In today's Bite: Food for good health

Beef fillet steak with pickled cucumber. Photo / Bite magazine

Find all your favourite bits from today's Bite magazine online. Follow the hyperlinks in Jo Elwin's editor's letter and lose yourself in bite.co.nz.

"It's really good for you" is my most used phrase. Well no, it's actually, "Don't worry, I'll do it myself," which my nearest and dearest tells me is not at all good for me, but that is a whole other story.

"It's really good for you" gets used a lot because I am regularly encouraging people to eat foods that they think they dislike or have never tried. I find that by explaining the nutritional benefits incorporating a particular food can bring to their diet makes them more receptive to the untried or disliked.

Beef fillet steak, lamb leg steaks and mussels. Photos / Bite magazine

It is Iron Awareness Week, so that is where our focus is today. Mikki Williden cites facts and figures in her wellbeing column and Kathy Paterson cooks up beef fillet steak with pickled cucumber, lamb leg steaks with broccoli and almond butter and New Zealand green-lipped mussels with tomato sauce red meat and mussels.

These three meals are rich sources of dietary iron as are Warren Elwin's ideas for baby leafy greens. These bagged baby greens are a wonderful convenience food and their sweetness and tenderness make them more palatable for those not keen on eating their greens.

Citrus season is also upon us, just in time for a few rounds of Aaron Brunet's gazpacho before the chill sets in and we'd prefer our soup hot ... mind you, the vitamin C from all the lemon, lime and orange will be just what we need come winter so, as they turn up their noses at a bowl of cold soup, I will be telling them: "It's good for you."

Baby leafy greens, gazpacho and a reader recipe: sponge cake. Photos / Bite magazine

I leave you this week with our latest reader recipe winner. Thank you Bonnie Sumner, your egg- and dairy-free sponge cake completely won us over. Light and full of flavour with an oh-so-now whipped coconut cream filling, this sponge is irresistible and can be made gluten free.

Enter here to win an Oscar DA1000 juice extractor to give away to one lucky Bite reader.