The Recipe Book

Cooking! The Chore We Either Love or Hate….

I have always found the hardest part of cooking is just figuring out what to cook. Day in and day out, we have to come up with ways of tempting our taste buds with something different, because let’s face it, the old standard of steak and three veg. can only go so far. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with that if it’s your favourite food. For almost 70 years my dear old dad fronted up each night for his staple diet of steak and veg., without ever tiring of it. None of that fancy pasta stuff for him. And I’m not sure if it was anything to do with my mum’s early attempts at cooking or not, but he always ordered his steak ‘to look like it had been nailed to a tree in a bushfire‘. Perhaps he’d grown to like it that way, or perhaps he really did prefer it to be well done – and I mean ‘REALLY‘ well done.

Let’s Share The Love … of those old recipes

If you’ve got a favourite recipe that’s been handed down through the ages, or one you’ve copied from a magazine in the Dentist’s Office, how about sharing it here? We could all do with a bit of variety in our lives, especially when it comes to cooking and eating.

One of the recipes that was handed down through my family was Grandma’s omelette recipe. With ten hungry mouths to feed when times were tough, Grandma knew how to stretch the budget. With just an egg and a slice of bread for each person, she could whip up a very filling meal. Two generations and a lot of years later, I would use that old recipe to whip up a tasty breakfast or lunch for my family (and occasionally even a quick dinner after a long day at work).  Quick, easy and reasonably nutritious – and the family loved it.

Grandma’s Omelette (serves 1 or 2)

Adjust the ingredients depending on the number of serves: 1 egg and 1 slice of bread for each person.

Ingredients:

  • 2 eggs
  • 2 slices of bread (with crusts removed)
  • season to taste

Method:

  1. Break the eggs into a mixing bowl
  2. Tear the bread into small pieces and place in the bowl with the eggs
  3. Add seasoning
  4. Use a fork to beat the eggs and bread  – you don’t have to be too fussy with this – a few lumps are okay
  5. Heat a lightly greased frying pan on a medium heat
  6. Pour half the mixture into the pan – it will look like a pancake
  7. Cook until bubbles form around the edge of the mixture and it is reasonably ‘set’ in the middle
  8. Flip the mixture over and cook the other side
  9. Repeat with the remaining mixture

Enjoy…..

Notes: 

You can add any ingredients you have on hand, including chopped onion, tomato, ham, even cheese (my favourite). Mix the additional ingredients in after beating the eggs and bread.

 

Spam!

Spammers – the callers we love to hate!

We all hate getting those annoying phone calls, at the most inopportune times,  from people trying to sell everything from Life Insurance to raffle tickets, but there’s not much we can do about it…. or is there?

I’ve found a really useful way of dealing with these calls. And don’t get me wrong here – the calls from Charities trying to squeeze an extra dollar out of us for a good cause are the exceptions; the rest are just annoying.

I know you can go on the ‘Do Not Call’ list, but we all know what a joke that is. It’s like a Green Light to every spammer on the planet as it identifies your number as a legitimate phone number, and spammers know every trick in the book for getting lists of phone numbers. I kid you not, there are businesses that make a lot of money out of selling lists of phone numbers.

I’m going to share with you what has worked for me. It takes a little bit of time, but it is so worth it.

  1. Create a contact in your Contacts list called ‘Spam’
  2. When you answer a call and it is someone trying to sell you something that you just couldn’t possibly live without (according to them), but you obviously don’t need or want, immediately add the number to your ‘Spam’ contact
  3. Keep on doing this until you can’t fit another number in – then create Spam 2 etc. My original list is pretty long, but still going, so you shouldn’t really need to create a second one… hopefully.
  4. You might want to put Charities in a separate Contact called ‘Charities’ so that you can choose whether to answer or not

You don’t answer a call because you suspect it might be spam based on the fact that you don’t recognise the number, and decide to wait and see if the caller leaves a message, and trust me, they usually don’t.

The next steps explain what I do with those calls…

  1. Write the number down
  2. Find out who the number belongs to by going to Reverse Lookup Australia
  3. Type in the number – chances are you won’t get a result, but if you look down the page you will see the comments made by people who have also taken calls from that number – and 99% of the time – it’s spam
  4. Add the number to your Spam folder

When you get a call from one of those numbers, it will show up on your phone as ‘Spam’, and you simply ignore it

Simple – but effective!

 

Who Is Responsible?

When something goes wrong and we are faced with an expensive repair job, the first question most of us ask is ‘Who Is Responsible?’ While most situations are easily determined as either ‘Owner’ or ‘Owner’s Corporation’, there are some areas that aren’t quite that easy and lie in that murky area between the two.

So next time something goes wrong and you’re not sure who is responsible, check out the Who’s Responsible Guide. Or, ask the Village Manager.