GREEN CHEESE: March 2009

The Fresh Express

The following scenario would occur regularly when I went shopping for the household foodstuffs:

Grab keys. Grab baby. Grab husband's butt. Kidding. Husband is at work. Think about going to a butcher for meat and a market for fresh fruit and veg at low prices. Drive to supermarket.
Go into fresh section and think about changing things up by getting a whole array of fresh fruit and vegies I don't normally buy. Chuck a bag of bananas and a couple of onions in the trolley. Move towards confectionary aisle.

One day, as I was contemplating how many more times I would believe myself when I said next time I was really going to a fruit market, the distant memory of a piece of junk mail I got about a year ago floated before my eyes. It was a pamphlet, I recalled, advertising a fresh fruit and veg delivery service, but I couldn't for the life of me remember the name of the company. I did some googling and discovered another company called Fresh Express.

I employed the services of this company, and for the last six weeks have had this:

delivered to my door at a price that wouldn't get you this much at the supermarket, with no delivery charge. It's like Christmas every Tuesday afternoon. Combined with The System, I am the laziest I mean most efficient healthy eater in town.

And I have the unknown company to thank, whose advertising material was successful in getting business for the competition.

Check it, freshexpress.org

Don't Get Mad, Get Organised!

About a year ago, someone brought something over to my house in a plastic bag - not a thin plastic bag from the supermarket, but one of those hefty, square-bottomed plastic bags that sometimes come with rope handles, and it had the slogan on it "Don't get mad, get organised!"

I liked this because I love all things organisation, storage, stacking, these go together, put these sideways and you can fit those there, budget, list-with-tickboxes, 8-step plan, achieved, goal, colour-coded, space-saving, labeled.
When a couple of pals introduced me to Store: The Storage Superstore where this plastic bag hailed from, I just couldn't stop frowning and shaking my head and singing little songs to myself and then left as soon as possible. It can be distressing being surrounded by too many things you want.

My Organisation Idol is a friend and former work colleague from back in the days when I used to get paid to work. I was looking through a filing cabinet of assessment results when I noticed the labels were not just in order of school year, but in alphabetical order within each year. And the manila folders were colour-coded by subject. After staring for a while in dumbfounded delight, I wondered what kind of filing cabinet mastermind had done this. When I looked around the office and saw a desk that was neatly stacked with space-maximizing document holders, each one labeled with an electronic labeler, I knew.

The true extent of this friend's organisational virtuosity was only revealed to me when I went over to her place and saw her study. Wall-to-wall cube bookcases. Storage boxes clearly labeled and in perfectly aligned rows between each level of books. Matching L-shaped desk featuring a clear and unencumbered workspace. It was genius. Pure, Swedish, flat-packed genius.

So. The following scenario was happening to me on what seemed like a daily basis at around 5pm:

Laundry: done. Poo-stained jumpsuit: soaking. Mopping of kitchen floor: HA HA. Baby wakes from afternoon nap. Kiss baby maniacally. Wipe baby drool off face (mine). Baby puts drooly hands on face and in mouth (mine). Wipe off baby drool again. Husband arrives home, handball baby to husband. Change wet-shouldered shirt. Need to get dinner so look in fridge: sweet chili sauce and milk. Look in pantry: passionfruit pulp. Look in freezer: Icepack. Spend ten minutes trying to dream up some new kind of toxic smoothie. Order pizza.

So after some weeks... or possibly months of this, I could have got mad. But I got organised.

There is now a System in place and the System is this. Once a fortnight, Gastro Boy and I go to the shops and fill our trolley with LARGE quantities of the following:

Chicken breast fillets
Minced beef
The big cans of tuna
Pasta
Rice
Frozen vegies
Cans, jars and bottles of such things as tomatoes, tomato paste, pasta sauce and chicken simmer sauce.

We fill the freezer with the chicken, beef and vegies, chuck everything else in the pantry and shazam - a healthy, easy meal is always at my fingertips and none of it is perishable so it all keeps till I need it. Shazam indeed.

