Hi Peter,
Nat from Oz here. In response to your questions:
I am 33 and Dad is just turned 64 (he got dementia young - age 53ish)so I've been dealing with this for quite a long time. But don't feel to sorry for me either, as Mum does the care generally, I just had a lot of involvement in it when Dad was in a care home for 3 years just 700metres from my house! He's now back home with Mum and me I'm living far away now, trying to re-capture the 20s that I lost....however I am in constant contact and still worry and care a lot about Dad's welfare.
As for the foods that can be eaten and are nutritious for people having swallowing problems...I may have trouble giving you advice there as Dad's dementia seems to have caused him not to care about taste. However, you could try doing what my Mum does, by yourself a food blender (there's another name for them but I can't remember it at the moment, Mum calls it her Oscar which is the brand name of her machine here in Oz) and make your normal meals, and then put your partners portions of everything into that before serving them to her, reheat in the microwave if necessary. Mum reckons she's tried the meals and they taste fine (but then she's not much of a food connoisseur either) but I think the trick to it tasting okay is to not mix everything into one big pile of mush, i.e. have a pile of mashed potatoes, a pile of mashed carrots, pile of mashed meat and gravy, etc all separately displayed on the plate. You can even make it prettier to look at by using an ice-cream scoop!
However as Dad's swallowing problems come and go he can still handle some solid foods, don't just follow my advice as perhaps what is okay for him is not okay for Julia...rely instead on the speech therapist's advice (though I am wary of speech therapists as one told us last year that the best thing for Dad was to stop feeding him and let him die over a few days in hospital!
Thank god a sensible doctor gave us a second opinion!! I'm planning to send that speech therapist a photo of Dad all healthy and smiling in a xmas card come December!
). I also found this website that may be useful (its based on Huntington's disease swallowing problems but will no doubt be useful nonetheless):
http://huntingtondisease.tripod.com/swallowing/id10.html
Hope that helps, and feel free to private message me if you want quicker responses to your questions next time.