By Lisa Messinger
Food and Cooking at Creators Syndicate

Plan brunch and you are apt to be dubbed "brilliant." Just calling the meal between breakfast and lunch a "brunch" seems to bestow an air of specialness and sophistication upon it. Late spring, with its warm weather months, picnics, potlucks, bridal and wedding showers and graduation celebrations is the perfect time to highlight light and healthy seasonal specialties that you can enjoy indoors or outdoors. Inexpensive ingredients, imaginatively paired, are all it takes to make great impressions, like the ham and spiced cheese waffles, green olive baguette French bread pizzas and peanut butter and jelly fresh fruit oatmeal that follow.

Fun fare like this also proves cooking can be easy, nutritious, economical, fun - and fast. They take just 10 seconds each to read and are almost that quick to prepare. The creative combinations are delicious proof everyone has time for tasty home cooking and, more importantly, the healthy family togetherness that goes along with it! Another benefit: You effortlessly become a better cook, since there are no right or wrong amounts. These are virtually-can't-go-wrong combinations, so whatever you - or your kidlet helpers - choose to use can't help but draw "wows" from family members and guests.

A Softy for Hard-Boiled Eggs
Quarter hard-boiled eggs and very gently mix them with bite-sized chunks of cooked red potatoes, pieces of fresh French green beans, chopped tarragon and dill, freshly ground black pepper and a small amount of low-fat or fat-free Thousand Island dressing.

Pizza Baguettes with Pizzazz
Slice a French bread baguette in half and toast each half about halfway in order to be able to get the rest of the toasting done during the quick heating process that follows. Carefully spread each half with ketchup mixed with Worcestershire sauce and spicy brown mustard and top with minced green pitted olives, chopped cooked chicken breast, chopped thyme and basil and freshly grated Parmesan cheese. Broil until hot and bread is toasty.

Tempting Tortellini Salad
Place store-bought cooked and cooled cheese tortellini atop a tossed salad of fresh spinach, chopped celery, spring peapods, grated carrots with low-fat or fat-free creamy Italian dressing on the side. Top with shredded provolone cheese and freshly ground black pepper.

Meaty Waffle Wonders
Top toasted store-bought whole-grain toaster waffles with thinly sliced low-sodium black forest or smoked ham (often sold under "healthy" brand labels in supermarket cold-cut sections) and drizzle with melted cheddar cheese mixed with curry powder. Garnish top with grated unpeeled red apple.

Awesome Peanut Butter 'N' Jelly Oatmeal
Cook quick-cooking (not instant) oatmeal according to package instructions and gently mix in chopped strawberries, blueberries, sugar-free grape jelly and sugar-free peanut butter and reheat slightly if necessary. Before serving, garnish top with ground cinnamon, nutmeg and ginger.

QUICK TIP OF THE WEEK:  It's the beginning of roasted marshmallow season and smart s'mores are simple. Make them open-faced with the bottom "sandwich bread" being a sugar-free graham cracker or sugar-free whole-grain crispy oatmeal cookie. In the middle is your roasted marshmallow. Some supermarkets and health food stores sell sugar-free marshmallows - and even the regular variety has always been fat free. As the top layer, use dark chocolate (which is filled with antioxidants and lower in sugar and higher in fiber than much less antioxidant-containing milk chocolate). The higher cacao your dark chocolate label advertises the better (such as from 70 to 85 percent).

Lisa Messinger is a first-place winner in food and nutrition writing from the Association of Food Journalists and the National Council Against Health Fraud and author of seven food books, including the best-selling The Tofu Book: The New American Cuisine with 150 Recipes (Avery/Penguin Putnam) and Turn Your Supermarket into a Health Food Store: The Brand-Name Guide to Shopping for a Better Diet (Pharos/Scripps Howard). She writes two nationally syndicated food and nutrition columns for Creators Syndicate and had been a longtime newspaper food and health section managing editor, as well as managing editor of Gayot/Gault Millau dining review company. Lisa traveled the globe writing about top chefs for Pulitzer Prize-winning Copley News Service and has written about health and nutrition for the Los Angeles Times Syndicate, Reader's Digest, Woman's World and Prevention Magazine Health Books. Permission granted for use on DrLaura.com.