Food Science stuff

Last week the food science department had an international dinner mostly with postgrads. and faculty. There were a few 4th years (working on an undergrad. honors thesis) but it was mostly people who have at least one degree already. Everyone who attended brought a dish from their country of origin. It took me a while to decide what an "American food" is but I ended up bringing chocolate chip cookies and brownies. People really enjoyed the brownies because they were made with dark chocolate but were not really dense like dark chocolate brownies can be. The most ironic thing about making the brownies is that I managed to burn myself twice. I have been cooking and baking for so long and have burnt myself twice. Once at work cleaning hot oil off the flat top grill and then last week when I made brownies.

I think I heard someone saying that there are no Kiwi postgrads so all of the food was international. There were a lot of Persian dishes and ones from different parts of east Asia. There was something called "Bunny chow" (or something really similar to that) from South Africa. It was a stew thing served in bread bowls. One of my favorite things was a peanut lentil sauce. I ate a lot of different food and I can't tell you what it was. There were labels on them but the names meant nothing to me.

There was also a very large dessert table. I was able to try some Kiwi desserts such as pavlova, hokey pokey ice cream, and Afghan cookies. There were also a lot of meringues. I'm not a fan of meringues at home but these ones were really good. There were sandwich ones that were filled with whipped cream and raspberry compote. Those were my favorite.

While there I talked with a professor in the department who is American. I don't remember where she is from but she came to talk to us because we sound American. There were some Kiwis that were sitting next to us and were amused by our conversation about what food we miss from the US. It included double stuff Oreos, Reeces peanut butter cups, s'mores (they don't have graham crackers here!), and Mexican food. They also laughed at us talking about breakfast cereals. Here they are all "healthy" meaning there are no brightly colored ones or ones with lots of sugar and marshmallows.


They also had a career night where they had people from 6 different companies present about what they do and advise for students. Fonterra is the large dairy company in NZ and they have a 2 year internship program where you work throughout the country at their different plants doing different things every 6 months. And at the end you earn a Master's degree and they give you a job in the company. They also had people from the meat industry and from a jam company and a few other companies. It was fun to hear about different careers and some of the advise they said is the exact same that I have heard back home. I guess that's good advise then :) I have also decided that I might be returning to NZ after I finish my degree back home.


A professor in the department has agreed to help me with a product development project that's on my own. I am going to make a soy ice cream made from soy milk and soy yogurt. I have only done on run so far and the yogurt is disgusting. There is a long way to go on getting that to taste good. She is also making me write up what I am doing and give a small presentation about it. So far I enjoy it and get to work with more science-y ingredients like glucose syrup and cultures.