Welcome!!

Welcome to this blog!  I'm Kristy, a "stay at home mum" of 3 boisterous boys 5 and under, and Thermomix consultant in the Newcastle and Lake Macquarie area.  I have decided to start this page to hopefully inspire people to really get the most out of their Thermomix, or have some more idea of what the Thermomix can do!  I absolutely love my Thermomix, and when it came to live at my house, I decided I was going to try pretty much everything I could possibly think of!  I spent hours researching recipes and forums and ideas.  I know not everyone feels the need to cook EVERYTHING in their Thermomix, but to be honest, I just use it because it is easy, quick, predictable and allows so much more flexibility with what you can do with food.  The Thermomix makes all of our breakfasts, lunches, dinners and snacks!!

So although I don't necessarily intend this to be an up to the minute update on what I am doing with my Thermomix, I do want to add to this page a lot of ideas, hints, hopefully videos, photos that people can use as a reference when needed.  I want to give specific details like exactly how long it takes to prepare meals and hopefully some easy simple meal ideas also.

It was my youngest son's birthday last week, and as we have an extended family dinner every Friday night (10 adults, 9 children), I took over the cooking from Mum!

I sat down with the recipes on Thursday night, did an online order from good old Coles so we could simply pick it up on Friday at our convenience.  At 3:30pm Friday afternoon, I sorted the ingredients into each dish on the bench.  The menu included a Thai Beef Salad (tenina.com) making dressing, marinade and cooking beef in TMX, Thai Red Curry(EDC), Green Curry(Recipe Community), Thai Prawn and Snow Peas (a 12 minute dish start to finish!!  This is my own - my fave Thai dish and I used to pay at least $16.50 from a Thai takeaway for a single serve - 12 minutes not worth the trip!!) all served with rice, plus I needed to ice the birthday cake that I had baked the day before (Bimby Chocolate Cake forumthermomix.com - brilliant.  Versatile, quick, throw it all in and either makes a slab size cake or smaller cake plus cupcakes - eat some now, freeze some for later!).

At 4pm I started actually preparing food.  If you think about the order in which you are cooking things, you know you can get a start on a dish and have the first part satueeing while you are cutting up the next batch of ingredients.  When you are making a few different dishes, you know you have about 15- 20 minutes of cooking time that you can already your next dish prepared and ready to go, so you have use the last amount of cooking time to actually clean the kitchen.  Awesome!  All that cooking and no clean up to return to after you have finished!  And this is when Thermoservers are FANTASTIC!! (I forgot to take mine and wish I had them!!)

I should have mentioned that 2 of the dishes I had never made or cooked before.

My Nana helped with chopping some of the salad ingredients, but I was certainly not hurrying as I usually would when cooking, so at a VERY slow pace, I had everything cooked, served and ready by 6ish, including the fact that I put all ingredients away and cleaned up, and I spent time decorating the cake. (I may be able to cook food, but presentation is NOT my forte.  And even worse than that, cake decoration.  Dismal.  I did consider putting a photo of the cake on here.  Briefly.  But wisely decided against it.)

So there you go!  With one Thermomix, there was plenty of food for 8 adults, 6 children (some were missing!) and a decent amount of leftovers as well, even after some of the hungrier males (and admittedly myself) went back for seconds (and possibly thirds.... I love prawns).  Oh and did I also mention it cost around $75?  Including whole packets of things like rice and noodles and fish sauce etc etc that only a certain amount was used?  This is less than half of what it would usually cost to feed all of us on a Friday night.  And I wouldn't like to add up how much the same quantity would have cost from the takeaway shop!

(sorry the curries don't look that fantastic... but YUMMO!)