Time is tight? Get the whole family involved in healthy cooking so you can prepare meals in advance.

RODALE NEWS, EMMAUS, PA—Thirty years ago, Michel Nischan was a bit of a rogue chef, trying as hard as he could to feed his customers locally grown food. "I had to make 30 phone calls a day to find enough local food so that maybe 30 to 40 percent of food I served would be from nearby farmers," he says. Now he doesn't need to make as many phone calls to feed patrons of Dressing Room, his Westport, Connecticut, restaurant (which was co-owned by the late actor, Paul Newman), but keeping in touch with local growers is still a priority. "I've always been very supportive and very tied into farmers," he adds, in large part because he grew up in a family of farmers. "I knew that all the big conventional agricultural practices like pesticides and fertilizers were not good for environment," he adds. "And it gave me an awareness of the overall impact our food choices have on human, societal, and environmental health."

Part of his work as a chef has included attempts to get people to eat more healthfully, first as a chef trying to cut down on the butter he used in his cooking, and later with the Wholesome Wave Foundation, a nonprofit devoted to improving access to healthy, local, affordable food. "After a while, you start really understanding that your decisions aren't affecting you and your business. They're affecting the people you're feeding," he says. "It's not like selling someone a shirt they don't like. The food we eat clearly has a direct impact on our long-term outcome."

This month, Nischan published a new cookbook, Sustainably Delicious (Rodale, 2010), meant to teach people that cooking simple recipes from local and organic food can be convenient and—maybe more important—easy. "The thing I think that keeps most families from buying and cooking healthy food is a combination of affordability and convenience," he says. "You've got people who work two full-time jobs, who start doing this comparative analysis between cooking and going through the drive-thru, and it becomes this perfect storm between convenience and cost."