Product Review: AntiOx Chocolate and Snack Bars

I was given the opportunity to review AntiOx Chocolate and Snack Bars. Anything that says chocolate I'm always interested! Apart from the fact that it is chocolate, what really got me was the fact that these bars have high antioxidant levels, low fat and are sugar free. They are sweetened with the natural sweetener Stevia. Vitality Brands has combined goji berries, acai berries, pomegranate and quinoa to make a healthy snack substitute to your regular fat and sugar laden chocolate bars. 

AntiOx Goji Berry Chocolate Bar and Acai Berry Chocolate Bar

AntiOx Chocolate Bars are 70% cocoa which is also high in antioxidants. So, at this rate I think I might be able to stall my aging skin for a while with chocolate that has as much antioxidants as twelve cups of green tea. 

The AntiOx Snack Bars come in Quinoa and Chia, Acai & Goji and they make a great healthy naturally sweetened snack that doesn't leave me feeling heavy or guilty. All the benefits and product features aside, it's time to talk about the taste.

The bars actually tasted quite nice. I'm not sure about you but I love dark chocolate. Admittedly it can be an acquired taste. Keeping in mind that it is in fact 70% cocoa chocolate, it is bound to be a little bit bitter but a lovely smooth chocolate nonetheless packed full of benefits. People often wonder what is the hype with antioxidants and think that it is purely to prevent aging. Well, well, well......*puts pharmacist cap on*

Our body consists of lots and lots of cells which face threats all the time be it from infection, unhealthy lifestyle, poor diet, malnutrition, exposure to harmful chemicals, carbon, smoking and so on. Our body generates something called free radicals naturally as part of the food to energy conversion process but we also get them from certain foods, alcohol, smoke, burnt food, pollutants, UV and other sources. Free radicals are basically ready to steal electrons from other compounds in our cells causing damage to DNA and disrupting the cell's original function and structure.  What antioxidants do is clean up free radicals by neutralizing them to prevent it from reacting with compounds in our cells. It's something we will always have in our system but excessive amounts are believed to lead to diseases and aging. In knowing that, people are becoming more interested in antioxidant rich foods.  

Antiox Snack Bars are avalaible from health stores and major supermarkets. The Snack Bars retail at $2.49 for a 40g bar and the Chocolate Bars are $4.65 for an 80g block.

These products were given to me to review. The opinions are my own and I have received no monetary compensation for this post.

Winner of 50 Shades of Chocolate

And the winner is......... Valerie Appleyard

Congratulations Valerie. Please send me a message on Facebook or email me at foodieling@gmail.com with your postal address so we can send the prize out as soon as possible. 

We hope you enjoy your new book!

Opie's Bakery Cafe @ Unley

Situated on Unley Road, I've driven past this place numerous times and finally decided to visit this bakery. It really is quite clean, bright and simplistic inside with bright red chairs, red and white checkered table cloths just like on a classic picnic. On the wall you'll find proudly displayed nostalgic memorabilia and large pictures from the early days. Opie's Bakery gives a sense of tradition. Producing fresh, high quality bread, pies, pasties, pastry and slices, this place was well worth the visit.

We ordered our usual favourite drink to have at a bakery with pies - iced coffee! It's just natural to have iced coffee and pie in SA isn't it? The iced coffee was lovely and refreshing. First up we tried a Bacon, Egg, Cheese and Tomato Pie. The pie pastry was beautiful, the right texture and baked perfectly. The filling was ok but I think with egg in a pie, it was a bit on the dry side. I'm still slowly in search for the best Ned Kelly Pie in SA. I've found an awesome steak, cheese and tomato pie at Port Elliot Bakery! 

We also ordered a Ham Cheese Tomato Roll. You could tell the roll was freshly baked, soft, delicious and comforting. We decided we couldn't leave the bakery without a croissant so next came a Pastrami, Tomato, Lettuce and Chutney Croissant. The croissant was flaky, didn't feel greasy and made a perfectly yummy sandwich!

 I get the sense this place has a lot of stories to tell of which I am unsure. Maybe I should ask someone who grew up in Adelaide.

