About this blog

I am not an inspired chef in the kitchen.

If I had my way, I'd make a great big pot of bolognaise sauce once a week, and eat it for all meals for the rest of the week - with pasta, on toast etc. On the nights when I need a quick meal, I'd have my son calls "tuna pasta" (blue packet mac and cheese, with a tin of tuna stirred through) or baked beans and cheese toasties. No problem with that sort of a lifestyle while your single...

...but I now have a family.

I have a partner who loves cooking and loves experimenting with food. Meals he makes are always amazing, but sometimes we wouldn't eat until 11pm while he was experimenting. He spent many years working on Lygon Street, and feels he has cooked and eaten more pasta and bolognaise that one needs to experience in one lifetime. I also have a son at primary school, who I would like to model good habits for, both with eating and duties such as cooking and cleaning around the house.

Both my partner and I work full time. Often we get to the end of the day and haven't thought about what we would have for dinner. Sometimes we would pick something up from the supermarket on the way home from work. Sometimes we'd resort to take-away or home delivery.

We both though we weren't eating enough vegetables - to try and combat this we signed up for a vegetable box to be delivered once a week. This didn't work for us. We got a wombok or two in the box four deliveries in a row - our fridge was overflowing with chinese cabbage as we couldn't find enough original recipes for it. We didn't get enough potatoes for our liking. The fruit tended to go bad very quickly. We were paying more than we would at our local grocery store, and ended up throwing a lot of food out.

Enter the new solution - a now discontinued magazine from last decade (Notebook - for which I had three years of subscription issues) that each month would publish a menu of 5 weeknight recipes and a shopping list. Meal planning for a week made easy! And these menus had a lot of variety - each week usually had one meal of red meat, white meat, vegetarian, fish and a salad. We discovered if we picked a menu from a January edition in Summer, it would usually have meals with fruits and vegetables in season, and mains to suit the weather. And the meals are designed to serve 4 - which means that there are usually some leftovers for one or both of us to take to lunch the next day, meaning one less meal to worry about.

This blog is to document the process we have this year, cooking the meals from the magazine. What worked, what didn't, what we liked, what was too much effort, etc.

From time to time I may mentions some gadgets I have in my kitchen that I use when prepping these meals. Please note that unless explicitly stated, I am not receiving any money for these endorsements - they are all my own opinions and reviews.

And if you're really lucky, I'll type up my recipe for one pot bolognaise to share with your all!