The walkway at the San Diego Convention Center—quite different from our hometown New York environment.
We’re off to the Winter Fancy Food Show in San Diego, where we and 16,000 other trade professionals will fill the San Diego Convention Center to sample as much as we can of the 80,000 food products from 1,100 exhibitors. Most of the attendees are retail buyers (stores, catalogs, websites) looking for new products to sell to their consumers, and special items for Easter.
THE NIBBLE staff will be looking for the very best products to review in THE NIBBLE online magazine, and for the rare few to be featured as Top Pick Of The Week. We won’t be writing much in this space until we return, the latter part of next week.
For a healthy and festive breakfast, split a ripe banana, add two or three small scoops of cottage cheese topped with different flavors of yogurt and different fresh fruits.
Sprinkle with granola or cereal flakes and you have a delicious “banana split.” (It’s a variation on a yogurt parfait.)
Or, try this recipe from Del Monte (find many more Del Monte recipes on Fruits.com):
BREAKFAST BANANA SPLIT RECIPE
Ingredients
1 medium banana, halved lengthwise
1 cup assorted fresh fruit: cantaloupe, honeydew, grapes, pineapple or other fruits in season
3 to 6 ounces light vanilla yogurt (we use fat-free Greek yogurt
½ cup low fat granola
Preparation
1. CUT the banana in half lengthwise and place in a bowl.
2. ADD the fruit to the middle of the banana. Spoon the yogurt over the top of the fruit.
3. SPRINKLE granola on top and serve.
If you have this regularly, it’s worth buying special banana split dishes—the entire family will love this one! Here are some inexpensive banana split dishes.
A water that neutralizes your stomach? Doctors say “No es possible.”
Got reflux? Have an acid stomach? Are you always reaching for the Tums, or supporting an expensive Prilosec habit? Can a water with “pH balance” help you? Accredited medical sources say no, and explain why nothing can enter the body and neutralize the pH of the blood or the stomach. But eVamor claims its water neutralizes the pH balance in the body, and testimonials on the website indicate that people like drinking the water, and feel that it has helped with stomach acidity and reflux problems. Perhaps it’s the placebo effect. So while the doctors say nay, if you like drinking bottled water and have too much stomach acid, it may be worth a shot. Read the full review. And find many spring waters and mineral waters that just want to be delicious water, in the Bottled Water Section of THE NIBBLE online magazine.
One way to stretch those cheese calories is to serve cheese cubes on skewers instead of a slice-all-you-want cheese board. Alternate the cheese cubes with grape tomatoes, broccoli florets, bell pepper strips and other favorite crudités. Then, you save the bread and cracker calories too! Avoid high-fat Brie and other double-and triple-crémes: the creamier the cheese, the higher the butterfat and calories. Soft and semi-soft cheeses like Brie contain 60%-74% butterfat, triple-crème cheeses like Saint André and Explorateur have at least 75% butterfat. Stick with Parmesan (40%), Cheddar (43%), Swiss (43%), Gouda (48%), mozzarella (24%) and other cheeses with a firm or dry consistency (called the “paste”).We love Cabot’s Light Cheddars—regular, Garlic & Herb and Jalapeño, just 7% total fat. Find more of our favorite calorie-reduced foods in the Diet Nibbles section of THE NIBBLE online magazine.
