Food Glorious Food

I love cooking. I will often spend hours in the kitchen cooking up an elaborate meal or trying out a new recipe. I love hosting dinner parties as it is a great excuse to go all out. Admittedly my love of food is part of the reason I am overweight as I can’t help sampling as I go. Food in pregnancy, however, takes on a whole new focus, with many things taboo.

While as far as I know I am not pregnant yet, the possibility is there, so I am trying to eat as if I am pregnant to get into practice. Just yesterday I had some soft serve ice-cream while out with the family. About half way through it I realised that soft serve is on the list of no-no foods for the pregnant. I added it to my rapidly growing mental list of foods to not eat.

When we decided to start trying and I decided to start eating as if I am pregnant, I thought it would be easy to remember what to avoid, after all it wasn’t that long ago that I was last pregnant. I was wrong! I keep catching myself going to eat things, or part way through eating remembering it’s on the ‘foods to avoid while pregnant list’. So after yesterday’s incident I decided to look them up again and share here for anyone else struggling to remember what to avoid.

Foods to avoid when pregnant:

• I’ll start with the obvious, avoid alcohol and cigarettes and limit caffeine.
• Soft and unpasteurised cheeses, basically any unpasteurised dairy is out.
• Processed sandwich/cold meats and cold cooked chicken.
• Raw seafood – brought sushi is definitely out unfortunately.
• Pate.
• Soft serve ice-cream - oops.
• Undercooked eggs, there goes those lovely runny yokes for a bit!
• Undercooked meats, if you like your steak rare, you will need to go medium for a while.
• Anything cold foods such as salads or dressings that have been sitting around at room temperature for a while. Basically anything that is meant to be cold that has been at room temperature for a while.
• Pre-prepared salads.
• And finally regardless of the food, watch out of food hygiene to ensure cross contamination between raw and cooked foods or other hygiene issues don’t cause salmonella.

The NSW food authority has a handy and comprehensive printable version of the foods to avoid that is easy to check foods against.

So now it’s off to the kitchen for me, to cook up a lovely dinner that contains nothing on the above list!