Opie's Bakery Cafe
378 Unley Road
Unley Park SA 5061
08 7120 2591

Go In Hotpot Train & Dessert Story @ Adelaide CBD

I'm always in the mood for good Asian hotpot or as we call it steamboat in Malaysia. Be it winter or summer, I'll still have it but the hot boiling soup full of flavour especially after cooking assorted meats and vegetables in it makes hotpot a very desirable and enjoyable meal for cold  nights. A while back I discovered Go In Hotpot Train on Hindley Street and have been back numerous times since. While hotpot is traditionally a sharing type of meal, Go In Hotpot Train is slightly different in that each diner has their own pot of soup. Pick from a range of pork bone soup, spicy tom yum, laksa to more "interesting" flavours like lamb spine soup. I've tried a few soup bases so far and they are all lovely. It's called a train because it used to be an old sushi place and the train was already installed with the bar and all. It's rather clever really that they managed to make use of that and turn it into a hotpot heaven. It's a long and narrow store, as you walk a great variety of sauces are on display for you to pick and bring back to your table. My favourite mix is always chilli bean sauce, satay sauce, sesame oil and coriander. Lots of coriander. 

Vegetables are on the conveyor belt so take your pick of Asian vegetables and mushrooms such as enoki, wombok, bok choy and more. Meat however, you have to order from the menu. Their sliced meat is thinly sliced frozen so it is fresh and cooks very easily. Brilliant for hotpot. They also have dumplings, house made fishballs, chicken balls, fish tofu, variety of noodles, seafood just to name a few. 

My favourite sauce mix, laksa soup base, fishballs, dumplings, gai lan and tofu

It's always a satisfying meal and as long as you don't order fatty meat slices, it really is a healthy meal with everything boiled and fresh. Be careful with those marbled meat slices though, you will soon realize what you have done when the fire goes off and the soup starts to cool down with a wobbly film of saturated fat settling at the top. I absolutely love this place! 

Go In Hotpot Train

38 Hindley Street

Adelaide SA 5000

08 8212 1858

A while ago I visited Dessert Story in Melbourne and found out they were opening in Adelaide. Well, it's here now on Gouger Street near Cafe Kowloon! Pretty excited about it just because we like shaved ice desserts. This place serves Hong Kong and Taiwanese style desserts with grass jelly, taro balls, tapioca pearl, red bean, puddings and smoothies being regulars on the menu.

My mango shaved ice dessert was humongous it was still too much for two of us. I ordered an iced tea for myself but ended up taking that away with me to slowly sip on in the car. Love iced tea! I'm glad something like this has opened in Adelaide.

Dessert Story
118 Gouger St
Adelaide SA 5000
08 8231 5805

Stirling Autumn Garden Festival Market

I'm sure I have mentioned that at this time of the year I love going up to the hills, Hahndorf is my favourite in autumn as the leaves turn red-brown and the breeze is cool but not too cold with rays of sunlight still peeking through. I was up at Stirling the other day and came to a road block. It was then that I found out the Autumn Garden Festival Markets were on, this wasn't the usual Stirling Markets. I had to go have a look!

The Stirling Autumn Garden Festival celebrates seasonal gardening and sustainable living with entertainment, activities, healthy and organic eating, local produce, food and wine and gardening equipment. On this particular Sunday there were wine stalls set up for tasting and purchase, live entertainment and family friendly activities. Local traders also took the opportunity to set up food and craft stalls. 

Beautiful flowers and native plants at affordable prices were on display. 

This was a community activity really to weave leaves, there was a basket of leaves and anyone could pick one up and weave it where ever they wanted to. I thought it was kinda cool. Small things!

The kids took part in a music performance using very different style instruments. 

Locavore had their specialty Wagyu Burger on offer. I've had their house made Wagyu burger at the restaurant before. Locavore means eat local and they strive to use ingredients from within a 100km radius. Using local and quality ingredients, they make some pretty darn good food! I've previously done a review on Locavore.

Jimmies is another great place I've had the chance to visit before. Jimmies is famous for their incredibly delicious wood oven pizzas and I remember we had such a great time drawing on the table at the restaurant. Well, it wasn't the table itself we were drawing on, at Jimmies their tables are covered with drawing paper and you get your cup of crayons so doodle away while you wait for your pizza.

This is only the second time ever I've come across these guys. The first time I bought two venison pies. This time, bought venison pies again. Bull Creek Bakery make awesome venison pies! You'll just have to take my word for it. They have a great range of traditional favourites and delicious creations but it really is awesome. 

