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When you are working full time (as many of us are), you tend to find that coming home and cooking up a big meal isn’t always possible. You kinda want to come home, collapse in a pile and not really worry too much about cooking (and cleaning the kitchen!) I remember not too long ago when I lived in the city and on the days where I felt like even walking that extra step was too much effort – takeaway and delivery always sounded so enticing! And that would often be the fallback.

But living out here in the middle of nowhere, takeaway isn’t really possible. There is one cafe in town but the prices are hardly everyday prices and the food isn’t all that great (sorry!) So you end up turning to simple recipes that require as little time to cook up and as little dishes to wash up as possible. Something short and sweet!

And that’s how I remembered that one of mum’s favourite dishes to cook on a Friday night when she was just so incredibly tired out was to cook up a whole pot of pumpkin rice. It was always so incredibly tasty yet so simple and easy to cook up. And possibly, the longest thing that needs prepping is the pumpkin!

Pumpkin Rice

Ingredients

Rice (don’t cook it yet!)
Pumpkin
Peas
Chorizo
Dried shrimps
Prawns
Ginger

Method

1. Prepare all meat and vegetables.
2. Fry up everything in the pan including the uncooked rice grains.
3. Pop everything into the rice cooker, add water and cook!
4. Done!

The beauty of this recipe is that other than the pumpkin and rice, everything else is up to you! Instead of chorizo, you could use lap chung (which is what mum uses), and instead of prawns you could use chicken. A lot of it is instinct cooking, and you season everything accordingly to your taste. Mum likes to use dark sauce to give it a nice overall dark colour, but I left my dark sauce in Melbourne so I’ll have to do without.

Do try it – it’s an absolute no brainer – and so easy to make! Short and sweet… made even more sweet by the pumpkin in the dish!

And much like the recipe above (which is going in for a competition!), BPAY (who is hosting the competition) makes paying bills short and sweet. I’ve been using BPAY for quite a few years now and I have to say that without it, I’d have so many bills left unpaid as I have no time to get to the post office at all! I didn’t realise that over 19,000 different billers offer BPAY payment. To be honest, I thought everybody did. Whoops. But in my world, 19,000 might well be everybody. God knows I hope I never have to pay 19,000 different bills.

You should try out for the competition too!

Here’s how:

BPAY created the Short & Sweet competition to celebrate condensing all that is long and arduous into delicious bite sized pieces. To enter, they’d like people to write either:
1. A recipe
2. Give a film synopsis,
3. Pen a love poem
4. Write a short fiction
… all in 120 characters or less.

You can enter via the following options:

1) Online, visit www.bpayshortandsweet.com.au and follow the prompts.

2) Via SMS, text your name, category and your 120 character entry to 0427 777 743

3) Via Twitter, tweet the category and your 120 character entry to @BPAYSS

Category names:
Love Poem = POEM, Recipe = RECIPE, Short story = STORY, Film and Book synopsis = SYNOPSIS.