Go and read this

It is likely superior to anything you will find here.

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.

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!!

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.

They range from mildly implausible to deeply offensive and are rarely founded on more than the vaguest of anecdotal evidence. They mostly relate to me only, rendering them harmless to the majority of humanity. But I have a couple that are more general, which will eventually go towards constituting my Code To Live By (coming to a bookstore near you in Fall 2015!).

The one I’ve been thinking about today is a way to measure your success in life thus far. It goes like this:

If you traveled back in time and explained your daily life to a 7-year-old version of yourself, they would look forward to growing up and being you.

The reasoning behind this theory is that it reminds me to examine life through the lens of, “Am I having enough fun? Do I take things too seriously, or do I make enough time to do silly stuff once in a while? Have I lost sight of things that were once important to me?”

Of course, a number of flaws are immediately apparent. If you are a loud-mouthed firefighter with a hook for a hand who eats pizza every night and has only a pack of undomesticated wolves for company, you have made a roaring success of life according to this theory (and perhaps, others too). However, if you are a mild-mannered wine aficionado with a highly-technical policy related job, who enjoys cooking vegetable side dishes on the weekends, you will likely be branded a failure. How much you enjoy these things now are fairly irrelevant. In order to be successful, most of your daily activities must be things you thought were awesome when you were seven.

A lot of things I hated as a child – having a long shower, going to bed, and finishing all my dinner – are now things I love dearly. So, there’s always going to be a certain amount in my life that child-me would screw their nose up at. “You eat spinach? Ewww! YOU HAVE A BOYFRIEND ?? Gross!!!”
But I can think of some aspects of my current life that would appeal to child-me. “Hey, child-me!” I would say, “Get this. I live in a house with my friends, I can go to bed whenever I like and I don’t have to ask anyone if I want to sleepover at someone else’s house. I can drink cocktails and eat ice-cream for dinner every night if I want to. I make my own money and get to decide what to do with it. And no-one tells me to go change when I pick out my outfit in the morning.”

Child-me would, however, be pretty pissed off that I’m not a ballerina, a famous actor, a famous writer, or a combination of both. Frankly, I’m pretty pissed off that I’m not any of these things (and at my advanced age, it is unlikely that the first two will ever come to fruition, but I’m still holding out for the third). She would be glad that I finished university, never started smoking (I was always a nerd) and that I’ve travelled and lived in other countries. She’d probably be impressed with my modelling work, like the fact I’ve become a good cook and that I’ve tried to keep up with dance classes. Thinking about what child-me would like to do is one way that I try to keep a recent and ever-growing fear at bay – that I will grow up to be utterly boring.

So, whenever I make a resolution to open a high-interest savings account, rollover my superannuation into one fund, or something else equally sensible and completely dull, I try to think of something more interesting to do too. Like getting really good at hula-hoop or learning another language. Or making time for craft projects, video games or even just colouring-in (I never got rid of my crayons).

How harshly do you think seven-year-old you would judge your life today? Does it matter? Are you more concerned with what eighty-year old you would think?

How do you measure your success?