I had a seafood paella from Stirling Hotel which was really fresh and delicious. Fresh prawns, mussels, clams and squid - I absolutely love paella. It was pretty cool watching them make it in the big paella pan. I got bits of crispy chewy rice too!

Big game of chess anyone? Really, you can have ten a side. 

Earthy goodies! I love the organic look. 

I also came across Provi to You Dore which I thought was a very clever play on words and great name for the business. What they do is, you can order a weekly box of food and have it delivered to your door. You could just get organic fruit and veg or the full shebang of a meal plan with all the required ingredients delivered right to your doorstep. Don't even need to think to eat healthy! Could not be easier. They were giving out samples of Lamb Kofta with Lentil Dahl as an example of things they have on the menu. It was pretty tasty.

It's ironic that I am writing this now, in the last days of autumn. Winter will be here soon and I'm sure I'll be hunting out restaurants with fire places. Until next autumn, I wanted to share this cute set up by one of the coffee and cake stalls at the market. Goodbye autumn! See you Mr. Scarecrow.

Crust Dinner Party - Cowabunga, Ninja Turtles!

Recently I was approached by Crust Gourmet Pizzas with a very exciting opportunity to host a  themed dinner party serving food from Crust Gourmet Pizzas. Thinking of a theme turned out to be the most challenging part because here was a chance to do something different, something that I'd probably never go all out to do for a dinner with friends. This also became a personal challenge to be creative. So there we were going through ideas, first the seasons - spring, summer, autumn, winter, then Christmas in May??? (didn't make sense), then Super Mario because pizza = Italian = Mario except Mario eats pasta. I wanted something to do with pizza so then we went down the track of Italy, Chicago and New York.  Lo and behold, who lives in the sewers of New York? Come on 80's kids! These guys are making a comeback now but the 80's version is way better. I mean, the original! None other than the heroes in a half shell - Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles! 

We got excited about the nostalgic idea for about 10 minutes then it dawned on us how the heck are we supposed to pull this off without looking like a complete kid's party. It got worse when we realized it wasn't easy to find Ninja Turtles stuff. But, we did it anyway because sometimes, the best stuff doesn't have to be bought. So here is my Ninja Turtle Themed Crust Dinner Party! 

Turtle colours? Green. Turtles live in sewers. Need sewer lid and pipes. Turtles have shells. Mr. Foodie likes spray painting. Put them all together, we had a fun afternoon keeping the dog away from the spray painting area. 

First we got the lid off an old bathroom exhaust fan (dusty donation thanks to my elecitrician Mr. Foodie). With the grids we could make it look like a sewer lid. What was white then got spray painted black followed by a light mist of silver paint to create a gun metal like look. All I had to do now was write NYC in the middle.

We did the same with tins! Suddenly I had to eat baked beans and diced tomatoes, luckily there are only four turtles so we kept the lids and peels the paper of the tin and sprayed it the same way to make them look like sewer pipes. 

I managed to pick up a couple of BBQ aluminium foil trays of which the back of it kind of looked like a turtle shell. We got some dark green spray paint and tube of light green acrylic paint and went to work. First, the back of the tray was sprayed with two coats of dark green. 

After it has dried, you can use a brush if you like, Mr. Foodie finger painted the raised bumps with the light green acrylic paint and blended a few light streaks in around the sides. We have two swords in a sword plaque which we hung on the wall and stuck a "turtle shell" on it for the ninja and turtle theme. 

Being in New York, I managed to get some New York canvases to bring the theme together. We also hunted around for second hand figurines because it ain't Ninja Turtles without the turtles. We found this guy who was selling all his figurines with the baddies and side characters as well - perfect! I decided to set a mini scene in the corner just to add to the theme. 

For some reason it was hard to get green lanterns so I only managed to get one which was hidden at the bottom of the pile and unwanted because the light was broken on it. Oh well, one will do. I haven't got a big dining room anyway. Got the green lantern and purple streamers (you can also use crepe paper in any of the ninja turtle colours) to make Donatello! Just wrap a strip of coloured crepe paper around the lantern and cut out two pieces of paper in the shape of eyes and stick them on. We got trigger happy and made a mouth too. Wonders of paper, scissors and texta!

