Week ending Friday 30th May 2025

It’s tempting not to write a blog post when I don’t have anything spectacularly interesting to say.

It’s also tempting not to have any routine in my day. Tempting not to get out of bed at a reasonable hour, and very tempting to do no exercise.

It’s my personality. I need routine and plans of things to do to keep me motivated. I thrive on a list of activities and being busy. I don’t think I’m unusual in any of that, but stopping work has definitely challenged the way I approach each day.

Writing this blog on a regular basis is therefore helpful. It keeps me accountable, if only to myself, and gives me an outlet for my thoughts, both frivolous ones and the deeper ones too 😉

Dave and I have just been on a decent length walk around our suburb. I know it’s something we should do every day, and my doctor may have suggested once or twice (or more!) that more exercise would be good for me. But putting my walking shoes on, heading out the door and actually going on a walk always seems like something that can wait till another time. I do walk with friends occasionally, and sometime even get into a pattern of going three or four days in a row, but then bad weather, or something else (like a holiday 😏) seems to stop it from becoming a routine.

Anyways, here I am writing the blog as per my original promise to post weekly. I’ve even now just added the task ‘write blog’ to my google calendar, to encourage me to make sure I do it! When I was working I had pretty much back-to-back meetings all day from Monday to Friday and that guided my day and kept me on track. Perhaps I should add a few mundane tasks in to fill the now almost empty calendar up!

I’m not complaining. Stopping work was the best decision ever, but it’s just going to take a bit of getting used to. Despite having/planning more holidays in 2025 then in any year (ever), there still seems to be a lot of blank days and weeks. My wellbeing is definitely improving, despite not doing enough exercise and my house is cleaner and tidier than it has ever been! That might sound boring – but it makes me so happy!

The other thing I’ve been concentrating on is getting better at reducing our food wastage. Did you know Aussies waste 7.6 million tonnes of food each year, and the majority comes from our own homes? Food waste is a global problem – with one third of all food produced going to waste. Australian statistics are actually worse than that average.

Not only is wasting food a waste of precious ingredients, it’s also very expensive, with the annual bill in Australia coming in at over $36 billion. Those stats work out to a whopping 312kg per person, costing households up to $2,500 per year.

Not working also means no weekly wages – so there’s no way I want to waste any of it when there’s more important things to spend it on – like holidays for example😉. I’m not being super stingey, or cooking things we don’t like – but I am being careful and thoughtful, especially with meal planning, shopping, storage and using up leftovers.

Earlier this week I bought a whole fresh chicken. I would have liked it to be organic, and locally/farm grown, but accessing those in Wagga isn’t easy. It was however a free-range chook, and was on special at $6 a kilo, so the 2kg bird I bought was a fraction over $12. It arrived with my groceries on Monday (delivered – a story for another time on how that saves wastage for me), arriving early afternoon, and I immediately butterflied it and plunged it in a container of brine for a couple of hours. It was then roasted for Monday night’s dinner, with all the usual trimmings including a gravy made with pan juices, of course!

Brining a chook isn’t totally necessary, but I do try to do it if I have the time. Putting the chicken even for a couple of hours in a salty solution (approx. 1/4 cup cooking salt per litre of water plus some peppercorns and bay leaves) helps it retain moisture and enhances its flavour, juiciness and tenderness.

When I butterflied the chicken, I removed its backbone with kitchen shears and then pressed it flat with the heel of my hands to break the breastbone. By doing that it would lie flat in the brine (therefore requiring less), and when I roasted it, it would only take around an hour to cook, rather than the usual 1.5-2 hours for this size chook.

A 2kg chicken is most certainly more than Dave and I can eat in one sitting. I often make enough roast veggies for four and then freeze up the extra two meals to use at a later date, and I’m sure you’ve all seen lots of ‘what to do with a BBQ chook’ online. I nearly always make a chicken stock with the chicken bones (raw ones and roasted ones), which I did on Monday, but this time rather than make two extra roast meals for the freezer, I pulled all the meat off the chicken carcass and popped it in a container in the fridge.

On Tuesday I then made:

1. Four serves of chicken and corn soup (recipe from recipe-tin-eats), shredding some of the leftover chicken meat and using 1/2 of the fresh chicken stock as a base.
2. A very delicious and nutritious Asian style peanut, edamame and rice noodle salad, which also used up some veggies I had (cabbage, carrot, cucumber, capsicum). I then topped it with some of the leftover meat plus some crispy fried onions (which I love!)
3. A creamy chicken and pumpkin pot pie which we ate on Wednesday night – bechamel sauce base with the rest of the leftover chicken meat and roast pumpkin, plus some peas and broccoli, for colour and nutrition.
4. Stock bombs – I reduced and then froze the remaining stock into ice-cube trays – ready to add as a flavour bomb to future dishes.

