Tim Malone.id.au

Cooking is honestly the hardest thing about living without a mum in the house. After many months (I’ve stopped counting now), we still really don’t know how to do it. It’s not the cooking per se, but the organisation of it all. For instance, right now, there’s not much in the fridge. So we need to go shopping. Then we all have such busy lives that we’re often only all here on about one night a fortnight. Most nights there’ll only be one of us at home – and that doesn’t give much inspiration to cook.

It’s not hard, and it’s not one thing that is stopping us, but rather everything coming together that makes it much easier to eat out, heat up something simple, or just decide one is not hungry (which unfortunately happens quite a lot…).

Now I got a book for Christmas called 4 Ingredients. This could revolutionise cooking in our household. I say could, because it depends on me taking the book as a hit of inspiration, holding that inspiration, and just pushing ahead even though every thing else makes it hard. As you’ve probably guessed, the book is filled with recipes that only need four ingredients. It also has a list of what your pantry should always have in it. Now that solves the shopping problem. As long as we can keep the pantry stocked according to this list, then we can plan out the meals for the week and just drop past the shops on the way home from work to pick up the fresh ingredients – and, because only four ingredients are needed, chances are we’ll have them (and they won’t be hard to find in the shops).

Easy in principle.

I need to take the inspiration and hold it… and just make everything else a non issue. For example, if I know I’m going to be the only one home, I just need to cook anyway and save the leftovers. My body will thank me for the more healthy meal.

Now that I’ve written that here, maybe I’ll actually do it!

I also got $100 worth of these for Christmas:

They’ll come in very handy for about a month… or maybe less now, considering petrol yesterday was $1.45. $1.45!!!

I also got a Bocce set:

And these very cool USB rechargable batteries:

A great idea, but not just for the cool factor – they can be very well applied with a wireless keyboard and mouse!

Oh, and Telstra also finally performed a port change for our ADSL connection just before Christmas – it was a very appreciated present!