It’s Christmas drinks. There’ll be booze and food – and plenty of it. I’m all for enjoying a glass or two of champagne or wine but it’s no good if you wake up the next morning feeling seedy and guilty. If you feel like being healthy at this year’s Christmas parties, here’s six tips to help you:

1. Have a healthy snack and a glass of water before you go.

2.  Start with sparkling water. It fills you up and quenches thirst with no kilojoules (calories). Soda water does the same but beware of tonic water – it’s just like any fizzy drink – packed with kilojoules (calories).

Here’s my question: Is it possible to make a wholemeal version of rewena paraoa (potato bread) that looks and tastes good? For the past month I have been experimenting. Rewena comes from the Maori word for potato – rewa, and paraoa means bread in Maori. Before Europeans arrived in New Zealand there was no potato, flour or sugar. Kumara, a type of sweet potato, was one of the main carbohydrate or energy sources for Maori. But this tropical plant was hard work to grow in New Zealand’s cool climate. Potatoes are different. Just throw them in the ground and they pretty much grow anywhere – my type of plant. So it was no wonder the potato soon took over from kumara as the staple food.

I figure the rewena recipe developed as most recipes do – by using the ingredients at hand – in this case potatoes, white flour, sugar and salt. I’d love to know how it started. Perhaps someone accidentally left a pot of boiled potatoes sitting in the sun for a couple of days and noticed that it had fermented. It wouldn’t have looked too great but maybe they recognised the yeasty smell and decided it could be made into bread. If anyone knows the true history, please let me know.