I had an interesting experience this morning at the natural market while shopping for this month’s DL recipe testing. (Yes, I make, and we test, every recipe that appears in the mag—it’s such a great job!) It’s usually easy to find what I need, but this time there were a few items on my list that the store didn’t stock. I had to go to three stores, in fact, to finish up the list. That gave me pause, because of course, nobody out there is going to want to go through that much trouble to make one or more of our recipes. Thanks to reader surveys, we’ve heard that one priority when making a DL recipe is that ingredients are accessible and easy to find.

But here’s the dilemma: At DL, we hope to be on the cutting edge of all things healthy and natural, informing our readers of the best that’s out there for natural living, including cool or up-and-coming healthy ingredients—AND, of course, we want to give tried and true, whole-food items their well-deserved due. So I want our recipes to strike a balance between using ingredients that you may be familiar and comfortable with (think whole-wheat flour, rolled oats, honey, lettuce) and introducing you to items that may be new to you but that are well worth checking out (such as agave nectar, quinoa, chestnut flour, broccoli rabe, stevia). So here’s where you come in: What do YOU think? I would love to know what balance is right.

Last week I was lucky enough to visit Scharffen Berger Chocolate Maker (www.scharffenberger.com) in Berkeley, California. Make a note to look for their stuff at natural groceries and fine cooking stores—they make excellent chocolate and were the first company I know of to produce cacao nibs, the hot “new” antioxidant-rich superfood.

Scharffen Berger approaches chocolate the way other artisan producers approach wine, blending cacao from regions all over the world until they get the flavor they’re looking for—”bean to bar,” as they say, and all made in small batches in their little red-brick factory. They’re also committed to organic and fair-trade practices (they’re based in Berkeley, after all), although they don’t label their products as such; for them, it’s about integrity—paying a fair wage, protecting the Earth—rather than regulation. Recently, Scharffen Berger was sold to The Hershey Company, which also bought Dagoba, an organic chocolate maker based in Oregon, so it’ll be interesting to see if their worldly ideals translate upward.

Check out Emily Stone’s interview with John Scharffenberger on the Chocolate in Context blog.

Come July/August, it’s hot here in Colorado, and when it comes to outdoor activity, I’m not doing much besides riding my bike between my house and the bus stop. (A side note: It didn’t used to be like this. I remember my childhood summers in Denver as pleasant, with highs in the 80s and thundershowers in the afternoons. But I’ll save climate change for another post.) Every weekday morning I lug my bike down the stairs into the bus terminal, hoist it onto the front of the bus for the 35-mile journey to our office, and worry for the entire ride that some pulley somewhere will break and send my Bianchi careening into traffic or under the bus. All that hassle for just 3 miles of riding.

This week, however, I threw down $170 for an A-Bike—a foldable, 12.5-pound, two-wheel British export that my fiancé found on YouTube. Okay, it’s a little funky looking and it feels way flimsier than my usual ride, but the thing folds down to a knapsack-size bundle in about 5 seconds, making it perfect for quasi bike commuters like me. The saddle is even marginally comfortable. The only downers: A 187-pound weight limit; pedals that feel like they’re on the cheapo side; and the time gap to adjust to the bike’s super-uprightness. Also, the valves for blowing up the mini tires are hard to access with a standard bike pump. But overall, I give my A-Bike a B+ for innovation, urban practicality, and ease of use. Cheerio.

If you’re like me, and you care about your diet, it’s easy to lose sight of the big picture by micromanaging every bite: Is it healthier to drink green tea or yerba maté? Sprinkle cereal with blueberries or raisins? Recently, I was reminded to take a wider view by Heidi Swanson, a young, hip, multi-talented cookbook author from the San Francisco Bay Area (in addition to being a culinary whiz, she is also a photographer and graphic designer). Swanson runs two websites www.101cookbooks.com and www.mightyfoods.com and recently published Super Natural Foods: Five Ways to Incorporate Whole & Natural Ingredients into Your Cooking, which aims to turn readers on to everything from teff (a type of whole grain) to antioxidant-rich goji berries. In it, Swanson suggests:

1 - expand your pantry with whole and natural flours, oils, fats, sweeteners, and spices,

2 -experiment with alternative grains like quinoa, teff, and amaranth,

3 - understand the importance of eating from a colorful plate,

4 - get acquainted with powerful, nutrient-rich superfoods, and

5 - branch out from white to natural sugars as you did from table to sea salt

At Delicious Living, we approach food in much the same way, so I’m psyched to try out a few recipes from Super Natural Cooking. Maybe this week I’ll treat my family to the Spring Minestrone (with asparagus and peas), the Sprouted Garbanzo Burgers, or the Coconut Panna Cotta.

