Dinner with the PopeSometimes after a tough day, I am afraid to say, this is what dinner consists of!

At least it is great wine - Chateauneuf-du-Pape from the Rhone wine region in France, and corn nuts are part of the vegetable food group, right? After this instance, we then whipped up a smoked salmon and potato salad to add some nutrition.

Pape=Pope

Taro and rou rou

If you are not sick of Fiji posts then read on. If you are sick of them here's a diversion...go to this website and read interesting stuff about career and personal coaching at my friend Daryl's site called Dynamic Life Creations.

So readers that have stayed on here is info about the food in the photo which was a typical dish served in Fiji.

I have never eaten taro (white triangular shape at centre of the plate) or rou rou which is the local spinach (green stuff on the plate) but we had plenty of it while in paradise (a.k.a Fiji).

Taro is like a harder potato with a starchy texture but tastes like a dry mixture of pumpkin and potato and the rou rou is the local spinach. It was so nice to eat as it was always served in a coconut milk sauce. I think I will try cooking our local spinach, which is leafy rather than the Fijian one which is ong and stringy, in coconut sauce as it was delicious.

Taro was served to us every day while we were on the Yasawa Islands and it seems that the vegetable has been a staple of the indigenous Fijian diet for centuries. Locals call it taro root but it is not really a root but a corm.

Corms are short, vertical, swollen underground plant stems that serves as a storage organ used by some plants to survive winter or other adverse conditions such as summer drought and heat. Interesting factoid, non?

In 1993 Samoa had a problem with their taro crops and Fiji stepped in to fill the gap. They then became the main supplier for New Zealand, Australia, and Los Angeles in the United States (there are a lot of Californian's in Fiji as it is an overnight 11hr flight to the islands).

Am not sure if you can buy it in Toronto but will have a look next time I am at the market and will try and make taro and rou rou for the Dolce's. Will need to call Grace of Pig 'N Pancake fame, in Oregon for a recipe.

taro corms

Where does canned corn come from?
I remember watching an episode of Jamie Oliver's TV show called Jamie's School Dinners where he went to a school and laid out 10-12 basic fruits and vegetables and asked kids from varying ages to identify them.

99% of kids in that group could not identify things such as spring onions, sweet potato, celery, broccoli and other BASIC fruits and vegetables. I remember watching in shock but not surprise as I worked at a school for a few months and some of the lower kids would come to school hungry or with a Coke and a bag of chips for lunch. Some were so hungry they ate the rotten pumpkin after Halloween, sad but true.

The School Dinners show demonstrated that kids in these schools do not recognize these foods in their raw state because they never eat them in that state, their parents never buy them and they are never involved in the cooking process at home if their parents cook. At school and at home kids from these schools ate only processed and pre-packaged foods.

Turkey Twizzlers were made famous on the show as they served them in many UK schools to children as part of the standard lunch program. TTs are a bizarre chicken nugget type food with some ridiculously small % of actual turkey in it and it is shaped as a coil so makes no resemblance to any natural food or turkey for that matter. It is a food listed on the UK school lunch program list - after the show Jamie got them banned from schools -yay! And the Department for Education and Skills created the School Food Trust to provide support and advice to improve the standard of school meals.

During the show Jamie followed some parents to the grocery store and watched them shop and all they put into their baskets were microwave dinners and more turkey twizzlers (they said, 'but our kids like them'). He even went home with a few parents to see what they could 'cook' and since they grew up on frozen foods too they could not actually put a basic soup together or cook some pasta as they had never seen their parents do it. The show pointed out the need for parents to get educated on proper health, nutrition and basic cooking skills.

When I first arrived in England I was impressed by this prominent 'ready meal' aisle at the supermarkets as for £2 you could have a lasagna, turkey dinner, Chinese food, Indian curry etc... When you finally read the label and see what crap was in there you soon re-think your choice. But think about this spend £14-20 a week and have a ready made hot meal each night after just 60seconds in the microwave or spend £20-40 a week and have to come home, peel, prepare and cook? For lazy and ignorant parents guess which option they choose?

That whole show was fantastic and can be a whole blog in itself. The reason for today's post is that some of the neighboring kids at the cottage had a diet which consisted of packaged foods all the time and the snacks they came out with were always chips and some type of sugary juice. Their parents didn't really enforce meal time so some of them also went without dinner on several occasions. The parents also did not spend much time with them and only seemed to be smoking in front of the tele each and every day. The kids were always at our place staring at our healthy dinners and lunches with hungry looks. This angered me and I blame lack of education and laziness on the parents part. In this situation do we feed the neighbors kids each night? There was 4 of them so not an easy task even if we wanted to. We did give them healthy snacks but who does that when we are not there?

Our little ones were always helping with meal preparation, tending the vegetable garden, coming along to do the grocery shopping, choosing which pint of strawberries they wanted and which carrots to put in the cart. This all makes up the educational experience of children which keeps them involved, teaches them good food habits and makes them appreciate food.

PM is peeling fresh corn in the pic and he loved it - we almost had to go back to the store to get another basket full so he could peel more. I guess my rant today is that kids need to eat fresh, whole foods and parents need to stay away from the gimmicks and easy avenues of junk or fast food. Yes kids like Coke and chips and boxed meals but think of how bad it is for them, they only like these things as they are filled with sugars and salts which makes them crave more!