Not bad, all made with a $12 chook!

If you happened to listen to ABC Riverina last Thursday morning (part 1) or listen Thursday next week (part 2), you will have heard me talking about food storage and how some simple things can really make a difference. I’ve also been ‘doing the speaking circuit’ of local Rotary clubs (two down with another two scheduled) to talk about OzHarvest, my role and how to reduce food wastage.

I used to have a fridge bulging with ingredients, especially when the kids still lived at home. Now days it mostly just holds the things I have planned for Dave and I to eat for the next couple of days. Of course, it also stores all the usual fridge staples like sauces, condiments, dressings, eggs, dairy items, pickles and my all-time favourite snack – stuffed green olives!

If I plan our meals before I do the shopping it prevents me from impulse buying things I don’t need. It’s not that I have everything organised down to the last detail, but I do have a rough idea of what we are having and when, ready to adapt of course if needed. Let’s face it, sometimes I just suddenly feel like takeaway, or a pub meal, or like this week when I decided to change the planned chicken rissoles into a spicy Thai chicken meatball soup! (I’d already mixed and shaped them and so remixed with coriander and chilli added and then rolled into smaller balls).

Less food in the fridge allows me to keep an eye on things more easily, especially on the leftovers which traditionally may have sat uneaten for a few days and sometimes not eaten at all. It also means I don’t get ‘back of the fridge’ surprises quite as often. Who hasn’t gone through their crisper draws to find mushy and inedible vegetables from time-to-time!

Even learning where to store food in different locations in the fridge can add to the shelf life of food. For example, the crisper draws are extra cold – a great place for most vegetables (and apples!); and the doors are sometimes not as cold when opened a lot – so sauces or drinks with a longer shelf life will be fine there.

How you wrap food also matters – my favourite hack is wrapping celery in foil (thanks for that hint, Pamela), it will literally stay fresh for months! Herbs wrapped in wet paper towel will stay fresh for up to a week; berries removed from their containers, rinsed in a water and vinegar bath then placed on paper towel in a container with the lid slightly ajar will give them an extra few days; cheese wrapped in baking paper won’t go slimy (like it does in plastic wrap); and of course, make sure any raw meat is well sealed and below other food it could contaminate – you don’t want raw meat juices dripping into something else!

The last thing to mention is fridge temperatures. Bacteria wont easily grow below 5C, so it’s important to make sure your fridge stays below that temperature. I bought a small and very cheap fridge thermometer a couple of years ago, which not only checks to see it’s working okay, but also has an alarm if it goes above a certain temperature. Who hates it when you realise your fridge is no longer cold because the door wasn’t closed properly?

I’ll post this now and then start to prepare dinner. I received a meat order this week from Highfield Farm which my friend Louise, and her husband David run. It’s about 60km east of here on the way to Tumut and her beef and lamb are amazing. Louise and David’s aim is to “blend small-scale, ethical, and sustainable farming practices with the preservation of one of Australia’s most critically endangered habitats.” I have so much admiration for what they do, and the bonus for me is fabulous meat!

I made a slow cooked Mexican beef dish on Tuesday with the diced beef; froze the whole brisket piece and the 2 x packets of mince for use next week; and tonight, I’ll use some of the rump steak to make steak sandwiches with the sourdough I bought yesterday.

*Will and Emma came for dinner on Tuesday for the Mexican beef, which I served with buttered corn rice (made with “India Gate” Basmati); cheesy jalapeno black beans; and a chunky avocado salsa.

To finish this post, a little food wastage humour: LINK TO LYN. If anyone is like me and a fan of comedian Melinda Buttle, this should amuse you 🤣

p.s. The peanut dressing on the noodle salad was delicious. Recipe is:

• 50g (about two tablespoons) peanut butter
• 2 tablespoons lime juice
• 1 tablespoon soy sauce (light if possible)
• 1 teaspoon sesame oil
• 2 cloves garlic, crushed
• 5cm piece of fresh ginger, grated
• 1 teaspoon sugar
• 2 tablespoons warm water
• Optional: fresh chopped chilli or chilli flakes for a bit of spice!

Whisk all ingredients together till smooth.

Catch you all in a week, for regular, as promised, weekly Morley musings.

Sara xx