When people find out I’m the food editor of a magazine dedicated to natural living (yes, it’s a great job), I get asked a ton of wonderful, thoughtful questions. One of the most common involves “prioritizing” organic purchases, and on this I agree with the threads posted on Pamela’s blog; I advise focusing first on organic dairy and then meat. But, as another reader pointed out, local is quickly becoming the new organic—something I think is an encouraging trend. While organics is a huge improvement over the who-knows-what’s-in-this food we tolerated from Big Ag for way too long, I’m hoping that more and more people pick up on the related importance of buying and eating locally produced foods as often as possible—the benefits are vast, from better taste to supporting small-scale farms. I know I’ll never find homegrown bananas here in freezing Colorado, but simply considering local first shifts my mindset from convenience to quality.

And it is doable—especially with the increasing availability of local produce delivery services. Our family recently subscribed to www.doortodoororganics.com. I get an email every week listing what fruits and veggies will be in the upcoming box, and you can even customize it; if you hate beets, for example (which is a shame; we’ll talk later), you can swap them out for something else. Almost all items are sourced locally; for foods that don’t grow here, such as citrus, DTD works with organic producers to ship them in.

My friend Amy, who told me about the service and who has three boys under age 5, says they enjoy being surprised by their box’s contents every week; and it’s made both of us more adventurous, cooking and eating vegetables we might otherwise pass up at the store. It’s a simple connection to the seasons and to regional food producers—a small return to the way foods used to be eaten all the time.

I’m not into hot, honestly. I sweat. I melt. I curse the heat in my non-air-conditioned house. But all it takes are fresh organic raspberries (a dollar a pack right now; I just bought 10!) and the truth comes out: I’m summer’s biggest fan … because of the food. I’m grilling zucchini, peppers, and eggplant, making cherry pies (at night when it’s cool), tossing up gigantic salads, and of course throwing berries into just about everything.

Here’s the salad I made a couple of days ago:

In a glass jar, mix:

1/4 cup raspberry vinegar

1/4 cup honey

1 tablespoon olive oil

a pinch of salt

Shake well.

In a big bowl, toss together:

Several cups of washed farm-fresh greens and arugula

A handful of crumbled feta cheese

A handful of fresh raspberries and/or blueberries

Toasted chopped pecans

Drizzle with dressing (not all of it) and toss gently.

To kick off my portion of this new Delicious Living blog, I have a confession: I have never eaten a hamburger. I grew up on brown rice and tofu (or “toad food” as we affectionately called it) and steamed veggies. Yes, I am a lifelong vegetarian. Which is pretty much where my interest in natural living starts.

“Don’t you miss meat?” people ask. Of course not, I say. “Do you miss eating ants or seal blubber?” I want to retort. Instead, I just smile and explain that—for me—the choice is easy. What I think they really want to know is: Do I believe that eating meat is inherently wrong? Do I think their diet stinks? Well, no.

In my lifetime, I’ve seen vegetarianism go from being considered a form of devil worship—not to mention from being bland and unappetizing—to a fairly widely accepted (even gourmet) option for healthy eating. But is it the only way to eat healthily? No. Can meat be part of a planet-conscious diet? In my opinion, sure.

As a mom of a toddler (with kiddo number two on the way in April), and as an editor who scours dietary studies on a daily basis, I often wonder if I am making the right choices. (A second confession: I cheat by taking fish oil supplements.) But several recent things have strengthened my dedication to eating vegetarian: First, an obituary for Peter Roberts, founder and director of Compassion in World Farming, a dairy farmer who spent his life promoting animal welfare around the world and who eventually became vegetarian himself. It’s because of people like Roberts that we now ask: Where does this meat come from? Was the animal fed a natural diet? Let out to pasture and treated well? Was it pumped up with synthetic hormones and antibiotics?

Second, scientists like Udo Erasmus (the creator of Udo’s Oils, plant-based essential fatty acids) assure me that animal products aren’t a necessity for good health—and that given the state of the planet, such sources of nutrients (e.g. fish for EFAs) may be too polluted and overprocessed to be safe. That’s not to mention issues surrounding sustainability. (Check out our January 2007 Evolve column, “Is Eating Seafood Sustainable?” page 50.) Right now, I’m still taking my daily fish oil supplements—but stay tuned.