Does the term "bran muffin" conjure up a cardboard-like breakfast your Great-Aunt Ida used to serve - the kind of thing you'd slip to the dog when no one was looking? If it does, you've been the victim of a very common health food blunder: thinking that "healthy" and "high-fiber" are synonymous with "tasteless" and "impossible to digest."

It's true: bran muffins can be challenging to make exciting. I've been baking a lot lately, though, and so with some help from my friend Andrea, I've taken on the challenge of making a bran muffin that you want to eat but which has few artificial ingredients.

Why all the baking? Well, in trying to be a more conscious eater, I've found that the foods with the most strange and unpronounceable ingredients are my beloved carbs. It's hard to find bread products without a paragraph of chemicals after the word "Ingredients." Hence, the baking.

Did you see that movie Up in the Air? George Clooney plays a dude who spends three hundred days a year on the road and gets a hard-on from rental car rewards cards.

Let me tell you, sometimes I can relate.

Packaging is important.

Some packaging just doesn't last, and it ends up being thrown in landfills or choking a sea turtle. If marketers were smart, they'd realize that if they put more thought into how their packages could be reused, they'd be stealthily recruiting secret advertisers who carry their product packaging around even when the contents are gone.

So ... maybe you made a New Year's resolution to eat less meat (a great way to be healthier and sustainable-er). Maybe you have always been a vegetarian. Or maybe you're just looking to try something new.

Well, here is the recipe for you!

Cannelloni (the name means "large reeds", which is quite evocative) is a sheet of pasta rolled around something yummy - usually cheese. However, many pastas contain ingredient lists a mile long, so those of us who try to stick to Michael Pollan's "eat food" rule can find them troublesome. That's why this recipe is so great: instead of pasta, you use eggplant as the wrapper for your filling. I really enjoy the creamy consistency of eggplant; the key is to make sure it is completely cooked. Raw eggplant kind of tastes like a chewy mud pie.