multicultural food fest #3

Yesterday, I went to one of my favourite events in Canberra – the Multicultural Food Festival. It was crazy busy and in comparison to previous years, the fest was more spaced and there were more and a different range of stalls. Seemed like there were new stalls – for example Croatian, a wider variety of Indian, cider stalls etc. Or maybe these stalls were always at the food fest but they were in more prominent locations or this was the first time I acknowledged them. I realised that there weren’t as many Asian food stalls as previous years – my theory is that Sunday (today) is Chinese/Lunar New Year. I guess families who own Asian restaurants and normally would host a stall were busy with festivities and their own families.

A lot of the festival was a haze – I was parched and quickly drunk ½ a cider and a cocktail before I ate anything. I went to cider stall hosted by ‘The Apple Thief’ – I don’t think I’ve seen this brand before so was excited with the possibility of something new. There were three types of cider – pink lady (sweet), granny smith (dry) and pear (in between). As I usually over consume on sweet foods, I got the granny smith one… regrettably though… it was like light beer – a light taste while you’re drinking it and a dry aftertaste. I ended up handing it over to a guy. The cocktail from Digress (Italian and Indian restaurant) was refreshing – probably one of the better things I’ve had from the restaurant in my experiences.

I made an effort to avoid eating one large meal and feeling completely full so opted to have small bites from different stalls… This was difficult because all I could find was deep fried stuff and Chinese stuff that I didn’t want to eat (my family makes better). I ended up getting ‘Aloo Tikka’ balls from the Digress stall (curry potato balls) that were very salty (best served with a dry alcoholic drink). I also got a chicken kebab stick from the Samoan stall, which tasted like plain barbequed meat. If you are like me and like trying lots of different foods, it’s definitely best to go with a group with the same mindset and share.

In my experiences of the food festival, I normally ‘over-consume’ on food/drinks. However, today I feel more gross/bloated than I normally do post-festival. My flatmate reminded me that I’ve been pretty good with my diet in the past few months (including not eating a whole piece of cake by myself) so the food’s probably not reacting well with my body. To balance out my excess calorie intake, I have an urge to exercise… but today so far, the weather has been very temperamental (rain, shine, rain, shine), so it’s been very difficult to exercise outdoors. DETOX STARTS NOW.

veggie stack :)

It was Friday, I survived another tough week at work, did an interview and was feeling lethargic. I thought I’d treat myself on Friday evening – many people who I know, treating yourself would mean you’d have a glass of red wine and cheese or takeaway food. But drinking red wine by myself would make me feel like an alcoholic and I don’t normally eat cheese. And there was a storm so I wasn’t inclined to step outside for takeaway. I treated myself with a veggie burger… just without the bread.

I love most veggie patties – it’s a mysterious object so I love guessing what’s inside and thinking about how I would create my ‘dream’ veggie pattie. It’s ‘safe’ because it’s only veggies (as opposed to sausages or meat patties that probably have mashed up animal intestines). Veggie patties have a dense and wholesome texture which is adds variety to my diet of that’s mainly crunchy veges and soft beans.

I scanned the aisles of Coles and picked up probably the most expensive packet of veggie patties. I didn’t choose them because of the price (idea that expensive = luxury = self-pampering) but because I love mushrooms. One downside about these patties is the amount of packaging used – an outer paper bag and inner vacuum bag containing the patties. The majority of veggie patties in the supermarket use only a vacuum seal bag and that is sufficient.

For the sake of brainstorming, I looked up a few recipes for veggie stacks... I came up with a stack that would look reasonably colourful and would have almost all my fav veggies.

From the top, ingredients included:

*Herb pesto: including basil, chives, herb olive, pine nuts, olive oil

*Red onion

*Oven baked/ grilled mushies, zucchini and red capsicum

*Store-bought mushie pattie

*Guacamole

This mushie pattie tasted a bit like red meat, so in hindsight hummus would have suited it better. But the veggie stack was a perfect treat… well with my tastebuds/preferences at least.

toasted rolled oats vs. raw rolled oats

My breakfasts are usually pretty healthy as I eat muesli/granola (less-processed options bought from the supermarket), home made granola or a cooked breakfast mainly with veges. However, I realise my weakest point might be the stuff I buy from supermarkets - although I'm pretty selective with it, it usually contains more sugar than I really need.

I'm trying to get around this by making my own granola. So for approx every 7 cups of cereal mix, I add a heaped tablespoon of honey. The other day, my granola included the usual rolled oats, linseeds, dessicated coconut and puffed wheat. This time I included dried cranberries, dried apple, hazelnuts, pecans and almonds. It was delicious! I'm not going to cut out the dried fruit for their sugar content because I figure I'll be snacking on some sort of fruit throughout the day anyway.

My male body-building housemate told me that cooked rolled oats has less essential vitamins etc than raw rolled oats as the cooking process/heat kills the good stuff. As I need to make my next batch of muesli, I thought I'd look into it.

There's heaps of body building, nutrition and dieting forums that talk about this (like here and here). The original poster would ask whether there was any diff between raw oats and cooked oats. However, this would often be followed by a stream of posters saying 'I don't know, but I think raw oats taste good/bad... they are difficult to digest as evidenced by my friend who had stomach pains after consuming them... or I incorporate them into my diet by putting them into smoothies'. Sometimes posters said 'Yeah they are good for you', but provided no evidence or reasons why. These forums didn't contain any facts but just people showing off their diets and their experiences. I want facts, not personal experiences.

