Don’t get stressed,
don’t get stressed,
don’t get STRESSED!

I chanted these words over and over again through gritted teeth, like some demented mantra, as I ran around the kitchen with very little time on my hands.

Even though I’m usually very good at managing my time, the time had got away from me and now I had to hustle to get dinner on the table before my kid had cub scouts to go to.

Can you relate to that feeling? (and by that feeling I mean the sense of frantic helplessness where you feel like someone drugged you and you woke up 5 hours later with the same long to-do list as before, but waaaaaaaay less time to do it in?!) Adult life is a God damn time thief and that fucker is getting away with crimes every day.

Wanting a well-deserved sense of justice, I decided to find one of the quicker meals in the Brave New Meal cookbook, and get it knocked out so I could slap a meal on the table.

I decided to make;

Pineapple Fried Rice

(page 96 Brave New Meal cookbook.)

Challenge status: 11 recipes down, 113 to go. 77 days down, 288 to go.

I chopped the pineapple we had with much dangerous haste while yelling to my son to go find his cub scout uniform. Even though Bad Manners (previously Thug Kitchen) said the meal would only take 18 minutes to prepare, I knew that my son is one of those kids (gotta love them) that takes five-hundred-million years to get ready, and then when you think he’s finally done, you realise he’s not done, he’s only just put on a sock. So not wanting to wait another century for the other sock, I thought I’d get him started early this time.

I threw the carrot and onions in the pan and heard that familiar sizzle. It was like greeting an old friend, and I could feel the stress starting to subside a little. There’s nothing like being in a kitchen cooking, to relieve stress. There’s something soothing and therapeutic about it. Maybe it’s the repetitive nature of chopping. Maybe it’s the knowing you’ll have food in your belly soon, I just don’t know.

Next, I threw in the peas and pineapple, and after 3 minutes I removed all the veg from the pan, like instructed. I didn’t have time to fuck around and divert from the recipe today. I would occasionally stop stirring to run out into the hallway to see where my kid was and remind him to get dressed for cub scouts. Each time I found him he had added another item of clothing to his body, like a strange game of strip poker done in reverse. I congratulated him each time for his efforts, and got back to stirring.

After that, it was all about mixing all the sauces together before throwing the rice back into the frying pan and slathering the two together. I used less chili paste because my child enjoys having taste buds. In fact, he’s annoyingly protective of them, so the rest of us routinely miss out on exotic flavours. But hey ho, part of parenting, and besides you can always spice something up by adding extra spice to your plate – it’s much harder to spice something down when it’s already added. Just ask my cousin about the time I made Thug Kitchen Tortilla Soup. Jeeeeeeezus. None of us were ever the same after that incident, and I’ve NEVER made that soup since.

So back to my kid’s taste buds.
He likes having them, and who can blame him?

Once everything was slathered good and proper, I added the veg from earlier, and stir-fried like I was competing for gold. Then once that had done its thing for a couple of minutes it was GO TIME, so I folded in the green onions and sprinted to the table like an olympian. I nearly attempted to shot put the pan to the table, and discus the plates, but I thought that might be a bit excessive, and also could be messy if it all went wrong.

I realised as we sat down that I’d forgot the spinach but I didn’t have a god damn spinach time machine, so we ate it the way it was. And it was DAMN GOOD! It went down as fast as it was cooked – in record time!

So this is definitely a good one to make on a week night where you don’t have time for spend 4 hours cooking some fancy gourmet shit with 5 courses, and God only knows how much cutlery. Nobody ever knows which fork to start with any way.