…I started writing a post, but then I couldn’t find any pictures to illustrate it and I don’t like posting things without pictures unless they’re really short (and this post wasn’t) and then I started looking at Reddit and working on a mixtape, so like, I’ll be SUPER BUSY for the rest of the evening. Sorry.
Go and read this
It is likely superior to anything you will find here.
Dear readers (indeed, if you have not all deserted me by now),
I am sorry.
I am no good at multi-tasking.
I’m clearly not able to juggle working the same grown-up hours as everyone else, a couple of dance classes, a gentleman whom I see on weekends, and a deep, burning desire to zone out on the couch when the washing needs to be done and the leftovers need to be packed up. Not yet, anyway.
But I have a plan!
Starting next week, Tuesday nights (between the hours of 8 and 10pm) shall be For Blogging. Not this week, ‘cos it’s Monday and I had to shuffle some things around. But yeah! See, it’s awesome already!
OK SSSHH IT’S ABOUT TO START!
Groceries were bought. Budgets were kept to. Joyful skipping was indulged in. Dough was kneaded. Things were sauteed, simmered and fried. Canapes were et, in the kitchen, like they should be, so the cooks don’t get left out. Dinner was served. The people rejoiced.
We decided on Mexican food, as wholemeal tortillas/flatbread are dead easy and cheap and the vegetables we got on special (sweetcorn and capsicum) suggested something el grande. The final menu was:
Wholemeal Flatbread
Vegetarian Chilli
Stir-Fried Sweetcorn
Dulce De Leche Cos We Found Condensed Milk Going At 5 CANS FOR A DOLLAR And I Had This Awesome David Leibovitz Recipe
(No picture of this. Mostly because we were too busy eating it)
Canapes and a fruit flan were provided by our guests (on the off-chance we didn’t have enough food, or what we did have ended up sucking). It was hearty to the max.
Soilduck posted our full recipes and methods in this blog post, so I won’t double up and shall instead just link you.
So, did we make a delicious, fairly healthy and plentiful dinner, consisting of at least two dishes for $2.50 a head, buying all our ingredients from Coles? Indeed we did.
Was it hard and did it involve tons of slaving over a hot stove? Nope. It was an exceptionally fun evening.
Did we cheat a bit and sometimes chuck in things we had lying around to spice things up a little? Hells yeah. More than ten years of cooking muscle memory made it pretty hard not to. Sorry.
So what did I learn?
First of all, Coles is full of poop. Their campaign was fairly insulting to people who already know how to cook on the cheap, do it often and do it well. To people who don’t have a lot of cooking skills and need a helping hand with a budget, they could’ve done better than a handful of lame recipes with a dodgy pricing system. My Mum told me the other day that the pinnacle of Real Hard-Hitting Investigative Journalism, ACA, called them out for it too. So you know I’m right.
Secondly, people on low incomes need to know how to shop for an entire week or more’s worth of meals cheaply, not just one night’s dinner. According to the tax department, I still fall into this category, so I’m allowed to get a bit preachy . Knowing how to work with leftovers, plan meals and make certain things from scratch has been a valuable skill set when money is tight and I needed more than a Violet Crumble for lunch.
Lastly, and not to kill you with surprise or anything, but Coles isn’t that cheap. On the way out with our shopping, Soilduck and I noticed that the fruit and veg market a few doors down had entire racks of specials that put our meagre goods to shame. We both shop at Aldi and know how cheap certain things can be there. Plus there’s farmer’s markets and the vegetables and herbs sometimes grown by ourselves and our friends.
Both of us reckon that by utilising all the resources available to us (lucky as we are with transport and weekends and such), we could’ve made a much better and cheaper meal than we managed on this challenge.
We’re planning another one soon. Hopefully you won’t have to wait as long for the results as you did for Part Two.
I’m sure many of you have seen, through your devoted watching of Australian TV’s Masterchef, the “Feed Your Family For Under $10” promotion that the Coles supermarket chain is currently running (rather directly inspired by a similar promotion run by UK supermarket Sainsburys last year).
The basic premise is (surprisingly enough) that uber-tanned, Oprah-beloved celebrity chef Curtis Stone has taken it upon himself to teach YOU (yes! pale, slovenly, non-celebrity chef you!) how to feed a family of 4 for $10.
Sort of.
A quick glance at the recipes reveal, that rather than forking out a lowly $10 at the cash register, the ingredients are priced per portion used in each recipe. For example, a clove of garlic is priced at 10 cents, a cup of chicken stock at 98 cents, even though I wasn’t previously aware you could purchase items in this way at Coles.
The recipe developers must think us clever enough to devise other uses for the leftover fresh tarragon/cream/fennel seeds in your other cooking, but I’m going to assume that if you’re good with leftovers, then you probably don’t need Curtis Stone to teach you how to crumb a chicken breast either. Given the enormous amounts of food that Australians throw away each year, I’d suggest that a promotion centering on how to cook a week’s worth of meals with minimal waste would be more helpful.
I’ve seen some other criticisms of the promotion rumbling around on the internets – such as the high fat/sodium content of many of the meals and minimal inclusion of vegetables.
