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!).
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!)