God save us

Me, Ata and the munchkins are at the Paddington Markets and enjoying this:

The closest thing to 'home' in Sydney

Pempek, gado-gado and mie ayam at Pempek Clovelly restaurant in Kensington, Australia:

Food Expiration Dates: We Discard Food Too Soon

This is interesting and good to know.

Amplify’d from green.yahoo.com

Food expiration dates: What do they really mean?

Expiration dates on food products can protect consumer health, but those dates are really more about quality than safety, and if not properly understood, they can also encourage consumers to discard food that is perfectly safe to eat.

Which five foods are most often feared as being unsafe after the printed date? According to ShelfLifeAdvice.com, we are most wary of milk, cottage cheese, mayonnaise, yogurt, and eggs, and the site offers these helpful explanations:

Milk: If properly refrigerated, milk will remain safe, nutritious, and tasty for about a week after the sell-by date and will probably be safe to drink longer than that, though there’s a decline in nutritional value and taste.

Cottage cheese: Pasteurized cottage cheese lasts for 10-14 days after the date on the carton.

Mayonnaise: Unopened, refrigerated Kraft mayonnaise can be kept for 30 days after its expiration date or 3-4 months after opening, the company told ShelfLifeAdvice.

Yogurt: Yogurt will remain good 7-10 days after its sell-by date.

Eggs: Properly refrigerated eggs should last at least 3-5 weeks after the sell-by date, according to Professor Joe Regenstein, a food scientist at Cornell University. Note: Use of either a sell-by or expiration (EXP) date is not federally required, but may be state required, as defined by the egg laws in the state where the eggs are marketed. Read more at green.yahoo.com

Scramble for food companies a warning of crisis to come

Do you know how to grow food, even in a city apartment?

Amplify’d from www.smh.com.au

MUCH has been said about how BHP Billiton's bid for Potash Corporation and Canadian fertiliser company Agrium's play for AWB fit in with the growing issue of food security and food shortages.

These are just new chapters in developments that resulted in China's Bright Food Group trying to acquire Australia's CSR sugar this year and Sinochem's move to buy Australian agrichemicals operator Nufarm. Then there's Qatar-based Hassad Food, backed by the Qatar Investment Authority, buying up rural land in Australia to feed Qatar and other Middle East countries worried about food security. Hassad has bought more than $40 million worth of sheep stations in northern New South Wales and South Australia in the past six months.

The corporate activity is a storm warning of how food shortages and famine will reshape the world and corporate strategies.

The Economist notes that by 2050 world grain output will have to rise by half and meat production will need to double to meet demand at a time when growth in grain yields is flattening out, there is little extra farmland and renewable water is running short.

Similarly, rising food prices are a poke in the eye that the world needs to remind us of how fragile the food production chain has become. The drought and bushfires in Russia, combined with limits on grain exports, have resulted in a 70 per cent price spike in wheat futures, which has caused prices for soy and barley to go up by 10 per cent.

Global warming is getting the press, but some are now warning that the threat to the human race is a looming food shortage. This seems unimaginable in a world where there has been almost half a century of abundance.

But in his chilling book The Coming Famine, journalist and science writer Julian Cribb warns we are headed towards global food shortages in the next 40 years because of scarcities of water, good land, energy, nutrients, technology, fish and, significantly, stable climates. You can add to that population growth, consumer demand and protectionist trade policies. Read more at www.smh.com.au

15 Bento Lunch Box Containers and Accessories

"Pack our easy, healthy bento box lunches (or any lunch!) into one of these adorable containers with equally cute accessories"
By Kate Goodin and Alina Soler

A Cut Above

Pack this fork, spoon and chopstick set with your kid's lunch in place of flimsy, disposable plastic ware. The wide, flat handles are good for small hands, plus kids can practice their chopstick skills. All three utensils are stored in an adorable container to boot.

Cutlery Set - Spoon Fork And ChopSticks Clapping March Picnic BLUE, available at from-japan-with-love.com, $5.75

Why you should NEVER trust labels on food: 'Fresh' food that isn't fresh. 'Natural' colours that are chemicals

Sad but true, hope all of you are avid label readers & de-mystifiers

Amplify’d from www.dailymail.co.uk

I glanced at the packaging quickly. Even in the midst of a rushed family shop, I was still concerned — as many parents would be — about the food I’m feeding my daughter.

‘No artificial colours or flavours. No hydrogenated fat,’ it read in large letters on the front. Reassured, I popped the packet in our trolley.

But back in the comfort of home, I took a closer look (and I needed my reading glasses for the small print) and pretty quickly concluded that I’d been had.

While the packet claimed there were no ‘artificial’ colours, I found — under a tiny heading of colourings — ‘titanium dioxide, cochineal and lutein’, chemical compounds I’d never heard of before (and more of which later).

Last week, a survey by consumer watchdog Which? found that food label claims such as ‘pure’, ‘fresh’, ‘non-artificial’, ‘natural’ and ‘real’ are largely unregulated and are confusing shoppers.

