Warming to a ’70s hero
commitments and particularly younger siblings who are starving well before 9pm has presented a new challenge which I wrestled with for several weeks.
I asked mothers of teammates how they were managing to feed their families on these late evenings.
A couple of mums told me they packed up lunch boxes for their children to eat on the side of the court while their sibling was playing and after the game their netballer could eat the contents of their lunch box on the way home or at home.
While this was a good suggestion and one I did try, the drudgery of packing lunchboxes for school is bad enough and having to pack double the number of lunchboxes was intolerable.
Others rolled their eyes and spoke of 2-Minute Noodles, soup and ham and cheese toasties on those nights.
The collective wisdom was that it was impossible to fashion a working solution and so all that was left was to cobble together whatever would get you through and repeat this on all sport laden nights.
Having spoken to many in a similar plight and obtaining no obvious responses that would solve the problem in a sustainable and reliable way, I rang the one person who always has the answers. I rang Mum. She listened, she empathised and then suggested the crockpot. I laughed.
Mum assured me my mission brown vision had been dramatically updated, as had the universal term for this miracle device, which was now known as the slow cooker.
Sitting on the side of the court that week, I did some serious internet research (while watching every single minute of the game in case my daughter asks).
I discovered there is a whole food movement devoted to these machines and having read reviews and concluded my research, I bought a slow cooker the following weekend and have been using it for weeks now.
While lamb stew recipes have survived almost unaltered from the late ’70s, the slow cooker has embraced modern times and makes an excellent beef ribs that the family love and now ask for.
There have been a few recipes that will not be repeated but, overall, the new and improved crockpot is a family lifesaver for midweek meals.
It allows those who don’t attend the game to resolve their starving early and those who stumble home at 9pm exhausted and frozen to fill their bellies and warm up from the inside out.
In addition, the experience of the slow cooker’s reappearance in my life has reinforced two life lessons I know to be true.
First, any tip that helps families better juggle work, home and sport, needs to be shared and, second, your Mum always knows best.
And with that wisdom, let’s hope the resurgence doesn’t extend to the perm. Rachel Schutze is a principal lawyer at Gordon Legal, wife and mother of three. [Ed’s note: Ms Schutze is married to Corio MP Richard Marles.]