The Auckland Food Show is on this weekend. I went with a friend today. Here’s my take on it.

[tweetmeme]Most unusual food: Halfords Earth Gems
.

Earth Gems are multi-coloured, bite-sized vegetables that ‘are the jewel of the South American Incas’. They grow like a potato but are from the beetroot family and have an earthy taste. You sure know you are eating something straight from the ground. I think they are an acquired taste! With all those colours they are bound to have plenty of antioxidants.

Most native Kiwi drink: Kawakawa Fire Tea

A caffeine free tea made from kawakawa, lemongrass and ginger by T leaf T. It’s packaged beautifully with a simple Maori design. A lovely present and it tastes great.

Food I bought today and have already used: Australian semi-dried tomatoes and Monin vanilla syrup

I used the tomatoes on pizza but should have kept them for a salad. They were too delicious to waste on pizza. I mixed the vanilla syrup with low fat milk for a delicious instant vanilla milkshake. I also bought Monin’s Chai Green Tea Extract to make Chai Latte – a sweet, milky alternative to coffee.

What I’ll use tomorrow: New Zealand Breakfast Tea

A black tea blended with manuka. It smells like honey but tastes like tea. It should taste great with grainy toast and honey for breakfast.

Best buy: Dutch Maasdam cheese

It was half-price – about $20 per kilo. I bought a huge chunk!

Most interesting food: Cherry juice that helps you sleep

This tart cherry juice is made from Montmorency cherries from Canada. According to the promotional leaflet these cherries have significant levels of melatonin which promotes sleep. It’s 100% juice with no added sugar or preservatives which is good. It comes in a concentrate which must be kept in the fridge or freezer to maintain its nutritional value.

Food that brought back the best childhood memories: Fresh walnuts

There was always a tray of walnuts drying in the sun at my grandparents. We would spend ages helping my Nana to crack them open. My grand-dad liked them dipped in icing. Walnuts contain alpha-linolenic acid (a type of omega-3 fat) so make a healthy snack, preferably without the icing!

Biggest trend this year: Anything with omega-3 in it.

There was flax seed oil, biscuits, pills for kids that taste like jelly lollies, and even smoothies made with flax seed oil. Parents seemed most enthusiastic about these foods. I just hope they don’t mega-dose their kids. Omega-3 fats are good and most of us could do with a bit more but as with all nutrition too much of one nutrient is likely to upset the balance of others. Also flaxseed, like walnuts, contains alpha-linolenic acid which converts to EPA (the omega-3 fat in oily fish) in the body. The conversion rate is about 8% so you need to eat quite a bit of flaxseed to get the same effect as a from a meal of salmon.

Most organised person

The woman who had a suitcase on wheels filled with all her purchases. She had already made one trip back to the car to unload and was on her second round.

Most popular stand

Anything with chocolate!

Found these interesting snippets surfing around the web …

The price of free choice … When National’s Tony Ryall took over as Health Minister he promised no major structural changes.  He has kept that promise. District health boards and universal subsidies for primary health care are intact. … I agree with free choice but for  many of us  ‘free choice’ does not always equate to ‘good choice’ ..c

How the food industry buried the folic acid plan … The New Zealand Government wants to defer mandatory fortification until 2012 and this week issued a public discussion document which floats that option, along with that of proceeding with the original September start, and pulling out of the rule altogether. … If you have an informed opinion on folic acid supplementation make sure you respond to this public discussion document soon – it’s on a tight time frame ..c

Keep an eye on … Viewed as the healthy children’s snack, these thin crisp rounds grab attention with claims they are 97 per cent fat- and gluten-free. The downside is they’re loaded with salt and flavour enhancers… Parents! – read this. It’s right! Have you ever smelt some of those snacks? Even a tiny pack of some of those rice snacks can stink out a car for days – and it’s definitely not a natural food smell..c

Swiss Company Promises Chocolate Revolution … Chocolate is just as much a part of Switzerland as the Alps. Now, global market leader Barry Callebaut has developed the product that competitors have been hopelessly puzzling over for 60 years — chocolate that doesn’t melt and is low in calories … Melt-proof chocolate with less calories? What will it be made of? I’d rather stick to the real stuff myself ..c

Top 10 Tips and Tricks for Better Coffee … Coffee doesn’t always make work better, but you can definitely work to get better coffee. From four-cup hotel machines to French presses, from home-roasted beans to decorative foam—we’ve got a wealth of tips for enjoying a better cup… My favourite iced coffee is the Thai style – strong black coffee mixed with sweetened condensed milk and poured over a glass of crushed ice. Delicious and naughty ..c

Hunting best buys when eating healthy costs more … WASHINGTON – Obesity experts say the lousy economy threatens to worsen Americans’ already bulging waistlines because bad-for-you food happens to be the cheapest. But there are healthy cheap eats, and new research aims to show how to eke the most … Potatoes, eggs, yoghurt and lean mince – good suggestions for healthy eating in tight times ..c

No one in the world has the same fingerprint as you – or exactly the same mix of talents and tastes. You are designed as a ‘one-off’ which is wonderful – until you try to get a family of individuals to eat the same meals. It’s a common cry that I’ve come across a few times lately: “My husband likes meat but I want vegetables” “One child wants cheese on everything and the other can’t bear cheese but wants tomato sauce” “My child hates soup” “My children love soup but only if it’s smooth” How can you get everyone in the family to eat well without force-feeding or becoming a restaurant catering to individual tastes. Here’s a few ideas.

