My house smells like fresh cooking

I have a confession to make. I really don't like cooking. It's time consuming, it's messy and my food never comes out looking anything like the pretty pictures alongside the recipes. I've been known to go for weeks at a time ordering take away meals just to avoid cooking. When I say take away, I mean things like Mexican, Chinese or Indian, not junk food.

Thunder Maker doesn't have the greatest skills in the kitchen either. You'd think I could pick out a life partner who could actually cook, hey? I must admit though, I was rather caught up in the emotion of things when we first met rather than thinking with my stomach. Thunder Maker makes a pretty mean stir-fry but if I left all the cooking up to him, I'd be eating stir-fry three times a week. Thanks, but no thanks. I don't love stir-fry that much.

Quite by chance, I heard about a fantastic kitchen gadget called a Thermomix. It cooks, it chops, it does a heap of other stuff and I wanted one. Given that you don't get much change out of $2000 for one, I thought it would be hard to convince Thunder Maker, but he was surprisingly open to it. I organised to have an in-home demo and the rest is history.

I received my Thermomix nearly two weeks ago and I have used it at least once a day every day since. The very first thing I made in it was mango sorbet. I started making fresh bread earlier this week, using the Thermomix to mix/knead the bread. I made chocolate brownies earlier and I have bolognaise sauce cooking in it as I type.

I think what I like so much about it is that I only have one item to clean when I finish cooking. That and I have never owned a decent food processer before. Only a crappy one that cost me $70 and have barely used because it is so messy to use and really painful to clean.

I'm also enjoying being more inventive about what I cook. The recipe book that comes with the Thermomix has a good range of things to get started and I've also discovered the Recipe Thermomix forum. I now make a lot of things from scratch that I would never have attempted before such as my own vegetable stock concentrate (I have a big container of it sitting in the fridge) and grinding spices for curries.

Anyway, the Thermomix has just finished cooking my dinner, so I'm going to go serve up now, then have brownies for desert. :)

*I have not been paid or compensated in any way for this post. I'm just a very happy customer bragging spreading the love about something that has made cooking fun for me.