So, here I was, feeling pumped for a snarky blog post, when there serendipitously appeared a blog post from compadre and fellow blogger Soilduck, asking for food-related challenges. I suggested that we could at least improve upon Coles’ promotion by purchasing whole ingredients for a meal and still have it total under $10. Hence, a dinner party concept was born.
The challenge: To cook a healthy meal for 6 (we had extra guests so we had to upsize and preserve the $2.50 per head equation of the original promotion), for a total bill of no more than $15 for everything, regardless of whether we were using part of an ingredient or the whole thing.
The meal had to contain at least one main and one side dish. Soilduck had already promised to incorporate another of her reader’s challenge ideas, which was to cook something involving flatbread. Our meal had to be vegetarian too, given there were non-meat eaters in our dinner party, but this just made things less expensive.
The only things that were exempt from purchase were cooking oil, water and dried spices (including sugar and salt). So, we set a date, organized for guests to bring dessert (as backup in case we failed miserably and everyone was still hungry) and formulated a plan.
We decided to hit up Jamison Coles for our ingredients – out of the way of the fancy suburb-related price hikes that our two major supermarket chains are famous for. We already had our side dish sorted – flatbread, so we were thinking Mexican or Indian. We figured we would check out which vegetables were cheap and in season, then factor in prices of various beans/pulses before we made our final decision.
So, which did we choose – Mexican or Indian? Lentils or kidney beans? Was the meal a delicious success, or an inedible failure? Find out in the next episode of Coooooking Chaaaallenge!!
As part of having a fancy new job (which is OF COURSE the reason why it’s been ages between posts…nothing to do with wanting to sit on the heater with a blanket instead of writing), I recently had to submit to the awesomeness that is a staff security check. But aside from the many, many pieces of paper and copies of pieces of paper I had to magically produce from the life vault, it had at least one unexpected and fun outcome.
In providing proof of residence, I had my Taiwan address translated, which meant I could finally look it up properly on Google Maps. Better yet, the Street View truck had started mapping out Taiwan starting late 2009, so I got a have a good long e-walk around the neighbourhood I lived in almost 3 years ago.
I’ve tried hard not to label my almost-year in Taiwan as a ‘bad’ experience, despite hating my job conditions there which, at 60 hours per week, coloured a lot of my time. I don’t want to see it in a negative light, because there was some really good stuff there. Like the kids I taught, the friends I made and how much fun Taiwan was on a Sunday when I didn’t have to work. So, I’ve been writing down some things I remember about the neighbourhood and now I’ve even got pictures to go with it. Here’s a little bit I prepared earlier.
(Note: J is ex-bf, who shared the Taiwan experience with me. Since it sounds lame to keep saying ‘ex-bf’, he gets an initial instead.)
The fruit van, unfortunately minus the fruit man
The fruit man was one of the first locals we made friends with in our neighbourhood. He had his little blue van parked just down the street from the main apartment entrance and I passed him at least once a day, depending on the way I walked to and from work.
The first time we spoke must’ve been a few days after we moved in. J and I stopped to buy fruit while we were on our way to have dinner at one of the wok stands at the end of our street. The fruit man and J had the kind of first conversation that happened every time we met someone new in Taiwan. Basically, surprise at the novelty of a foreigner speaking Mandarin, then compliments on his proficiency and questions about where he’d studied. Then more general questions about where the two of us were from and why we were in Taiwan. They cracked a few jokes with each other, we bought some fruit, then headed off down the street to eat dinner.
We were sitting at one of the little tables, waiting for our food, when the fruit man passed by the stall and saw us both sitting there. He proceeded to march in, sit down at our table, grab a pair of chopsticks from the basket and berate us loudly for being so rude as to not invite him to come to dinner with us when we were buying fruit. We played along, with J apologising for our great error in an equally exaggerated way. It was extremely funny, but the funniest part was when the fruit man paused and very seriously asked J to explain to me in English that he was just joking and hadn’t really been offended, in case I didn’t understand and thought he was rude.
It was cute and I made sure he knew that even though I didn’t speak Chinese, I understood enough about context and tone to get the joke.
My relationship with the fruit man was necessarily limited due to our lack of a common language, but he was always friendly to me, even when I was on my own. If I was just passing him on my way home after work, he would always stop what he was doing to shout out a friendly English “HELLO!”.
His was one of only a handful of places I felt happy buying from on my own, as he knew my language limitations and there was no embarrassment. And he always put extra fruit in the bag, despite my halfhearted protests.
My street - those are mountains in the distance.
When J told the fruit man that we were preparing to go back to Australia, he took to stopping me on my way home, miming an airplane taking off and adding an emphatic “NO!” and crossing his arms. He would then mime that I should tell J that we had to stay in Taiwan.
I usually just laughed, since I didn’t have the mime skills needed to explain that I was behind the move home as much, if not more than J – but that if he could find me a teaching job where I worked less, actually got paid for all the work I’d done and had enough time to take a language class occasionally, I’d have thought twice about leaving.
I was glad that the fruit van was still on my street when I took my walk last week. The fruit man told us, that when things got quiet during the day and there wasn’t anyone else to talk to, he practiced writing with his other hand. He showed us once, and it looked like he was pretty good. I bet in the time since I’ve been home, he’s gotten so good you can hardly tell which hand he’s written with.
