OF all the bits and pieces I have in my kitchen, without doubt my favourite is my slow cooker.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
I simply love throwing in some beef cheeks, carrots, zucchini, celery, onions, eggplant, squash and whatever else I have lying around, and then letting them bubble away for hours in a mixture of crushed tomatoes, beef stock, maybe a little bit of red wine, some wholegrain mustard, crushed garlic and fresh herbs.
And no, before you ask, you are not invited to my place for dinner.
But I love cooking it in the slow cooker because there are some things that just take time, as difficult as that is to accept in a world that expects everything to happen and be provided instantly.
When given enough time the food develops and amazing depth of flavour, and the normally tough and chewy beef cheeks fall apart and just melt in your mouth.
Taking time to do things properly is a wonderful notion in this rushed and time-poor world, yet every day I see how things go pear-shaped when people just rush things through without double checking.
The problems seem to be most glaring in the media, where staff cutbacks and structural changes have resulted in a few absolute howlers getting though.
The worst was on Channel 9, which for days ran promotions about its State of Origin coverage that screamed out in huge words “They we’re wrong”.
Hmmm, well, if you are going to make a mistake, you might as well make it in big, bold capital letters.
Then about the same time the Sydney Morning Herald had headlines about a car that “mums and days will love”.
Okay guys, so the only blokes who will love it, I assume, are Gary Day, Steve Day, Mark Day and other relatives, which I guess means the rest of us will hate it.
Of course the morning news shows are absolute gold mines for incorrect spelling and whodunit cases of murdering grammar, with headlines running across the bottom of the pages including one of people being threatened “outside they’re homes”.
Mistakes have even taken on biblical, or Shakespearean proportions, with headlines recently about a rugby league player Johnathan Thurston’s “strained thy”.
Now, as a person who spells well but types badly, I will be the first to admit we all make mistakes from time to time, but the beauty of taking your time means a person will usually spot and correct most of their mistakes if they go back and read things over before hitting the send button.
In our modern world, however, that rarely happens.
Or maybe it is all caused by problems with spellcheck.
My youngest daughter recently complained that spellcheck changed one of her words in a social media post to an obscenity, and I have had similar issues myself.
Seeing the regular and repeated mistakes in morning news headlines, I tried to send off a text message to the producers saying, “It is hard to fully understand the news when headlines are misspelt with incorrect grammar making the meaning unclear,” however spellcheck changed it to, “You are obviously employing a mixture of baboons and uneducated fools to write your headlines, and the lot of you should be sacked, shot and thrown in boiling oil,” and maybe with the odd swear word tossed in for good measure.