NATURAL PERSPECTIVES:Eating organic is good for the environment -- and for you

Last week's Independent had a derisive "Sounding Off" column written by Irvine "opinion researcher" Adam Probolsky ("Harman's enviro thinking is backwards"). He blasted Sen. Tom Harman as someone who stir-fries organic veggies and soy, like there's something wrong with that. Basically, Probolsky was opposed to doing anything constructive to combat global warming.

Probolsky objected to Republicans for Environmental Change, possibly because of their policy statement, "Global climate change is the pre-eminent environmental issue that America and the rest of the world will face in the 21st century.

"The evidence is becoming increasingly clear that human activity is causing an artificial warming of the earth's atmosphere.

"Scientists believe that a warmer world could result in costly, harmful consequences: coastal flooding, increasingly erratic and severe weather, loss of farm production, greater stress on forests, reduction in fresh water supplies and spread of infectious tropical diseases to temperate regions."

Sounds to us like Sen. Harman and Republicans for Environmental Change are on the right track. We're going to keep right on eating organic veggies.

Our friends, Paul and Sue Hertzog and their daughter Katie, came to visit us recently for a weekend of gourmet dining, sans tofu. We grilled marinated elk steaks from Don's Market in Santa Ysabel, boiled Yukon gold potatoes with butter and parsley, and had corn on the cob, Italian flatbread, and a salad of butter lettuce, fresh spinach, sprouted sunflower seeds and sugar plum grape tomatoes.

Yes, most of the food was organic, and yes, most of it was locally grown.

For dessert, we had a fruit Pavlova, a spectacular dessert that is as beautiful as it is delicious.

To assemble it, I slathered a baked meringue shell with mascarpone cheese mixed with honey.

I filled the shell with a mix of six kinds of sliced fresh fruit, to which I added honey, a goodly dash of cinnamon and nutmeg, and a splash of pear chardonnay vinegar.

I don't know if the pear chardonnay vinegar added much more flavor than a good champagne or sherry vinegar, but it sure sounds nice.

I topped the fruit with a pint of sweetened whipped cream.

On Saturday, we grilled sausages from Wild Oats Market that were made from lamb, mint, and garlic. I made some French bread from scratch, then sautéed red kale with pecans and dried cranberries. I also made a mushroom and pine nut risotto.