Tired of deciding what to cook for dinner?

I am! This is where the inspiration came from.  I tend to do my shopping on a Monday and find myself trolling recipe books on Sunday night or Monday morning before I head to Morrison’s (yes, we slum it) and not being a natural in the kitchen doesn’t help.

It won’t generate recipes or create a shopping list for you but it will eliminate the need to make any decisions.  Hooray!  One less thing to worry about!

Start by deleting my list.  Then add all your regular meals, the main ingredient (pork, chicken, fish, etc) and then click the Random Meal Generator button and it will suggest 5 meals.  It took me all of 5 minutes to add my meals.  You may also want to add the odd sneaky take-away or possibly a new meal idea so it forces you to try something new.  Don’t forget to save it to your machine so you can add to it and make changes.

Don’t worry, if you’re not a meat eater, just add your own main ingredients (soya, quorn, falafel, quiche or risotto) and it still works.  No idea how, but it does!

Click on the image:

If you get a message about macros..you will need to go into tools>macros>security…choose medium and then enable macros.

I really can’t take credit for this…yes, I did come up with the idea but lovely James (@syzygy), who has a strange attraction to excel, did all the hard work for me.  If you find it useful please do drop him a quick tweet to say thanks!

I hope I saved you 5 minutes!

How did you tell your other half you were pregnant?

Parts of this may horrify some of you.  I never planned on having children and believed that the batteries in my biological clock were well and truly dead.  However, on Christmas Day 2006, after we drank our way through everything in the house including the duty free cupboard we got a bit carried away!

Late January, I knew in the back of my mind that I was pregnant (sore boobs, etc) so I went off to a chemists, one where no one would recognize me, and bought a pregnancy test.  I came home, peed all over my hand and to my great relief it was negative.  But, I knew it must be wrong, so off I went again to get another one and no big surprise this one was positive!

I was in utter shock and in my true fashion I wandered to the shop at the end of the road and bought 20 fags and 4 of the largest tins of beer I could get.  I then returned home smoked all the fags and drank all the beer and called my best friend in tears somewhere in the middle.  She managed to calm me down.

When hubby arrived home I had the fire going and made him sit down in front of it.  Then I presented him with a present…gift wrapped and all.  Inside were these:

It took him a moment, but he was over the moon and then……I passed out!

So how did you tell your other half?

Please note:  I did give up all this silly business during my pregnancy!

Ever wonder what you’ll look like in 20 years???

I found myself watching and enjoying Restoration Man last night and it made me realise I must be getting old.  It may have something to do with my older sister turning 40 on Friday as well; I’m only 19 months younger than her.

I’ve come to a point in my life where I prefer to stay home and drink wine than go to the noisy pub, have friends around for dinner and play games and a weekend isn’t complete without a trip to Homebase or a garden centre!  Look out middle age here I come!

This got me thinking of what I would look like when I’m 60.  After a quick troll on the net I found Face Transformer.  So what do you think???

Eeek!

Smile and Fake It!

This is the best advice my mother ever gave me.  I’ve used it countless times:

  • When the midwife came around and was asking about breastfeeding and I’d just been busy hiding all evidence of bottles.
  • When accidentally fair jumping on the underground in Budapest and had a run in with the transit police which resulted in a tug-of-war with passports.
  • When making small talk with someone who I can’t stand and I know the feeling’s mutual.
  • When leading a training session on a piece of software I’ve never seen before.
  • When I was the 2nd woman ever allowed into the Ministry of education in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and the entire meeting was in Arabic.  I didn’t have a clue what was going on.
  • In the bedroom, I don’t think I need to elaborate on this as you ladies know exactly what I mean!
  • When talking politics, if you were to ask me who the Prime Minister of Canada was I’d have to look it up.

What’s the best advice anyone has ever given you?