I've been the cook in our family since the early days. In grade school, one of my kids was assigned a fill-in-the-blank worksheet that said, The best food my mom makes is... Joe crossed out mom and changed it to dad.

I was lucky in that my wife agreed that having an evening meal together was an important part of family life. We refused to let television or work interfere.

Cooking is just one of lots of things I enjoy doing, so I've always tried to stick with meals I could pull together in 30 to 40 minutes.

Joe's favorite food back in grade school was pancakes, which I made for breakfast on Saturday mornings. Those were the low-fat days and pancakes were a low-fat favorite.

Of course we slathered them with trans-fat loaded low-fat margarine and smothered them in Mrs. Butterworth's high-fructose corn syrup.

The glycemic load of that breakfast was off the charts. No wonder Joe loved pancakes, as did the rest of the family. They were tasty, filling, and our bodies spent the rest of the day turning them into saturated fat.

But we didn't know that then. For me, the tide changed in July 2002, when the New York Times Magazine published What if It's All Been a Big Fat Lie? by Gary Taubes.

After reading that, I couldn't stop. I gradually adjusted how I cook while reading diet books, nutrition books, biochemistry books, and a summer's worth of current research articles on nutrition and health.

What we know about nutrition is killing us.

Unfortunately, what science knew about nutrition just a few years ago has little overlap with what it knows now. If you want to take a look at today's science, there's a good summary in the article, Origins and evolution of the Western diet: health implications for the 21st century.

The article was published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition in August 2005. The link I'm giving you goes to an abstract of the article in PubMed; just click on the red button to get free access to the full text of the article.

From an evolutionary perspective, some of the foods our ancestors needed were difficult to obtain. We inherited sensory systems that seek out those foods. They taste good and so we buy them over other foods. Since we buy them, companies make them and improve them. Now they're everywhere and we eat way too much of them.

Moreover, the wild foods that made up the bulk of what our evolutionary ancestors ate make up just a tiny portion of what we eat.

What difference does it make? The difference is all of chronic disease - heart disease, cancer, diabetes, depression, anxiety, irritability, the list goes on and on. Our evolutionary ancestors died of acute diseases - the ones that kill rapidly, like smallpox. The ones that kill slowly are all the result of missing nutrients that our evolutionary ancestors received from the wild foods they ate.

Science has by no means unlocked all the secrets of human nutrition yet. Moreover, it would take several articles as long as this one to cover what we do know. But from my point of view as the family cook it can be reduced down to two ideas.

First, we eat way too much omega-6 fat in relation to omega-3 fat. Right now the only thing home cooks can do about this is to avoid omega-6 fats and supplement the family's diet with molecularly distilled fish oil. Omega-3 fats go bad quickly, which is why they've almost entirely been removed from our food supply.

Molecular distillation of fish oil removes toxins like mercury and concentrates the omega-3 oils. These oils originate in plants; mammals and fish get them from their food. However, the food we give farm animals doesn't have any more omega-3s than the food we give ourselves. Wild ocean fish still eat wild foods, however, and are a good source of omega-3s.

Second, we eat way too much starch. Starchy foods provide plenty of energy, but not much else. Our evolutionary ancestors didn't eat the vast quantities of starches that we do - instead they ate foods with a huge variety of vitamins, minerals, and other micronutrients. To solve this problem, home cooks need to remove starches from their family's diet and replace them with fruits and vegetables.

High starch foods include potatoes and grains like wheat and rice, to say nothing of anything made from these ingredients, including french fries, breads, buns, chips, pastas, and pizza crusts. As you can imagine, removing those foods from today's typical family diet leaves a huge hole. Here's how to deal with it.

Home Fusion: stir-braising

Stir-frying is a type of cooking that originated in Asia. It involves heating a pan to a very high temperature, adding a bit of oil, then adding the food to be cooked, which has to be cut into small pieces ahead of time so that the food heats quickly.

The pan, called a wok, is kept at a high temperature and the food is stirred for just a minute or two. A pre-mixed sauce is usually added before transferring the food to a plate for serving.

