You’re seated at your favorite organic Mexican restaurant and spot a wonderfully fragrant bowl of organic salsa on the table. Yummy!

But don’t be too quick to dip your chips, cautions gastroenterologist Cynthia Yoshida, MD, in a recent issue of Good Housekeeping. The salsa may have been left out for several hours, warns the director of the University of Virginia Health System’s GI clinic and author of No More Digestive Problems : A Leading Gastroenterologist Provides the Answers Every Woman Needs—Real Solutions to Stop the Pain and Achieve Lasting Digestive Health.

Ask your waiter for a fresh bowl, and make sure it’s properly cold—straight from the refrigerator—when it arrives at your table. You’ll avoid diarrhea and a possible bout of food poisoning.

Is it wrong for a full-grown woman to fall in love with a cracker?

When I was shopping for organic food at my local Whole Foods Market, I came across Dr. Kracker Pumpkin Seed Cheese Krackers. These crunchy morsels are made from organic wheat flour and are studded with organic pumpkin and sunflower seeds. The cheese taste is subtle, and the cracker is low on salt—one of my prerequisites when I shop. Topped with an aged cheddar cheese, these crackers make the perfect snackers.

Dr. Kracker specializes in organic flatbreads, with flavors including Klassic 3 Seed, Seeded Spelt, Muesli, Graham and Seedlander (pumpkin seeds, millet grains and poppy seeds).

If you can’t find Dr. Kracker at your neighborhood natural foods store, click here to order online. The website also features a cool Kracker Community Recipe Exchange.

Go Krackers today!

Why bother making your own organic tortilla strips or chips when you can buy an inexpensive bag of them at your local natural foods market?

As a Los Angeles resident, I’m lucky to live in a city where I can visit the local tortilleria and buy them hot off the griddle, piled high by women who have been making them for decades. A fresh tortilla (or tortilla chips freshly made at a favorite Mexican restaurant) are warm and inviting, a far cry from the packaged strips that are, by comparison, tasteless and much too salty.

The recipe featured in this week’s Organic Authority Cooking School calls for fresh tortilla strips as a soup topper, and there’s only one ingredient you need to buy when you go shopping: a package of organic corn tortillas. The next step is simple—and you may never go back to bagged chips.

Tortilla Strips

Preheat the oven to 350°F. Cut four 5-inch corn tortillas in half. Cut the halves crosswise into 1/4-inch strips. Transfer the strips to a mixing bowl and drizzle 1 to 2 teaspoons vegetable oil over them. Toss well. Spread the strips out in an even layer on a baking sheet. Bake, stirring and redistributing the strips once or twice, until lightly browned and crisp, about 12 minutes. Cool the strips completely. For simple snacking, sprinkle with sea salt as they come out of the oven. This makes about 1½ cups of strips.

Recipe reprinted with permission from The Mushroom Lover’s Mushroom Cookbook and Primer, by Amy Farges, © 2000, Workman Publishing Company, Inc., New York. All rights reserved.

January’s Organic Authority Cooking School

Welcome to Organic Authority’s Cooking School!
When You Can’t Find Organic Ingredients…
Cooking with Organic Dried Beans
Hot Trend: Organic Chili Peppers
The Recipe: Latin Tomato and Huitlacoche Soup