Livestrong.com did a comparison of nutrients of instant dry oatmeal to the cooked stuff using the U.S. Department of Agriculture nutritional tables and found that dry oatmeal has more antioxidants, vitamins, minerals. I particularly like an article on Veg Weight Loss that actually pulls out data from the USA website and compares them. I checked this against the original website. But the Veg website points out that the difference in nutrients may be because 100g of cooked oatmeal has a higher water content (and takes up a lot of the weight) than 100g of raw oatmeal.

But what about rolled oats? The Australian and New Zealand Food Standards website gives nutritional info for boiled rolled oats and raw rolled oats, so I put together a comparison table of this. The raw stuff has more energy, protein, calcium and more vitamins than its boiled counterpart. I'm not sure whether the info on the boiled oats would be affected by its higher water content.

	Oats, rolled, boiled	Oats, rolled, raw	Unit
Proximates
Energy, including dietary fibre	273	1572	kJ
Moisture	83	9.3	g
Protein	2	11	g
Nitrogen	0.35	1.88	g
Fat	1.4	8.7	g
Dietary fibre	1.7	9.5	g
Fructose	0	0	g
Glucose	0	0	g
Sucrose	0	0	g
Maltose	0	0	g
Lactose	0	0	g
Total sugars	0	0	g
Starch	10.2	58.1	g
Available carbohydrate, without sugar alcohols	10.2	58.1	g
Available carbohydrate, with sugar alcohols	10.2	58.1	g
Minerals
Calcium (Ca)	9	45	mg
Copper (Cu)	0.102	0.502	mg
Fluoride (F)	94.44	60.22	ug
Iodine (I)	1	4.3	ug
Iron (Fe)	0.9	3.73	mg
Magnesium (Mg)	24	131	mg
Manganese (Mn)	1.214	5.821	mg
Phosphorus (P)	80	411	mg
Potassium (K)	53	313	mg
Selenium (Se)	1.5	14.1	ug
Sodium (Na)	1	7	mg
Sulphur (S)	39	151	mg
Zinc (Zn)	0.42	1.92	mg
Vitamins
Thiamin (B1)	0.103	0.535	mg
Riboflavin (B2)	0.026	0.141	mg
Niacin (B3)	0	1.01	mg
Niacin Equivalents	0.42	3.29	mg
Pantothenic acid (B5)	0.06	0.34	mg
Pyridoxine (B6)	0.01	0.07	mg
Biotin (B7)	5.4	30.1	ug
Folate, natural	0	18	ug
Total folates	0	18	ug
Dietary folate equivalents	0	18	ug
Vitamin C	0	0	mg
Vitamin E	0	0.35	mg

Aus & NZ Food Standards links - raw rolled oats and boiled rolled oats

I'm not sure if toasting the oats in the oven would have the same effect on boiling oats in terms of their nutritional content. Nevertheless, I'll try mixing my raw oats with my toasted oats and see how I go.

cherry apple strudel

Apparently cherries are a super food - they contain heaps of melatonin (a compound that helps you to sleep) aids weight loss, fights types of cancer, lowers cholesterol etc. Dan had some over ripe cherries so I looked up some recipes where we could use them... most recipes called for dried or pre-packaged cherries. Screw that - we used a recipe for apple and cherry strudel, substituting pre-packaged/morello cherries for fresh ones. Fresh food is the best option anyway, in my opinion.

The recipe was super easy - the filling contained cherries, apples, a bit of sugar, lemon juice (essential as it gives the strudel a 'bite'), almond meal (gives texture and substance). Wrap it in filo pastry, bake, then done! The strudel wasn't too sweet or fatty. We made it a second time without lemon juice (this was when I realised the importance of the ingredient) and use halzelnut meal (reminded me of nutella, yum!)

The recipe is here. My one doesn't look as good as the website,,, but they probably Photoshopped the heck out of it.

sushi in tuggers

To me, the things that makes sushi awesome is the freshness and generosity of fillings. The new 'Hero Sushi' in Tuggeranong's Hyperdome is far away from the typical sushi-eating inner-city crew in Canberra but offers a great range of sushi.

There were numerous vegetarian options (what?!?!) - my favourite was the sushi covered with tofu skin and filled with avocado/cucumber. I was so excited to eat it... it looked and smelt delicious and had a combo of veges that I normally don't see together on one sushi roll. Eating it engaged all my senses and I was thrilled.

As I was taking a picture of the sushi place, I realised it was a dumb foodie move. A young girl with her mother walked past me and the girl said loudly in complete bemusement and wonder: 'Is she really taking a photo of the sushi place?' Lol.

red and green salad

Eh oh. It's 7.30pm, I just woke up from a nap and it's dinner time but I can't decide whether I'm not hungry or still waking up. Maybe if I try to articulate my food-thoughts on this blog, I will start to feel more grounded and hungry.

Mainstream food/health magazines, web pages and books always say that when you eat, your meal should contain as many colours as possible as this usually means your meal contains a range of nutrients.

However, on a recent hot day, I improvised and created a salad from everything that looked good from my fridge... everything just happened to be red and green. (maybe it's a good salad to get you in the xmas mood?) 

Afterwards, I looked at the nutrients of all the salad ingredients on this website and it seems that my arse aka nutritional needs were well covered in the salad. The ingredients were a high source of Vitamin A, B6, C, E, K, dietary fibre, folate, iron, magnesium etc. The apple cider vinegar is known to aid weight loss - whether this is a psychological thing of 'this liquid is so strong that i don't want to eat anymore' is beyond me.

Oh, and it was delicious - creamy with the avocados, fresh with the almost-raw zucchini and apples and tangy with the vinegar dressing :)