Allyson Gofton dishes it out

The day they asked her to say fish bites were a good source of omega-3 was the day Allyson Gofton really lost the plot.

"I went into the kitchen and I pulled five fish bites to pieces and out of 105 grams there were 75 grams of crumbs and 30 grams of munched up fish paste and that was a serving for a child that they wanted me to say was a good source of omega-3?"

The problem, says Gofton, was the essential fatty acid was abundant in oily fish (like tuna) - but less so in the Sealord hoki product featured on that episode of Food in a Minute.

She sighs. "The script went back through the layers, and a comma was put in... I couldn't understand it."

But she said it anyway. With a smile. For 13 years, Gofton was the face of Food in a Minute, the Wattie's-sponsored cooking slot before One News. Bright and breezy onscreen; behind the scenes, trouble was brewing.

Scripts she didn't agree with, recipes with odd combinations because sponsors wanted two products (frozen mashed potato with teriyaki sauce, anyone?), and the decision Gofton would no longer test the food she was cooking, left - literally - a bad taste in her mouth. "When it was good, it was really good. I loved what we were able to achieve with Food in a Minute. There were a few occasions, though, that really worried me."

Officially, Gofton, 47, quit our screens last month to spend more time with her family. The reality: "My contract was due to finish in October this year and I suspect they would have got rid of me by that point."

On a stinking hot morning in the eastern Auckland suburb of Meadowbank, Gofton is serving the Sunday Star-Times coffee, homemade cake and candid conversation.

Food in a Minute was born out of a simple statistic: In the mid-1990s, at 4.30pm, more than 60% of women did not know what they were cooking for dinner that night.

Mike O'Sullivan, whom Gofton met when she was working on Sanitarium and Chelsea accounts for communications firm Foot, Cone and Belding, came up with the idea of a 60-second cooking show. "We had to find $1 million. We went round the companies and Wattie's agreed to underwrite it."

Back then the team filmed 10 spots at a time, each featuring a single sponsor's product. Gofton convinced a reluctant product manager to let her put potato pom poms on a cottage pie, and "the rest is really history".

Look at those early shows, says Gofton, "and the recipes for families are as valuable today as they were then. Tuscan chicken? It doesn't get any better than drumsticks cooked in a light flavoured tomato sauce served with beans and pasta. Fantastic".

A FEW YEARS later and there's Gofton being told to stuff a tender-basted turkey breast with sourdough breadcrumbs and glaze it with lime marmalade.

"Forget it," says Gofton. "She [the target viewer] is going to use regular breadcrumbs. Lime is not a flavour that goes with turkey. Take sweet, sticky marmalade and put it back in the oven? It has the potential to burn. It's chunky-cut marmalade. It looks like it has the pox. She goes to carve it, but it's gone sticky, because that's what a glaze does, and the knife is going to glue to the breast."

Oh, yeah - and if the breast is already "tender-basted", why does it need a glaze? "That, in a nutshell, shows you where I was beginning to get so frustrated."

There is another punchline to this story. It turned out the sponsor didn't have optimal supermarket distribution for lime marmalade. Gofton was asked to substitute orange. The flavour worked better and, she says, was probably already in the average New Zealander's cupboard.

According to Gofton, Food in a Minute changed when Heinz bought Wattie's. "International corporateville." She went from working on a handshake to a "very legal binding contract of many pages". Friday night gin and tonic planning sessions were replaced by six-week business programmes. "And at about that point it became a job." (She did, however, keep the cook book rights the first one sold more than 100,000 copies.)

Internal politics, personality clashes - it was not, says Gofton, a happy time. Why did she stay?

"We were going through the costly process of IVF. I needed a job to pay for my children. I stayed to get that money to get my girl."

There is a crack in her voice. She moves on quickly. But halfway through this interview, a chubby blonde cherub will burst through the doors and throw herself at Gofton. Olive-Rose is two years old. Gofton and husband, Warwick Kiely, conceived their first child Jean-Luc after just one IVF treatment, but this angel girl took another four years and a treatment bill "that clocked six figures".

Gofton says the fertility treatment, mood swings, "the whole rollercoaster of emotions" inevitably lowered her tolerance for change. She suffered pre-eclampsia (dangerously high blood pressure and fluid retention) during her first pregnancy. Her baby boy was delivered 10 weeks early by emergency caesarean and spent three months in a neo-natal unit. Olive-Rose came a month early - Gofton could not keep food down, lost 10kg and was hospitalised so she could be drip-fed. The new baby suffered severe reflux and ear infections. Gofton was diagnosed with clinical depression.

"I could swear loudly about how tired I am," she says. And later: "I accept that I too, at times, must have been hard to work with."

Gofton "doesn't want to scald the hand that fed". When she left Food in a Minute, Wattie's gave her an antique pearl and turquoise necklace. She knows she won't be missed at script meetings, but hopes she will be remembered with "a smile and a laugh".

"It was truly a special family to work with for 12 years. We all believed in what we were trying to do... and so long as 10 recipes out of every 12 were great, you know, I was happy.

"Food in a Minute has to be financially viable for Wattie's and so I have no doubt the changes were required to make sure the television commercial was worth the money and the time that is put into it, each and every day.

