One Serving

Cut a small cross into the skin of each tomato. Drop them into boiling water for about 10 seconds. Fish them out (mind the hot water!) and the skin should peel away easily.

How big is one serving or portion? Good question. It depends on what you’re eating. Food can be put into 5 different groups: Fruit and Vegetables; Starch, Grains and Cereals; Nuts and Seeds; Proteins and Fats, Oils and Sugar. Each group has a different set of nutritional requirements.

Fruit and Vegetables

Common wisdom says you should eat at least five servings of fruit and vegetables every day. Problem is, how big is a serving?

According to the World Health Organisation, adults should eat a minimum of 400g (14 ounces) of fruit and vegetables every day to help stave off chronic diseases such as heart disease, cancer, diabetes and obesity.

In other words, one serving or portion of fruit and vegetables is 80 grams. That’s 2.8 ounces. Eat five portions every day and you’ll hit your daily target.

Great. But what’s that in real terms?

Ah, now you’ve hit the crux of our site. Have a look around. You’ll find photos of one measured serving of all kinds of fruit and vegetables, along with their calorie counts, glycaemic load and a load of other useful information. Here are some to get you started:

• One Serving of Tangerines
• One Serving of Pepper (Capsicum)

Nuts and Seeds

Nuts and seeds are a huge segment of food. You’ll find all sorts of nutrients in different seeds, so it’s not appropriate to use a general weight measurement for serving size. Instead, we’ve settled on 160 to 180 calories as a reasonable amount of energy to eat in one sitting.

Have a look at these pages to see how different 170-odd calories can look from seed to seed:

• One Serving of Shelled Pistachios
• One Serving of Brazil Nuts

Proteins

According to dietician and nutritionist, Dr Mabel Blades, one serving of meat is approximately 100 to 150 grams of uncooked meat, or 3.5 to 5 ounces. This will shrink depending on how the meat is cooked.

We’ll update this post to include the other foods groups in the next couple of weeks.

Zest is a great way to flavour things – put it in butter to add a zing to your vegetables, add it to fruit pie fillings, make Limoncello… there’s no end to the tasty stuff you can make with a bit of citrus rind.

When grating citrus fruits for zest, make sure you only get the coloured part of the peel. Don’t go all the way through to the white pith; this will taste unpleasantly bitter.

Tangy raspberry coulis is a fabulous way to add some zing to a rich creamy dessert. I serve it with vanilla ice cream or drizzled over a plain cheese cake. Here’s a simple recipe:

What you need:

• 15-20 raspberries
• 1 tbsp lime juice
• 1 tsp icing sugar

Equipment:

• A food processor
• A sieve
• A bowl

Instructions:

1. Throw everything into the food processor.
2. Blend until uniformly liquid.
3. Strain through a sieve into a bowl.

Nice and simple, right? You can adjust the quantities of lime and icing sugar to suit your dessert.