Martha Rose Shulman’s weekday Food column at NYTimes.com is my equivalent of having a personal chef in my kitchen: here’s someone who realizes how busy I am and how determined I am to serve healthy delicious meals regardless. Someone friendly and inventive, impeccably thoughtful, worldly, always aiming to please and never ever full of herself. Oh, and this personal chef won’t fatten me up: she includes detailed nutritional information at the end of every recipe.

Martha's Kitchen at her House

You can prowl the archive for hours or make snappy choices. Recipes are organized by ingredient (from A: Apricots to Y: Yogurt) or theme (B: Breakfast Grains to W: Winter Greens) This week’s theme was tomatoes. Next week: picnics. The following: stir-fry (she just bought a new wok). From the intro to “Recipes for Health”:

The easiest and most pleasurable way to eat well is to cook. Recipes for Health offers recipes with an eye towards empowering you to cook healthy meals every day. Produce, seasonal and locally grown when possible, and a well-stocked pantry are the linchpins of a good diet, and accordingly, each week’s recipes will revolve around a particular type of produce or a pantry item. This is food that is vibrant and light, full of nutrients but by no means ascetic, fun to cook and a pleasure to eat.

Martha is a prolific author, including co-author gigs with Wolfgang Puck and Dr. Dean Ornish; she’s given classes all over; she’s great on TV; and she co-founded the professional foodie site Zester Daily. Her newest cookbook, The Very Best Of Recipes for Health, comes out this week. In short, she’s a rock star.

It fits that she has a busy cooking school – in LA. I’m scheming to attend…. It was a treat to have a conversation with her recently — about her column, her life, and Practically Green.

The Times column began exactly two years ago. I want the column to demystify healthy eating and empower people to cook, prepare their own food from fresh ingredients, as opposed to eating out or bringing in. The country has gone astray because we aren’t in control of what we eat! If you have an egg and a vegetable, you can make a meal. The recipes are very simple.

Which recipes have been most popular?

One is the Spicy Quinoa Salad. People seem to really love quinoa. It’s fantastic! The week that Obama was elected, that recipe was #3 on the most emailed list of all of The New York Times! Another recipe people really love is anything with beets. It’s always fascinating to me, but any recipe with beets is popular. [Note: I found 14 recipes for beets.] Sometimes recipes get REdiscovered, and I don’t really know how! One of those is one of the first recipes I did, for oriechetti, tomatoes, arugula and parmesan. It’s just a really great summer recipe.

Spicy Quinoa Salad

I took the Practically Green test and I got a 6 out of 10, and part of that’s because I have a landlord. I don’t know what kind of a dishwasher I have, but I do know that the fridge is Energy Star, because I bought it myself. I composted until my landlord freaked out; he thought it was attracting rats. [Sigh/humph.] I have a garden, and everything about it is organic. And I still compost because we have green baskets in LA – LA’s bureau of sanitation has a great recycling program. If you enter “green bin” in the search box on that link, you’ll get a pdf with the 3 different bins and what you can put in them, including a green one for compost. We put kitchen scraps into the bin that’s there with all the rest on the curb and it’s picked up!

I have a twelve year old. His generation is much more aware. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t want to eat crap if he gets a chance – he’s a healthy twelve year old. If he’s taking a long shower and I say, “Liam, you’re taking a long shower, it’s time to get out!” nothing happens. But if I go in there and say, “You’re really wasting shower water, Liam,” He’ll get out. They are getting the message.

Aren’t you a little bit hungry now? Motivated? Visit Practically Green for dozens of ways you can make healthy, eco-friendly decisions in your kitchen and at meal-time! Maybe you’d like to start with these three:

Martha’s website: www.martha-rose-shulman.com Join her on Facebook and follow her on Twitter @MarthaRShulman