The King of Moomba

Thrilled to be crowned King of Moomba alongside Queen Chrissy Swan! This years festival will be loads of fun and I hope to see all you Melbournians there!! It really will be a Hoot!! :)

The One About The Slow Cooker...

My mum handed down a slow cooker to Tori and I when we moved in together. It gathered dust … fast. I mean, I grew up with two fast eating brothers

and a dad who we call the bottomless pit. The thought of something ’slow cooked’ was just absurd. Mum doesn’t know this, well she will now, but we turfed it when we moved interstate. Years went by and it wasn’t until I was scrounging around trying to buy something for christmas for Tori when I picked one up.

SIDEBAR: Tori is an excellent present buyer, she has bought me a guitar, drum kit, golf clubs, wake board the list is endless. I, on the other hand, am hopeless. I often opt for the ‘more the merrier’ option whereby I purchase multiple less expensive gifts in the hope that ‘with their powers combined’ Tori would get something … well … more exciting than Captain Planet. END SIDEBAR.

So, I was on one of these present scavenging expeditions when I remembered her mention some delicious looking meals in a slow cooker recipe book … somewhere! So I got one. It gathered dust. But… then one day Tori and I busted it out, looked up a recipe and cooked … slowly … very slowly. In fact the beef stew we cooked took forever, a quote from the recipe book ‘for best results allow to cook on low for 8 - 13 hours’ … THIRTEEN HOURS! We kept it bubbling away for the minimum 8 and served it up. It was incredible. I wanted to put it back in for 5 more hours just to experience the best it could possibly be. We were hooked. Well, to be honest I got a little obsessed by it, Tori remained normal. I threw away the recipe books and started making up my own concoctions, a tin of this, a piece of meat and some veggies, just add time … and thyme … and bang! Now, if you haven't experienced the slow cookers brilliance then let me try and capture its beauty in a bad analogy or two. It is like forging a sword of Excalibur’s might with a tin of diced tomatoes and a piece of cows butt. It’s like waiting a week for an episode of Game of Thrones … its worth the wait. You can’t go wrong.

But wait theres more! The magic meals that it creates are just half of its mastery, let me share why I love it so much. First, you can chuck whatever you want in there and it infuses everything into a gooey sensation, with meat that falls apart and flavours that last forever. Secondly, you can prepare all this the night before, leave it in the pot and whack it on in the morning and the very very very best part is the cooking time. If you put your creation on in the morning you can eat it whenever, let me explain. It’s 8 in the morning, you have prepared the slow cooker meal the night before, left it in the fridge, you put it on, you go to work. You are plugging away at work and at home the wizard is extracting flavours then shoving them back into itself at a leisurely pace. Now its time to leave work but your colleagues want to go for a drink… you go. The wizardry is still in full force at home. You need to pick up something on your way home … you do that too. By this time the supernatural flavour angels are in your slow cooker. I think you get the point. It doesn't matter what time you get home, DINNER IS SERVED. You know what, you don't even have to eat it that night, let it cool and have it as left overs. IT IS GENIUS!

So thats it, thats what I love so much about my slow cooker, the delicious dinners … until I stumbled across the Slow Cookers 4 Families FaceBook page! People are cooking meringues, fudge, porridge … oh man … I’ll be forever cooking as slow as I can.

I Got Married!

So I got married! 2013 was an extremely busy year work-wise but Tori and I had our wedding to look forward to and MAN was it a ripper day. We decided that a dingy old rustic barn would be the perfect place for us to tie the knot, luckily we found one on the Mornington Peninsula. We had a huge turn out, mother nature kept the rain away and everyone had a fantastic time. Now this is the part where I tell you that I wasn't nervous but I actually was. Haha! I stood there chatting to my groomsmen as if I didn't know that my family and friends were all staring at me waiting for to see my reaction when I saw Tori enter the ceremony. It seemed like that time went forever ... Tori arrived (looking amazing) then all of a sudden ... it was midnight and we were saying goodbye to everyone. WENT TOO FAST.

In a nutshell: My younger brother sang amazingly at the ceremony and older brother had some great dirt on me in his speech at the reception, mum and father-in-law spoke beautifully and we danced and danced and danced. I'm sure you can see in the pic how happy we are. For more pics check out the wedding gallery!

Catch Ya ... Jimmy :)