It is almost impossible to keep a wok at the temperature required for stir-frying in the typical western home kitchen. In the west, stir-fried foods, like deep-fat fried foods, are restaurant foods.

Braising, on the other hand, is a western method of cooking. It combines a cooking liquid, low heat, and a long cooking time. Braising is traditionally used with tougher cuts of meat and is how we make stews. Crock Pot slow cooking is a type of braising.

Stir-braising is a method of home cooking that combines these two types of food preparation. From stir-frying we take the idea of cutting a meat and a variety of vegetables into small pieces to speed cooking time. From braising we take the idea of cooking in a liquid, to limit the cooking temperature to a friendly 212 degrees (100 C) or less.

One of the most important parts of stir-braising is food selection. Unlike the typical western meal, which might consist of a piece of meat, a starch, and a single vegetable, stir-braised dishes include meat that has been cut into bite size pieces, no starch, a few beans, and several different vegetables of different colors.

I always include a red food like tomatoes, red bell peppers, or cranberries and a yellow or orange food like carrots, yellow or orange bell peppers, or squash. Green favorites include celery, peas, green beans, broccoli, asparagus, and various green leafy vegetables such as cabbage, bok choy, kale, or collards. There are also white vegetables like onion, cauliflower, mushrooms. Zucchini and eggplant have color on the outside and white on the inside. And don't forget the garlic.

Beans also come in a variety of colors including white, red, black, and my favorite, garbanzo. Dried beans have to be cooked ahead of time for stir-braising, or you can use canned beans.

When using canned beans or canned vegetables such as tomatoes, keep in mind that unless you're cooking for a large family, you won't need to use the whole can at once. They'll keep fine in the refrigerator. I use about 1/4 of a cup of beans per person.

The liquid in stir-braising becomes the sauce. You can take the sauce in any direction. I usually use broth and a bit of either soy sauce, oyster sauce, Worcestershire sauce, Tabasco sauce, vinegar, or wine. Depending on the liquid, I usually also add one or more spices such as basil, thyme, cumin, chili powder, turmeric, pepper, salt, or sugar.

A sample recipe

On any given night I make a meal out of what's on hand. The recipe is always different and always the same.

Heat some olive oil in a large pot while cutting any type of meat or other protein into bite-sized pieces. I use about 4 ounces of meat per person. Add the meat to the pot. If you like garlic, add it now, too (I buy minced garlic in quart jars - we like garlic.) While the meat browns, cut a vegetable.

Start with the vegetable that will take the longest to cook. Do you have carrots? Cut up a carrot per person into pieces no bigger than a key on your computer's keyboard. Don't cut yourself! (Serious stir-braisers quickly invest in a large, sharp, knife.)

Before adding the carrots, add some liquid to the pot. In a measuring cup, add soy sauce to the 1/4 cup line, then vinegar to the 1/3 cup line, then water to the 1/2 cup line, then a tablespoon of brown sugar. Stir to dissolve the sugar. You've just made a Filipino adobo sauce. Pour it into the pot. Add the carrots. Give it a stir.

Are there beans in the refrigerator? Add about a quarter cup per person. If not, open a can of beans (not baked beans, by the way, just beans), drain, rinse, and put some in the pot and store the rest. Give it a stir.

For red let's use a red bell pepper. If it's on the small size, use one per person. If it's on the large size, use one for two people. Cut as before and add to the pot, and give it a stir.

Celery? Trim three sticks of celery and cut into pieces like green beans. Part of the art is cutting the vegetables in different ways. Add to the pot. Give it a stir.

Do you have any dark green leafy vegetables? Probably not, but if you do, cut up a leaf or two per person into short ribbons. If you don't, bok choy is a good place to start next time you're at the store. Add this to the pot, stir, and cover. The liquid should be hot enough by now to create some steam under the pot's cover.

At this point I quickly pull together a salad. Sometimes it's mostly lettuce and sometimes it's mostly cut up fresh fruit. Add some dried fruit, some nuts, some olives, or some cheese. Use lots of colors.

When the salad's ready, open the pot and dish the stir-braise into the center of the plates. Eat and repeat, with appropriate variations, nightly.

Let us know of any particularly colorful and tasty combinations you come up with in the comments below.