When I need a sweet boost in recipes I’ll always turn to fruit or stevia first (whole natural foods = yay!), but when those foods simply can’t pull the weight, it’s palm sugar comes to the rescue. I teamed up with superfoods company Navitas Naturals a couple weeks ago — who offers organic palm sugar — and shot this fun Navitas-style video for their “Chef’s Notes” video series. In this video we discuss what makes palm sugar so easy to love, how to use it, and showcase my mini-recipe for Palm Sugar Limeade as well (it’s a winner). You can find Palm Sugar in natural food stores and also online.

“Can you believe what they put in these things?” he asked, pointing to his bottled iced tea. “All I wanted was some iced tea and I look at the can and there’s 56 grams of sugar in here.”

Cool. Yes. Glad you’re in the know.

“It’s so awful what they put in our foods these days. All this corn syrup, this sugar, in everything,” he continued.

Sure is.

“Even when you think you’re eating well you find out all this other stuff’s been hiding inside the ingredients.”

Well, the ingredients are always listed on the back of a package, but I hear ya.

“And then there’s all these people with diabetes and obesity… something’s gotta change. That’s why I . . . ”

Nice – bring it home, brother!

“That’s why I stopped drinking juice.”

Wait. What?

Whether it’s sugar, fat, carbs, protein, etc, we have a nasty habit of isolating food elements without looking at the big picture. Some people, such as my new iced tea friend, are afraid of juice because of reports claiming the sugar content in fruit juice is equivalent to soda. Unquestionably yes, juice — especially fruit juice — contains natural sugars, in particular fructose.

Yet it’s not really sugars per se that earn the Big Bad Wolf title as much as it’s those creepy empty calories that compose the food that sugars often reside in. Context is everything. In juice’s case, that “context” is a drink naturally filled with vitamins, minerals, antioxidants and other nutrients (it’s just a fruit/vegetable without the fiber). As far as the context of iced tea and soda go . . . cue the crickets.

Understanding nutrition can be very, very simple through the idea of nutrient density (the amount of “good stuff” you get per calorie). And because juice is essentially condensed nutrition (you can fit 3-4 servings of fruit or 5-6 servings of veggies in a glass), I’d unquestionably rank juice in the “premium fuel” department. General rules apply: fresh is best, veggies are better than fruit, green veggies are even better than that, and of course, with everything (say it with me): balance.

Here are a few potent juice combos I paricuarily love (you can juice them yourself at home or custom order at a juice bar):

Lean & Green: cucumber + celery + kale + spinach + lemon

Purify & Cleanse: beet + carrot + ginger + fennel + parsley

Restore & Rejuvenate: orange + coconut water + wheatgrass

Sweet & Warming: apple + burdock root + ginger + cinnamon (just dash)

I wish I had a brownie for every time I’ve been informed that eating naturally is simply too hard. While making fancy shmancy meals can be a fun project, uber delicious healthy food doesn’t have to be complicated. Some of my favorite “recipes” are not recipes at all. Take, for example, a fig. Bite into it and . . . whoa! All those little seeds and colors and textures are like whole universe of magnificent complexity tucked inside a shriveled-looking edible fruit package. Imagine if the fig didn’t exist, and some company “invented” the recipe for one: would the fig not be the most amazing “product?” So much of our food experience comes down to mindset.

There’s a style of Japanese brush painting called shodo – a form of calligraphy with an abstract offshoot that attempts to capture energy and kinetics through a few simple brush strokes. Whereas most styles of painting take days, months, even years to complete, shodo takes just a few calculated moments. A swish. A swash. Maybe one last accoutremental zing . . . and then, the decision to end. And within this philosophy of “less is more,” the biggest challenge becomes when to step away and recognize perfection in “just enough.” It’s an empowering judgment call – a kind of discipline in a way – embracing simplicity in this funny world of ours that is obsessed with faster, newer, hotter, and anything that begins with “now with more.”

Poor ol’ “less.”

In the realm of food — for the most part — modern cuisine teaches “just enough” is never enough. Our perfectly lovely foods are processed, packaged, mixed, mingled, extracted, added and bastardized until they’re pretty much unrecognizable. Then we process them again, add healthyish-looking colorings, artificial vitamins and preservatives, and reshape the result into forms that pass for food-like. I don’t think most people would be too impressed if I took a beautiful shodo painting, sprayed graffiti all over it until it turned grey, covered it in white-out to get to a white page again, and then drew a couple of lines mimicking the original painting in magic marker.

I find natural foods can take us back to a Tao-like state — appreciating beauty in simplicity. Take the humble parsnip: a wonderfully useful root vastly overshadowed by its more rotund cousin, the potato. While usually just reserved for an occasional hodgepodge-style stew or roasted medley of sorts, the parsnip offers a complex flavor functioning as a gorgeous balance between a potato, a carrot, and fennel . . . all rolled into one (aka a “recipe”). And it even contains more vitamins and minerals than many of its other root friends (especially potassium). What a guy.

Homemade parsnip fries utilize this idea of “ingredient economy.” Slow roasting them allows for a caramelization of their inherent sweetness, and a little coconut oil keeps them crisp on the outside and soft within. There are a billion ways to make this recipe fancier, but in pulling them out of the oven, I’m personally hard-pressed myself to add a thing. There’s simply no need. I find these parsnips perfect: Just. The way. They are.

Here’s the basic recipe for parsnip fries.

Parsnip Fries

Ingredients:
2 pounds of parsnips (about 2-3 large roots)
2 Tbsp coconut oil, melted
salt and pepper to taste

Directions:
Preheat oven to 425 degrees.
Peel the parsnips and trim the ends. Cut in half lengthwise, then slice into sticks – about 1/2 inch thick. Spread out onto a large baking pan and toss with oil, salt and pepper. Bake for 30-35 minutes or until golden brown, tossing parsnips once or twice during baking to ensure even cooking.

Serves 2.

The brownie universe isn’t exactly full of surprises. The combination of sugar, butter, flour, chocolate, eggs, a few extraneous ingredients, plus a little oven time, inevitably leads to some form of brownie action. Of course, the resulting degree of deliciousness is all in the details — just talk to the adamant nut-adders, the chocolate chip enthusiasts, or the “fudgy” versus “cakey” people that can seemingly never agree. Yet, by and large, the language of brownies is pretty much the same: delicious chocolate squares that just about everyone loves. Including me.

But I have a secret. With the exception of chocolate (which can be profoundly beneficial in its unprocessed form), I don’t use any of the “conventional” ingredients in my homemade brownies. In fact, I don’t even bake them. (I know — what a rebel.) Instead, by using exclusively natural, whole foods, the inherently gorgeous flavor of each healthy ingredient does all the sweet singing — without needing the crutch of sugar or butter. Undercover health benefits like antioxidants, good omega fats, potassium, magnesium (and more) nutritionally rank this dessert as more of an energy bar than an “extra 20 minutes on the treadmill indulgence.” Best of all, five ingredients plus five minutes is all it takes to go from zero to brownie.

Oh, and as for their decadent texture? Simply put: go team “fudgy.” Here’s the printable recipe.