Shopping is always fun for a girl. I bought green napkins, green plates, a green pizza cutter, green table cover, black table cover, ceramic mugs with silicone green holders, traffic cones and then list  goes on. I decided on a black and green theme because I thought the green would stand out more plus, sewers, grungy dark, so black. I used a black table cover and the green one as a runner down the middle for strategic placement of my decorative items. At the end of the day, it was a pizza party so we went for a bit more casual but fun and not too kiddy. 

I managed to get some bright orange traffic cones to place with the sprayed tins to make it look like the roads of New York with turtles coming out of the sewers with Master Splinter, April O'Neil, Shredder, Bebop and Rocksteady placed near the cones. 

I also got some green sashes for the chairs and when I set the cutlery down I decided to place them in an X position to look like ninja weapons. It was quite fun once all the work was finished. I even bought Mountain Dew and Appletiser because they were green!

The final reveal

Guests were arriving soon so I got some popcorn out in a green pail I found at the op shop for them to snack on before we got the lovely pizzas. 

My nearest store was on Brighton Road, Brighton. Off we went to collect our dinner. I had been to Crust in Norwood before and loved it so I was excited to try new flavours this time. The lovely staff at the Brighton store were friendly and promptly prepared my order.

Hard at work

Our dinner

Our order was four large pizzas, one pasta, one salad and dessert. We decided to try one of each meat group because we are such carnivours. Crust Gourmet Pizza prides themselves in using healthy and fresh ingredients, not leaving your feeling greasy and guilty. They produce restaurant quality gourmet pizzas with a fast food service. Their ingredients are of quality and the flavour combinations are interesting, gourmet and delicious. 

The Turtles would have gone crazy for this!

Tandoori Chicken - Chicken breast fillets marinated in Tandoori spices, shallots and crushed cashews on a tomato base, topped with mint yoghurt. 

Seafood Pizza - Marinated tiger prawns, scallops, mussels, sundried tomatoes and bocconcini on a tomato base, garnished with fresh herbs and lemon

A lot of seafood pizzas end up being dry with shriveled seafood but this particular one was fresh and still succulent. Their ingredients are definitely of a certain quality.

Mediterranean Lamb Pizza - Slow cooked marinated lamb, tomatoes, green capsicum, Spanish onions, feta and oregano on a garlic infused base, garnished with mint yoghurt and lemon. 

Philly Steak - 4+ Marble score Wagyu beef, roasted and fresh capsicum, caramelised onions and mushrooms on a tomato base, garnished with Dijon mustard and wild rocket.

The meat pizzas were a lovely balance of flavour with juicy lamb and steak and well complimented toppings. It definitely wasn't too much or too rich. Just the right amount of gourmet ingredients. 

Spicy Spanish Seafood Pasta - Marinated garlic tiger prawns, scallops, shallots, caramelised onions and thinly sliced spicy chorizo served with Chilli infused extra virgin olive oil.

I love anything spicy so the pasta was a nice spice and biting into the chorizo gave me a bit of a kick! The chilli infused extra virgin olive oil was a nice touch.

Vietnamese Salad with Wagyu - 4+ Marble score Wagyu beef, roasted red capsicum, mixed leaf, Spanish onions, fresh herbs, snow pea sprouts tossed in sweet chilli servied with chilli infused extra virgin olive oil

My awesome friends who came to play with us! It's pizza time!

Everyone really enjoyed the pizzas and we had a good time reminiscing about Ninja Turtles and childhood cartoons and weekend TV time. Mr. Foodie even managed to get some episodes of the original Ninja Turtles cartoons to play on TV in the background - just to set the scene, because there's no stone left un-turned in this house!

Pizzas, popcorn, crisps and Appletisers later, it was time for dessert! Yes, a dessert pizza is always a gamble but this one was good. 

Black Forest Crumble - Dessert pizza layered with custard, mud cake, black cherries, topped with baked crumble, drizzled with berry coulis and dusted with icing sugar.

Seriously, how can you get this stuff at a takeaway joint! It's madness. The dessert pizza was everybody's favourite. Delicious, not overpowering, well balanced with all the favourite elements in a dessert. It was a fantastic end to our dinner party. Easily the best dessert pizza I've had.

The Aftermath

Everyone had a really good time and we all enjoyed a delicious dinner. It was a fun experience for all with the theme and definitely fun for me to decorate. Thank you to Crust Gourmet Pizza for this great opportunity to bring out the inner kid in me. 

For more information on Crust, check out their website here.

Check out my previous post on Crust Pizza Bar Norwood