The Avocado Sundae

When you sit down to write a new blog and you end up just gnawing at your fingernails for an hour in the hope that your fingertips will become too bruised and tender to actually type anything, you realise you may be trying to suppress certain childhood memories. This blog post is a good example, since it has taken me a full hour to write this single paragraph.

By now you are probably thinking that something truly horrific happened to me, something so mentally scarring that I need to share it with the world in order to gain proper closure. Well, I’m afraid that after building it up so much, the story itself (which happened when I was seven-years-old) is going to feel a little anticlimactic … but since I’ve wasted so much time already, I’d like to persist.

I was sitting at the kitchen table one night, putting forward a carefully constructed argument (basically just whining, with a lot of mumbling mixed in) about why I didn’t want to eat my avocado, when my father suddenly stood up and removed the offending fruit from my plate.

It was uncharacteristic of my dad to concede defeat so early into the night and I was further shocked when he then turned to my brothers and I and cheerfully asked if we all wanted dessert. Did he just have a memory lapse or something?

Either way, I was very pleased with myself - that was until he handed me my dessert bowl.

Me: “Hey, what’s this?”

Dad (very causally): “That’s ice cream.”

Me: “No, it’s got green stuff in it.”

Dad: “Oh that, well, you don’t like avocado but you do like ice cream, and so I thought that if I mixed the two together you might start liking avocado.”

Me (a bit whiny again): “But I don’t want to eat the avocado bit.”

Dad: “Well it is mixed through, so if you want your ice cream, you have to eat the avocado bit.”

By this point, Dad and the boys were already halfway through their snow white uncontaminated desserts, whilst mine was slowly melting into a green lumpy river.

Now, rather than go into the gory details, I’d just like to say that there is a reason that ‘the avocado sundae’ has never been invented, or if it has, it’s never been a mainstream hit, and that’s because it’s seriously disgusting!

But I have to thank my father too, because he actually did me a favour that night. And it wasn’t just cleaning up my sick. My dad planted a seed in my head (maybe it was an avocado one) that slowly grew and evolved in my mind.

It’s very simple really: if you want to encourage children to embrace their fruit and vegetables, it’s important to be creative.

So I guess being traumatised by the avocado sundae was a good thing, because it pushed me to find other ways to make fruit and vegetables fun for children.

Now, after years of testing my own recipes with preschool children, I am releasing a story-based cookbook with edible food characters called Kindy Kitchen.

And I can almost hear my seven-year-old self sigh with relief.

Text © Jessica Rosman

Life after Death by Chocolate

There are times in your life when you can’t help but be a glut. When you think, 'I can't possibly eat another mouthful or my stomach will explode, splattering everyone in the vicinity with semi-digested food particles'. But you still have that extra mouthful.

One of those times, for me, was at a restaurant called Death by Chocolate.

I know. The name should have warned me. It was basically saying that should I choose to dine with them, I could expect the main meal to come with a complementary eulogy, and the dessert to be accompanied by their finest selection of coffins.

But I still went. In fact knowing me, I would have had my nostrils pressed up against the restaurant window, eager to show the chef that there was a giant pig at the door who would really enjoy rolling around in their muddiest mud cake, if they would just let her in.

My little heart must have been beating its fists against my rib cage yelling, 'Get me the heck out of here! I'm not ready for stints! Do you hear me? If our life together has meant anything, DO NOT go into that restaurant!'

But I didn't hear it. Or if I did, I chose to ignore it. In the same way I ignored my liver, pancreas and other vital organs.

Little did I know, I was about to suffer from what a dietician might term a ‘chocolate mousse lobotomy’, where you eat so much of the gluttonous dessert, that your brain seizes up and all decision making tasks are relegated to your stomach.

Had I known about this strange affliction, I might have tried to prevent my tummy from taking over and running up a huge bill on my cholesterol account.  Because by the time my brain finally came to, my body had gone into a catastrophic meltdown. The only positive being that every other patron looked just as sickly and remorseful as me.

Looking back, I'd say that restaurant actually did me a favour, because instead of eyeballing dessert menus with a blatant disregard for the nation’s shortage of hospital beds, I started to approach them with a little more sense.

So in a way, I don't regret my decision to dine at a dessert only restaurant. At least it taught me that normal restaurants have savory meals for a reason and a little moderation never killed anyone. In fact, it's probably the reason I'm still alive today.

Text © Jessica Rosman 2015

The Young and The Reckless

I never had any really terrible vices as a teenager. I never wagged school so that I could sit behind some wee-stained toilet block and drown my lungs in tobacco and illegal strains of herbs. I never stood outside the local bottle-o and begged some smelly stranger to buy me a six-pack of Stolis so that I could stumble to the park and wake up in a disused building site. I never went to a nightclub and bought an expensive little tablet from some weedy kid in a baseball cap.

It wasn’t because I was a saint or because I was suffering from some kind of early-onset levelheadedness. It was simply because I already had access to a legal, cheap and highly additive substance: sugar.

