Eat your greens.

I can still hear those words echoing... my mother, telling my brother to eat his greens. Craig was such a stubborn kid, he would fall asleep at the table instead of eating his green vegetables.

Adam has been doing most of the cooking this year, he takes turns with Dominos. Last week while I was on prac, I felt a pang of guilt about the diet we are currently consuming. I popped into Woolworth and at that same moment my guilt started feeling a little exhausted itself. I decided on spaghetti bolognese. Easy spaghetti bolognese.... the bottled sauce, mince and pasta type. On the way to the check out with my dinner option, I realised I had no vegetables... spinach!! Easy.

I had a few errands to run on the way home and by this stage the bottled sauce spaghetti option was starting to sound like hard work. I decided to make it easier. I have always been the type of person to wonder, if a recipie needs twenty minutes to simmer, why not boil it in five? So the approach I took really was quite practical and appropriate given my recent kitchen history.

The blender is my favourite kitchen appliance. I have been known to blend a chicken roast, vegetable and gravy dinner for the sake of getting a child to eat it. So it seemed a sensible idea to throw the spinach in the blender with the bottled pasta sauce. When the spinach filled the whole canister and I needed to add water to get the sauce and spinach to mix, I realised I had overstepped the mark of what could be considered an appropriate amount of spinach to disguise in the sauce...

What I think I did successfully achieve, was a fifteen minute surprise meal. A surprise because we did not really know what it was anymore, surprising that it actually turned out looking so gruesome, and by far the greatest surprise was that it didn't taste too bad and the kids ate it. Really just needed enough cheese to hide the colour... viola!

I had a picture of the meal on facebook and made the comment to a friend that if I was being graded on my cooking my report card would read like the one my least favourite teacher, Mr Kenovan, wrote in primary school... 'Fiona has potential beyond the results she is currently achieving, yet... she continues to display a 'careless' attitude!'

I would not really say I have never been a cook, I remember at one stage in early married family life, I bottled sauce, made jam and home made bread... I catered my twenty first birthday party... I can even make a mean baked cheesecake. I would say however, that at the moment my attitude is careless, not really only towards cooking but I would also add to the list... housework, bookwork, ironing and really anything that can wait until next February.

I prefer to think of myself as easygoing, not necessarily careless... seems that's the way we are rolling and to some degree surviving... so I think we will stick with this method with the expectation that things will get better, until then, one word... BLENDER!