It started not with a kiss, but in the ‘caf’ over reheated leftovers and falafel wraps dripping sweet chilli one lunch hour. Since we’re always talking breakfast, lunch and dinner, since we’re always comparing recipes, reminiscing about food from faraway places, and making each other hungry at our desks with naughty chocolate cake descriptions, we thought maybe we should start a blog. So we did.
Welcome to the beginning. To guide our tasty ramblings, each month we’ll pick a recipe book or a chef then go fossicking for inspiration – at markets, community gardens, farms, production plants, school tuck shops and yes, maybe the odd dining establishment – so by the time our monthly three-course dinner rolls around, we’ll have oodles of ideas and knowledge (and perhaps larger dress sizes) to impart on our plates, and hopefully, you.
Since we’re all suckers for cockney English charm, Jamie is first cab off the rank. We love him. Haters, slink away now. We picked an entree, main and dessert for our first dinner on April 24 from Jamie’s At Home book over some seriously good Bircher muesli last weekend, and we’ve got all sorts of adventures in the works. Jamie says use free range eggs? We want to meet the chooks that make them. Jamie says grow your own? Well, okay. We’ll plant a tomato or ten, veggie eating possums and all. Jamie says ‘stop being a vegan and start enjoying what you eat’ (he did say that folks), we’re all over it. Just watch.
And ‘cereal for dinner’? ‘What’s that ‘sposed to mean’, you ask? Well, it goes a little something like this: We’re three twenty-something girls who, thankfully, are seated in close proximity to each other in our 9 to 5 office, and share a mad love for a lot of things – music, lunch hours with Cleo Bachelor of the Year spreads (okay, not really. Well, maybe really), Sex and the City, travelling, travelling, travelling, sunshine, Keith Urban (whoops, maybe that’s just ONE OF US) but mostly, food. Yep, we live to eat but snooty foodies, we are not.
Sometimes, things go wrong. You ding the car, you forget to pick up the kids, you lose the ability to spell or to function like a human being. You’re heartbroken, or tired, or overworked or completely and utterly lost. Sometimes, the most basic thing in the world – cereal in a bowl – can be comforting. And whether you’re eating in a five star restaurant, defrosting fish fingers, cooking a gourmet feast for your friends, gobbling Thai takeaway in front of A Current Affair or pouring cream over Weet-Bix (true story), the reasons are the same. Food comforts, and brings joy, and evokes memories and brings people together. We need to eat to live.
To paraphrase a famous Buddhist teacher, “anyone who has their shit together is standing in it at the time.” Cereal for Dinner is kind of like that. Not everything is always right or ideal or even healthy, but we’re doing our best. And if we can have granola while we figure out what we’re doing and where we're going? That’d be great.
We’d love to know what makes you tick, too dear readers (that doesn’t include you, mum). Whose recipes should we attempt? Any cookbooks you’d recommend? What do you want us to explore or investigate? And hey, what’s your favourite cereal? Stay in touch – we’d love to see you at our monthly dinner cook-ups one day.