My thinking was something like this: why put myself in a sleazy, dark and potentially life-threatening environment, when I could just stage my own private protest against the world by consuming an extra-long packet of Tim Tams, from the comfort of my bean bag?

This brings me to the chocolate cigarette. Could there be a better confectionary product that symbolises teenage rebellion? It’s got everything. It’s cheap, it’s legal to 'smoke' and it doesn't make you want to cough up your liver. The problem is, that whilst real cigarettes are dangerous to your health, it can be equally unwise to eat a packet a day of the fake ones.

So what is the answer?

• Do we need ‘candy crime squads’ who conduct random searches of teenager’s bedrooms?
• Do we need to hold ‘snack food interventions’ for kids who abuse the family biscuit tin?
• Do we need to create slow-releasing fructose patches a teenager can wear as they wean themselves off the cola?

Personally, I would say that all a teenager with a reckless sugar habit needs is lots of compassion and a few healthy role models.  And if that doesn’t work, you can at least write to the person who invented the chocolate cigarette and tell them that their product should come with highly graphic and disturbing health warnings.

Text © Jessica Rosman 2015

The Chemist Con

Believe it or not, there used to be a time when young children were allowed to walk to school by themselves. Thank goodness all the parents of the world came to their senses and stopped this highly dangerous activity.

When I say ‘highly dangerous’, I’m not talking about the risk that a child might be snatched while dawdling through the local park. I’m not even talking about the fact the poor kid might be flattened by a semi-trailer. No, there is something far more sinister that lurks in the local community: it’s called the ice cream shop.

It’s not just any ice cream shop either. Just like a kidnapper pretends to be your friend before they club you over the head, this ice cream shop tricks you into thinking that it is good for you, that it is healthier than all the other ice cream sellers. It pretends to be a chemist.

When I was little, a chemist was the place I went to get well. It was the place where things were made better. Whether it was scratches, punches or a brother’s bite to the neck, the chemist was the wonderful giant medicine cabinet that made all those ouchies go away. So it was only natural that when feeling sad, I would stop there on my way to school and scoff a triple choc sundae.

The problem is that whilst vitamins, medicines and Band-Aids do help you feel better, daily ice creams make your teeth rot. But when you are seven-years-old and losing a tooth is a daily occurrence, the last thing you're worried about are cavities.

My poor mum probably thought she was doing me a favour by encouraging me to walk to school. “Go out into the sunshine, get some fresh air,” she’d say. Little did she know that once outside, I’d make a beeline straight for the cavernous chemist, which had poor ventilation and smelt of old hand cream.

I’m sure that if the health experts tracked the obesity epidemic on a chart, they would find a sharp increase in numbers around the time doctors were encouraging families to walk more for their hearts.

Luckily, society has gone into overprotective mode since then, so that children don’t stand a chance at making themselves ill, the way I did. But still, it’s important to know that just because a chemist sells ice cream, doesn’t mean it’s good for you.

Text © Jessica Rosman 2015

The Laughing Maniac

Hi, I’m Jess and I am a recovering sugarholic.

That’s what I would say if there ever was a Sugarholics Anonymous. Perhaps in the future there will be. Perhaps in the future there will be pale, sickly individuals who congregate in the basement of their local health-food shop to talk about their highly unwise dietary choices, the way I am going to do now.

I guess I knew that I first had a problem when the Creative Director of an advertising agency I worked at, told me that in the two years he’d known me, he had never understood a word I’d said. Instead of talking clearly like a normal human being, I had laughed and giggled my way through presentations, spluttering out the odd word here and there.

On reflection I’d say that was partly due to nerves. “So you (ha ha) want some (ha ha ha) award-winning ideas (ha)?”

It goes without saying that I was retrenched shortly after. But like all big changes in life, this one came with a wonderful silver lining: I finally had time to sort out my health.

The first thing I did was give up refined sugar. Why sugar specifically? With all the free time on my hands, it was just me, myself and I and it became clear to all of us, that I was a moody cow.

So I started reading books and discovered that too much refined sugar in the diet can put huge stress on the body (cross to intelligent chart on the right), leading to many of the emotional and physical symptoms that I suffered from.

There were tears. There was denial. There were times when I needed a straitjacket to stop me from picking up sugar-laden favourites in the supermarket. But I pulled through and overtime the cravings stopped. The incessant laughing stopped too.

Other happy extras (which you won't find on a chart):

• I stopped needing nanna naps.
• I discovered my boyfriend was not a nasty evil man after all.
• I lost my muffin-top.
• I stopped housing the kind of bacteria that throw loud and boisterous parties inside my gut.

Oh and there was another wonderful thing that happened as a result of cleaning up my diet. I wrote some books that encourage children to eat more fruit and vegetables. And after years of only ever wanting to be a published author, I became one.

A nice ending to a horrible diet.

text (c) jessica rosman 2015