My husband wants meat and doesn’t like vegetables, I want vegetables and don’t like much meat

Solution: Stir fry meat and vegetables.  Beef or chicken salad

We love soup but the kids hate it

Solution: Serve soup on pasta as a pasta sauce with grated cheese on top

We always have left-over rice when I make stir-frys

Solution: Add milk, sliced banana and a sprinkle of brown sugar or syrup for a quick rice pudding

I like to put wheatgerm on porridge because it is so healthy but no-one else will eat it

Solution: Make oatmeal pancakes with wheatgerm

My children won’t eat plain yoghurt

Solution: Make a smoothie with banana or berries, reduced fat milk and yoghurt. Make raita – chopped cucumber and mint mixed with yoghurt – to serve with Indian curry

My husband won’t eat lentils

Solution: Add a handful of red lentils to beef casseroles and mince. It helps thicken the meal, makes the meat go further and provides soluble fibre to fill everyone up and help help control cholesterol and diabetes.

The only beans my family will eat is baked beans.

Solution: Baked beans are great but for variety add red kidney beans to mince with a bit of chilli to make chilli con carne. Make minestrone soup with a mix of brown and white beans (I like borlotti and haricot). Try a bean salad.

If you have a great food solution to your family’s varied taste preferences, we’d love to hear it! ..c

Last week I attended an interesting talk by Dr Sally Poppitt on appetite regulation. She works at the Nutrition Unit in Mt Eden, Auckland – a ten-bed live-in unit where she studies what and how much people eat. “For some of our studies we ask people to eat a test meal and then six to eight hours later eat an ‘ad lib’ lunch. That means they eat as much as they like, of whatever they like, from the free buffet – and we calculate what they have eaten,” she explained. “During those 6-8 hours we ask them to rate how hungry or full they feel”. Just as I was imagining the queue of volunteers attracted by the prospect of a free feed, she mentioned the blood tests. A plastic tube stuck into your arm so the researchers can take blood every hour would certainly stop me from volunteering!

I learned that it’s harder to regulate how many kilojoules you are consuming with liquids compared with solids. This explains why slurping on calorie laden thick-shakes, juices and fizzy drinks are so fattening – you don’t really cut back on the solid food to compensate. There is a similar effect from eating fatty foods – it confuses appetite regulation. Dr Poppitt described one of their studies where they gave overweight women a low fat meal (25% fat) and asked them to eat until they were full. A week later the women came back to the unit to eat exactly the same foods but this time, unknown to the women, the meal was high fat (50%fat). Dr Poppitt commented, “It’s really easy to pack fat into foods without noticing any difference”. On the low fat meal the women felt full and stopped eating at 3000kJ less than when they ate the high fat meal!

I unintentionally did a similar experiment this weekend. On Friday we ate out at our local Italian restaurant. The service is friendly and the food is delicious – just like being in an Italian kitchen with Mama cooking while the four of us enjoyed pizza, veal marsala, veal involtini, chicken parmigiana and a bottle of chianti. I chose the veal marsala which came with perfectly cooked vegetables. It was pretty low in fat and not a huge meal but I was full.

Two nights later came the second part of the experiment. Some of our family had booked us into the restaurant equivalent of the high fat all-you-can-eat buffet. Creamy soups, deep fried vegetables, garlic butter soaked bread, cheese laden pasta, chips, salads with rich creamy dressings and the desserts – rice pudding made with cream, whipped cream slapped onto commercial pavlova and stuffed into commercial brandy snaps, chocolate mousse, chocolate cake, buttery biscuits and slices. My son gleefully filled his dessert bowl with jelly beans, topped with serve-yourself-ice-cream, caramel sauce, chocolate sauce and sprinkles on top – twice!

It’s not really the place a dietitian gets excited about but we didn’t go for the food, we went to spend time with our family – and that was great. But I had to eat and, just as in Dr Poppitt’s study, after two or three visits to the buffet, despite fussily searching for the healthiest food, I’m sure I had eaten way more kilojoules than the veal marsala meal. Actually, I think it was the pavlova and brandy snaps that did it! Have you ever been in that situation where you don’t really like a food but you just keep on eating it? It’s the fat or sugar that does it, I’m sure!

So it’s back to proper food this week – rolled oats, organic sour dough grain bread, home-made hummus, salmon and rice, stir fried beef and vegetables, and apples and mandarins for dessert. My son will thank me one day!

Related:

Veal marsala recipe

Not healthy at all, but a New Zealand favourite, so here it is: Pavlova recipe