Our first time

22/06/2014 | E

Our first time wasn’t romantic, there was no candle lit dinner and it certainly had nothing to do with roses. It was depressing and expensive for what it was. It felt like failure and stank like sulphur.

G claims he doesn’t remember our first time. I think he’s suppressed it. But what I remember is this …

It was a quarter of a cabbage, half wrapped in the cling wrap we bought it in, sitting in the bottom of our crisper.

We had invited friends over for lunch and instead of using the perfectly fine cabbage already in our fridge we chose to make our coleslaw from something more fresh. So we bought some more.

Aren’t we good to our friends?

But not using all of the cabbage for the lunch resulted in two separate quarters remaining. One more fresh than the other.

Of course, we ate the remains of the fresher one first. And as we did, we were inevitably left us with a fairly wilted and certainly in edible quarter of cabbage.

Now, at this point it’s important to remember that cabbage is in essence a base level, cheap vegetable. Ruffage G would call it. Even a whole one at a fancy pants grocery store will not quite cost our penalty price of five dollars.

But a quarter of a cabbage did. What a rookie error!

When you ask people seriously, most will say their first time was clumsy, uncomfortable and a little bit messy. This experience was all those, but as with all good affairs, we were ready to give it another crack.

Mandarin in the fruit bowl

21/05/2014 | E

There is a mandarin in the fruit bowl. I have been watching it for the last four days. I know it is going to become money in the waste jar. Deep down I know this.

The mandarin was bought by G because I asked him to. I had been suffering for a cold for a few days and began craving foods that were orange. Then on a tram trip into the city to meet my mum, I sat across from a man eating a mandarin. The smell was so delicious and comforting. I began to feel my sniffle dry up instantly. So what else to do but send G a text “Not that I’m asking you to, but if you happen to go to the market today, can you get me some mandarins?”

Now, if I was truly conscious of my waste habits I would have 1) asked G if he wanted any, 2) calculated an exact amount of how many we might eat before they went bad, 3) already had mandarins on a shopping list, 4) not asked G at all and just picked up a mandarin for a street vendor in the city … if I really wanted a mandarin that desperately.

Turns out G doesn’t even like mandarins. Something I think I knew but didn’t really consider.

He bought ten. I have now eaten them all but one.

This one, this last one, started to get a little brown patch around the top a couple of days ago. And instead of eating it when the spot first appeared, I chose a different, better looking mandarin from my little collection. And again the next day, and the next until I have only the ugly one left.

A few days ago I realised this is like a micro version of supermarket shelves. Everyone picking the beautiful fruit first until only the ugly spotted and perhaps (but not always) inedible fruits are left. I also speculated that this process happens more than once in the lifetime of the fruit; on the farm, in the storage, in the supermarket and yes, in our homes.

But I still continued to put the poor sucker back, and now the once little brown patch is about a fifth of the total skin surface.

Obviously, I am only at the comprehension and not quite the application phase of this journey. But that’s okay. There is much to learn.

The wrong bok choy

16/04/2014 | E

If you’ve ever had a hectic calendar, you will appreciate the need to stay on top of your health and eat right. It may take until that moment when you realise you’ve had wine for dinner every night that week, or the guy at the noodle shop knows your order, or your skin gets a little flakey and your inner … well … let’s not go there but it’ll happen … that time of full appreciation will come and you will wish you had something normal in the fridge.

Your planning, shopping, cooking routine is an easy casualty in these frantic times.

So when our comfy city office jobs turn into ugly 60 plus hour weeks, we are more than happy to sit at home in our trackies, take a break from our spreadsheets and reports, and do an online grocery shop. The scary thoughts of big business collecting our data aside, they’re a pretty good service. But one time, we got into a whole heap of waste jar trouble.

Now, don’t get me wrong, what we did is easy to do if you’re not paying attention, which is also easy to do if you’re tired and stressed, and a wine or two into your next client pitch presentation and “fire my assistant” is now an item on your gantt chart. But like all things we do with the waste jar, being mindful will pay off.

Particularly when buying bok choy apparently.

When the man came to our door with our online order in hand, we signed the receipt, and began to put our groceries away, noticing as we did a half supermarket bag full of very large bok choy.

Turns out there are two sizes of bok choy. Furthermore, turns out you should look closely at the item description when ordering your online groceries. Each item is very clearly described we’ve admitted in retrospect. In another shop we also bought a very small single can of corn, fortunately the life time of it was longer than a bag of fresh not-so-baby bok choy.

Like the stress of pending work deadlines wasn’t enough, urgh, we’re now faced with a waste jar dilemma of an unplanned item haunting us from our crisper. The plan had been a quick stir fry with some other greens. Surely it’ll work the same so in it went. I was cooking so there was no recipe involved, it’s all the same, it’s all the same…

It’s not all the same. The stir fry was watery and horrible. We should have cut it smaller, down to baby size one might suggest. It tasted more boil than fry. No amount of chilli and soy was bringing this not-a-baby back.

We ate half the total cooked and stared at the rest in plastic container for a few days more before finally conceding defeat.

In our effort to be more mindful of our health, we neglected to be more mindful of what we were purchasing. We were so worried about the details in our spreadsheets and reports, and were not so worried about our attention to detail in our shopping receipts.

We are still all for an online shop in hectic times, but we’re adding this to a lesson learnt and will be more careful about our online grocery orders in the future.