For example, 33 per cent of shoppers thought ‘real fruit’ meant fruit was the main ingredient (even though this was wildly off the mark); and 43 per cent believed products labelled ‘juice drink’ must contain at least a quarter fruit juice (again, something they found to be untrue, with some juice drinks containing barely 5 per cent juice from concentrate).

So how and why are our food manufacturers allowed to get away with this? And what is the truth about our ‘natural’ food labels?

Flavoured v Flavour

For food manufacturers, ‘flavoured’ and ‘flavour’ mean totally different things. The first, very importantly, means natural ingredients are used in the production.

However, the second means that the ‘flavour’ can be artificial — created by a chemical such as isoamyl acetate, an organic compound formed from isoamyl alcohol and acetic acid.

It is often used in many pear and banana-flavour sweets and snacks because it gives off that odour in its reduced form.

However, even more often it is used in solvents, and until recently was used extensively in the aircraft industry for stiffening and wind-proofing fabric flying surfaces. Not the most appealing of thoughts.

The real problem — and one that we should all be looking out for — is that manufacturers are beginning to combine the use of ‘real’ ingredients with synthetic ones, so it’s often impossible to avoid eating chemicals alongside your ‘real’ fruit.

No artificial colouring

What you and I call artificial and what the food industry calls artificial are surprisingly different.

Real

Another much-abused word.

'Real fruit’, often used in ice lolly and soft drinks packaging, can mean fruit concentrate (which is a boiled-down and stabilised ‘concentrate of fruit’).

And there is no law governing how much ‘real fruit’ you have to use in order to put the label on the front of your product: most ice lollies are largely sugars and water, with the fruit content being one part in 20.

Natural

This is another term that has more or less lost any meaning in food. A recent Trading Standards Officers’ survey found more than 80 different uses of it in food marketing, of which 79 per cent were ‘unacceptable or misleading’, and in 1989 the then Ministry of Agriculture issued voluntary guidelines asking manufacturers to avoid phrases such as ‘natural goodness’ or ‘nature’s way’. It was ignored.

Fats

All of us need to eat fat as part of a healthy diet. The key question is what sort and how much.

Food manufacturers are faced with a quandary — fat carries taste, and if you want to take it out of a product you usually have to replace it with things that consumers have been warned against: salt, sugar and flavourings.

McVitie’s Chocolate Digestive Lights, for instance, contain 30 per cent less fat than normal chocolate digestives, but they also containmore sugar than the full-fat ones.

Tricks played with ‘fat’ on labels include ‘lower fat’ — which often merely means that a high-fat product has had the content trimmed a little, not that it is healthy.

Healthy Brands

Food manufacturers have found there’s money to be made by exploiting the fact that few of us spend much time studying a product — research says the average time spent at the supermarket shelf before making a choice is seven seconds. So we rely on trust and logos we associate with health.

Its 23g bars which boast of having fewer than 90 calories actually have more than a third of their weight in sugar — twice as much as is contained in some ice creams, and putting them well into the Food Standards Agency’s ‘high in sugar’ bracket.

Sugar free

If there's no sugar then there will almost certainly be other sweeteners, such as aspartame and acesulfame K.

Fresh

This much-abused term has troubled government regulators for decades. Effectively, it means little more than ‘not frozen’ and uncooked — but products can have been chilled or, as with fish, kept on ice. Read more at www.dailymail.co.uk

They did say not in our lifetime

But they were wrong the brasserie is nearly ready to open.

[I Ate This] Husband's Love

Date: 8/22/2010
What:  Husband whipped up a nice protein packed meal after our Lake Union 10K race - a 3 egg omelet with mushroom, smoke salmon, and green onion.  It was delicious and possibly the best omelet I ever had!

[I Made This] Salted Mustard with Pork

   

Click here to download:

I_Ate_This_Salted_Mustard_with.zip (213 KB)

Date: 8/23/2010
What: 梅干菜蒸肉 semi-homemade Salted Mustard with Pork
Mix: .5lb of ground pork, 1/2 bottle of the 'preserved salted mustard' sauce (drain oil), 2 egg white, 2 chopped green onion, 3/4 cup of water, and some additional seasoning (touch of soy sauce, sugar, salt and pepper). Then put the mixture in a shallow dish (microwave safe). Use spoon to create 2 dents in the middle and put the egg yolks in the mixture.  Microwave (cover to create some steam but remember to cut a small hole in the middle) for 5 mins or until done.  You can chow down couple bowls of rice with this and yet so easy to make.

[I Made This] Quick Meal with Trident Alaskan Salmon Burger

     

Click here to download:

I_Ate_This_Trident_Alaskan_Sal.zip (296 KB)

Date: July 2010
What: The first time we tried this salmon burger was at a friend's BBQ party and we paired it with some grill pineapple and it was a hit.  So we got more at Costco and it quickly become a weekday dinner stable... we tried it chopped up and mix it with salad for the hot days, and also tried it on pasta with some sea beans that we got from farmers market.  The salmon burger is very flavorful and has lot of salmon chunks in it, good to keep in your freezer for a quick meal.