foods Cookbook: 225 Irresistible Recipes Featuring the Healthiest and Most Delicious Foods is available everywhere books are sold as of April 15, 2008. Dana writes a nationally syndicated newspaper column which also appears at The American Institute for Cancer Research. In addition, she teaches cooking classes in New York City, where she also lives.

Guest Blogger Dana Jacobi--

“This tastes too good to be healthy.” I hear it all the time. How I learned to marry what is good for you with what is delicious so well that my cookbooks are nominated for culinary awards has been an interesting personal journey, one that started with my family.

My interest in healthy food reaches back three generations to my grandmother. She followed early natural food gurus like Gaylord Hauser, and was vegetarian for many years. My mother picked this up and we even vacationed at a resort where clean living was practiced. If this sounds extreme, it was, but the baked potatoes lavished in butter, steamed broccoli from a local farmer, carrot and raisin salad, and other simple, fresh food tasted great to me.

My mother also followed Adele Davis, so I learned about cooking to preserve the vitamins and minerals in food. But my mother also loved gourmet cooking. As on-and-off vegetarians, on special occasions we dined at the finest restaurants in New York City and I discovered steak bathed in red-wine Bordelaise Sauce, filet of sole Veronique, made with grapes and white wine, and more. At home, my mother taught me to make these French classics.

Then events conspired to make creating heavenly healthy food much easier. In the 1970s, in France, elite chefs developed Nouvelle Cuisine and Cuisine Minceur to lighten dishes and enlighten fine cooking. At the same time, Alice Waters traveled through France, then returned to California inspired by what she had found in the French countryside.

While America was just learning to focus on the dishes made from beautiful fresh produce, olive oil, and full of the robust flavors typical of The Mediterranean Diet, I went to France, too. I apprenticed there with 3-star chefs, then traveled around the Mediterranean discovering, from Paris to Barcelona, Morocco and Sicily, how sublime the simplest dishes could be.

Finally, new and important knowledge influenced my cooking. Reading clinical studies proving how phytonutrients, fiber, healthy fats, and other elements in food help to preserve our health and even counter disease, I wanted to eat dishes full of these benefits at every meal. I also saw how this information made others hungry for recipes delivering both protective health benefits and the profound pleasures food can provide.

In the kitchen, while working out how to do this, here are three things I keep in mind. Try them in your cooking, too.

- Buy the freshest and best ingredients you can.

My recipes work with typical supermarket ingredients but make a dish like Green and Yellow Squash Ribbons using summer squash and herbs from your own garden or a farmers market and it will be even better.

- Create an interplay of flavors.

The result makes dishes with just three or four ingredients stand out. This can be as easy as garnishing soups and pasta with chopped parsley and grated Parmesan cheese. Or braising carrots in pomegranate juice to contrast their sweetness with the tang of the fruit.

Always Add A Garnish

A sprinkling of fresh herbs on beans and vegetables, a dusting of cocoa on your oatmeal, or Dukka-dusted Pita Chips set next to a salad, qualifies. Doing this adds potent phytonutrients. While they are only a small amount, over time, doing this consistently adds up to real benefits. Also, there are synergies among many of these substances, so using a wide variety, even modestly, creates bigger benefits.

Related:

Fish With Chinese Ginger Scallion Sauce

The Mediterrean Diet Is The Healthy Diet

Rosemary Kills Childhood Cancer Cells