Now don't get me wrong, I love meal planning and cooking, and I still plan and buy for special meals. I just don't have as much time or energy for it right now as I used to. When it comes to the end of the day, if I'm tired and haven't planned dinner, all I want is to be able to pull together something healthy and right now. And with The System, I can. No pizzas, no toxic smoothies.

The thing I love about storage planning checkboxes organisation is you pretty much never reach the perfect way to do it or store it or manage it, so there can almost always be a better way. It's a challenge, and much better than getting mad.

GORGED OF THE JUNGLE

Well, we came and we gorged. There was waaayy too much food, which is the waaayy we like it, and there were no disasters. Which is boring.

We started with an entree of Broccoli Tree Dip which is a bowl of dip you stick little florets of broccoli and asparagus and crunchy dipping sticks in and it looks like a jungle scene. And I just remembered there's a container of leftover dip in the back of the fridge. It may have grown a real jungle by now.

Broccoli Tree Dip
(makes 3 cups)

250g spreadable light cream cheese
250g smooth low-fat ricotta cheese
1/3 cup corn relish
2 Tbsp sweet chilli sauce
1 Lebanese cucumber, grated
Steamed broccoli florets, asparagus, carrot, celery and dipping stix

Whisk cream cheese and ricotta in a bowl till smooth. Stir in corn relish, sweet chilli sauce and cucumber. Stick vegetables in and serve.

We also had Jungle Juice, which, admittedly, sounds like either an aphrodisiac or poison, but I promise there was no funny business going on.

Jungle Juice
(Serves 6)

750mL soda water
2 cups orange juice
Generous splash of Midori
A can of pineapple pieces

Mix together. Hang Barrel of Monkey monkeys on glasses.

For main was coconut milk based Jungle Fish Curry from Taste.com.au. You can get the curry paste at Safeway and it's actually called 'Jungle Curry Paste'. The jar said a true jungle curry doesn't contain coconut milk, because there aren't usually coconuts in the Thai jungle, but none of my guests were the wiser. Except the ones I told. Which was everyone.

I used bassa fillets, added a bag of cooked prawns and used about half the specified amount of curry paste, as we just wanted a bit of zing, not to set the jungle on fire.

Dessert was completely OTT. We started with a 'palate cleanser' of Swamp Jellies, which were espresso glasses filled with layers of different coloured jelly with little gummy lions and snakes and hippos trapped in a state of suspended animation inside.

Next, Barbecued Banana Splits, which I happened to see a few days before on Fresh TV. You split the bananas with the skin on, chuck a broken up Snickers bar inside, close it up, wrap it in foil and throw it on the barbie for 5 minutes. I don't know if they're any good because I had to put Gastro Boy to bed after I served them, and when I came back mine was more like Cold Barbecued Banana Split and Icecream Soup. You can find the recipe here, although it will probably be an expanded version of what I just said.

Last, but not least, the crowning glory, a lion cake. I was exceedingly proud, but apparently not proud enough to think of taking a photo of it. Everyone was too stuffed to eat it so it just sat there looking marvelous (in my humble opinion).

I had told everyone to get into the theme and dress up, and I was planning to wear a big piece of leopard-print material, toga-like, a la Jane. But between the jelly swamping and the jungle currying, I couldn't find it, so we had one birthday boy rock up with a tail, the other with a wrist cuff, a hot girl come in a leopard-print skirt, and me, the host, in my normal clothes and feeling very disappointed in myself.

Then the other day I was cleaning out a cupboard and I found the blasted piece of material, except it was much, MUCH smaller than I had imagined... which made me think it was a good thing for all it wasn't found. Or a bad thing, if you're into the bib-and-only-a-bib look.

I swear there was no funny business..

NOT A FUTURE TV STAR...

A couple of people have been confused about my involvement in MasterChef, so I must clarify that I didn't audition myself, I just had a couple of people leave comments who did.

I'd be more likely to audition for So You Think You Can Dance. If you're going to fail at something on national television you may as well do it spectacularly.