Easy dinner recipes don’t have to involve cans, prepackaged foods or a microwave. Let’s put our chef hats on and start thinking outside the box! There is a whole tantalizing world of delicious and easy dinner recipes open to you, that are also fantastically healthy, and I’m going to tell you all about it.

Does a crispy golden chicken breast stuffed with a yummy cilantro cashew pesto sound good to you? How about that same chicken breast smothered with a fat free sun dried tomato sauce and stuffed with tomatoes and fresh basil? Does a cut of velvety steamed salmon on a vibrant bed of fresh greens whet your appetite? How about gluten-free, whole grain pasta with a homemade spaghetti sauce that includes five different fresh vegetables?

All of this is as your fingertips when you truly open your mind to a healthy eating lifestyle.

My easy dinner recipes involve ingredients that can all be obtained from your local grocery store, where you’ll spend almost all of your time in the fresh produce department, amongst all those gorgeous fruits and veggies. When you begin building your easy dinner recipes around abundant use of fresh produce, thus filling your stomach with healthy, life-giving foods, you will naturally cut down on the bad stuff that we all want to eat less of. Over time, your cravings for these foods will become fainter and fainter.

Unless you’re a gourmet cook, you probably don’t want to spend tons of time in the kitchen chopping and dicing and simmering. I am not a gourmet cook. That’s why having a collection of easy dinner recipes up my sleeve that are also super good for me is so important. I want top quality food that makes me feel amazing and energized when I eat it, but I don’t want to spend a lot of time preparing it.

When you start eating real foods (i.e. fresh, whole and unprocessed), you really do open up a whole undiscovered level of flavor. Your taste buds will thank you again and again! The reason all those packaged foods have so many ingredients (most of them unpronounceable chemicals) is because they have to: they don’t have any flavor of their own, so chemists in a lab somewhere insert additives to make them taste like something. They are amazingly good at disguising the tastelessness of fake, dead food.

These fake foods, for so many of us, have robbed real, fresh, whole foods of their rightful place at center stage, and they’ve also robbed us of our health. Let’s toss all those packaged foods in the garbage, where they belong, and start basing our easy dinner recipes around real foods.

Try this: buy a ½ pound of salmon per person, and steam it for five or six minutes, until it’s no longer dark pink in the center. Place the salmon on a bed of fresh mesclun greens, add some diced tomato and a few squeezes of lemon, and you’ve got yourself a meal! If you’re feelings sassy, add some finely chopped scallions. You don’t need salt or anything else. The brief steaming retains all of the natural juicy flavor of the salmon and it will melt like rich velvety butter on your tongue.

Healthy and easy dinner recipes really are as simple as that. I encourage you to try out some easy dinner recipes this week with your family. You’re all going to love it! A healthy eating lifestyle is one of the most rewarding journeys you will ever take, and sharing it with your family is one of the greatest gifts you can give them.