Chef's Blog

We were excited to discover a really interesting looking online course, Child Nutrition and Cooking, currently offered by Stanford University, one of the world’s top universities. The course is self-paced and starts from August 29th via online education provider Coursera.org.  Best news is it’s FREE!  Over five hours of videos and quizzes, Dr. Maya Adam, Child Health and Nutrition professor at Stanford School of Medicine, teaches what constitutes a healthy diet and how to prepare simple, delicious foods aimed at inspiring a lifelong celebration of home-cooked meals. You’ll come away with lots of helpful tips and practical knowledge to help...

Encouraging your children to try tasty new foods will help shape and develop their palate. I traveled to Brazil to visit family over the school holidays and enjoyed a myriad of delicious traditional dishes. My mum, grandma, aunties, sister and sister-in-law, all prepared special recipes they knew my daughter and I missed and loved to celebrate our home coming. It got me thinking about how lucky I am to have been exposed to such beautiful food from a very young age, and how these early experiences have helped shape my palate and my appreciation of food. Studies show that even what a...

This week, we’re sharing an article to help parents who want to cut down on the amount of sugar their kids eat. It’s from the US, but as we share many of the same international food brands, NZ kids are likely to be getting through about the same amount of sugar. US kids aged 4 to 8 consume an average 50 pounds, or over 22kgs of sugar. All that sugar not only establishes unhealthy eating patterns, it affects their future health. Kids naturally have a sweet tooth. They’re biologically programmed to prefer a higher level of sweetness than adults and...

Winter is officially here and nothing beats a bowl of steaming hot soup to warm up on a cold evening. So today I thought I’d share with you a quick, delicious and heart-warming option. Perfect for those mid-week evenings when time is short, but you still need to feed the family a nutritious dinner. Soup in Minestrone style, with lots of vegetables, beans and pasta, is one of those meals that appeals to everyone around the table, including the little ones. The other significant advantage is its versatility, as you can use whatever vegetables you’ve got in your veggie box,...