"I just want product managers to get out there in the country towns and small cities, to find out what it is really like to have no extra money to buy semi-dried tomatoes. And I want them to know that people do eat swede and brussels sprouts - some of the vegetables we were not allowed to use as they thought them too polarising."

Watties' response? "We are constantly researching the marketplace keeping a close eye on food trends, demographics and socio-economic shifts," says Mike Pretty, general manager marketing. "It is to be expected a celebrity chef may see things a little differently than a product manager from time to time."

What about that mashed potato with teriyaki sauce? "From the outside, this may sound a little incongruous, however that recipe for Teriyaki Potato Hotcakes generated a lift in sales for both products, which showed consumers understood the idea."

Pretty says the omega-3 claim related to nutrient content. "Sealord confirmed at the time that the claim met the Food Standards Code and the product had sufficient serves to meet the claim."

Thirteen years, says Pretty, "was a long time. Our customers, team and strategies have changed. Thankfully, the Food in a Minute overall recipe is continuing to track well. Allyson was wonderful as the host, and her ability to engage a television audience was legendary".

GOFTON WILL be hoping that statement stands. She is discussing a project with TVNZ, working on two new cookbooks and has been to see Prime Minister John Key. "I'd like to be on a select committee, maybe to do with families and health."

She is happy the government has overturned rules about what can be sold in school tuck shops. "I give Jean-Luc a ham sandwich most weeks, which the guidelines say should only be offered once a year - I wonder who put those together? They were obviously not in tune with mid-New Zealand mothers. There are only so many grated carrot sandwiches any kid wants to eat!"

Gofton is hoping to speak directly to "middle New Zealand" in her new role as editorial director of Real, a New World Supermarket magazine. It was that publishing project, she says, that gave Heinz-Wattie's an early out on her Food in a Minute contract. "They said we cannot allow you to work on a magazine for New World, we'll have to let you go."

Gofton: "My house is happier." And so is she. The new magazine allows her to dish out the back-to-basics information she says is missing from food writing. "It's so important that within the family unit, simplicity reigns. Family food should be family food, cafe food should be cafe food and when you go to a restaurant, it should be special.

"There was that research done that said people were too scared to cook at home and we all laughed at it here. But when you can't make it look like it looks in the photo, you think you've failed. This need for our food to look gorgeous and be perfect, it's gone too far."

Gofton blames the "excess of the 1980s".

"We no longer do scrambled eggs with bacon. It's got to be organic, free range, served with pancetta. It's got to go on the sourdough, got to be sprinkled with Italian parsley. We can't afford it. What happened to a bloody poached egg and a nice bit of crispy bacon and a cup of coffee sitting with your friends?"

The only olives in Gofton's house are for decoration. Sun-dried tomatoes are nice, but not as useful as those from a tin. A plug for her old sponsor? "We hear so much about Italian tomatoes, say, but Wattie's flavoured tomatoes, my favourite being the Indian ones, are all Kiwi. Designed here, grown here, processed here - why can't we be parochial about these things?"

Gofton's first food writing assignment (from Tui Flower's test kitchens at New Zealand Woman's Weekly) was 12 ways with luncheon sausage. She's not advocating a return to those days - but she wants to see the pendulum swing back a little.

"It must be lovely to be able to afford to have wagyu beef, but can we afford the land to farm it? It's very nice to have pesto... but it would be much better if we actually had some vegetables to toss through the pasta."

The night before the Star-Times visited, Gofton fed her family reheated lamb and gravy. When her husband comes home for lunch, it's a pickled pork sandwich - old-fashioned, but cheaper than ham.

Gofton says too many food writers "are not grounded in the 'burbs of New Zealand. They are grounded in the Matakana markets of the world. And that's the big problem". This year, she says, "all food writers have to look at the environment with a little bit of austerity. We have to be considerate that the budget is not moving this year, in fact it's going to shrink on food".

Beans at $14.99 a kilogram? "Outrageous. They're probably imported. I opted for the broccoli at 59 cents a head."

Gofton grew up in Tasmania where graduation from a high school home science course required the whoa-to-go production of a three-tier, iced wedding or Christmas cake.

Students today, she says, "learn about the technology of food, but not how to cook or budget or run a house. We lost the value of motherhood and fatherhood altogether in the 1980s, in the pursuit of finances and fashion. Food became a status thing."

A whole generation, she says, lost the ability to cook. And their kids are suffering. "The young people who write to me and ask how to do preserves, they're young."

For the record, Gofton doesn't know how to bottle fruit - her mum always bought canned.

LEFTOVERS: Allyson Gofton on...
Late motherhood: "I think it's up to a lot of women to say `don't forget to start earlier' to their children. Being a parent has to be the greatest experience it's just a bit better if you don't have to take your hot Milo to bed at 8.30pm to cope."
Best kitchen utensils: "Most cooks would say their knives. The thing that really makes a difference is the dishwasher."
Frozen vegetables: "Fantastic for busy families. I am sick to death of people who say they don't do frozen. It would be lovely if we had time to shell a mountain of peas every day for our child, but we don't."
Health claims: "Who knows what lycopene is and what it does? I'd really like it if we could have a taste claim on food - has wow factor, has yuk factor."
Sponsoring two World Vision children: "We had $2 a day. It's very humbling, somebody's worrying about organic eggs and you think `right, half the world can't even have an egg'. It brings out a kind side when you do something for nothing for others."

- © Fairfax NZ News