This post is sponsored by Crust Gourmet Pizzas.

The Man and I love entertaining (as you may have figured out by now). Sometimes though, during busy times it’s easy to be put off by the time and effort required.

I admit I also have a tendency to get caught up in the menu planning, cooking and cleaning instead of simply focusing on what’s truly important: sharing a meal in our home with friends.

So when Crust invited me to host a pizza night I jumped at the chance to try out a new style (for me) of entertaining.

In the spirit of the no-fuss entertaining, instead of setting the table I simply placed all of the servingware and drinks on the table for guests to help themselves. It creates a much more relaxed atmosphere, don’t you think?

I did pick up a cheap bunch of dried flowers at the supermarket (couldn’t resist) but apart from that I relied on the tried-and-true effect of tealight candles to set the mood.

It was kind of strange actually being able to relax and have a drink with our guests instead of fussing around in the kitchen!

The food arrived and it looked just as appetising as the pictures – how often can you say that about takeaway food?

The salad dressing and pasta garnish were in separate little containers so everything looked fresh (and a bit fancy).

Our friends (who are quite the foodies I might add) agreed the pizzas were really tasty. The favourites were the pesto chicken and white prosciutto pizzas.

The blackforest crumble dessert pizza with salted caramel ice cream (phwoar!) was the perfect way to end the meal.

Thanks to the team at Crust Norwood for our awesome instant dinner party!

I can definitely see takeaway gourmet pizza being an excellent option for simple (yet impressive) weeknight entertaining.

What’s your entertaining style? Does all the cooking and work put you off entertaining?

Disclosure: I was compensated by Crust for writing this review. Opinions are my own.

We had both of our families over on the weekend for Mother’s Day. Champagne, pie and good conversation – if only every Sunday afternoon could be so divine!

I’ve shared my recipe today over on Polka Dot Bride.

Looking for a St Patrick’s Day treat without the scary green food colouring? I’ve got you covered.

Mosey over to Polka Dot Bride for the recipe (you won’t regret it).

So here’s the reason why I had a batch of homemade lemon curd sitting in my fridge last week! It’s a lovely hostess gift or wedding favour, especially if you have your own lemon tree (or know someone who does).

If you want to keep it all to yourself, you can pop it into readymade meringue or tart cases for an easy dessert or even just slather it onto a thick slice of fresh bread and top with quark cheese, cream cheese or cream.

Head over to Polka Dot Bride for the recipe plus the cute tag for you to print.

Photography Mel Boulden Photography

The Man and I don’t do Valentine’s Day, but it is a good excuse to have a nicer than usual dinner at home and even indulge in dessert.

Being mid-week though, it needs to be simple, plus it’s really hot this week here so a no-cook dessert is definitely the way to go.

I bought these pre-made mini pavlova nests and filled with lemon curd (I had a homemade batch in the fridge – what, don’t you? – but you can buy it from gourmet supermarkets) then topped with blueberries.

Ready in two minutes flat, it’s the perfect dessert for V-Day tonight or for any summer dinner party where you’re short on time.

Whatever your plans, I hope you have a lovely night!

This strawberry sauce recipe is really easy, I challenge you to screw it up. It’s super tasty on pancakes or ice-cream. Perfect for Valentine’s Day, no?

Find my recipe and the free printable labels over on Polka Dot Bride today.

Last Sunday was Father’s Day here in Australia.

The Man and I reckon our dads are pretty tops. They are always so generous with their time and hospitality, so it was definitely time to do something for them.

My dad, in particular, loves Spain and its food (in fact he even RSVPd to our invitation in Spanish!) so a tapas banquet seemed appropiate. With both sets of parents, The Man’s brother and his partner joining us, there were eight of us all up (my brother and sister-in-law live overseas).

Apart from my killer paella (if I do say so myself) I haven’t really cooked any Spanish food before. But I’m always up for a good challenge in the kitchen.

Quite a spread, you say? Well that’s not even including the hot food and dessert! There may or may not have also been copious amounts of wine.

Here’s the full menu:

Cold tapas

Marinated olives

Pickled calamari

Tapenades (eggplant and capsicum)

Anchovies

Tuna-stuffed peppers*

Manchego cheese

Herbed goat’s milk cheese

Jamon

Vienna loaf

Olive sourdough loaf

Hot tapas

Potato and chorizo tortilla*

Lamb meatballs with romesco sauce*

Croquettes with bechamel sauce*

Chorizo and mushrooms*

Dessert

Crema Catalana

Drinks

Sangria*

Tempranillo

Sauvignon Blanc

The dishes that I made are the ones marked with an asterisk. My brother-in-law and his partner made the delish crema catalana – with a blowtorch no less! The croquettes and meatballs seemed to be crowd favourites.

This type of menu is a lot of work because instead of having one dish for each of three courses, you have to prepare a dozen smaller dishes. You also have to keep jumping up and into the kitchen to cook and serve the hot food.

I don’t want to put you off, though, it’s definitely do-able. You can keep it manageable by buying items that don’t need any preparation (like the cheese, jamon, bread, olives etc), starting with all the cold food laid out and limiting the amount of hot food. I also prepared as much as possible ahead of time, going so far as cooking the meatballs and sauces so I just had to heat them up.

I don’t normally buy new servingware for a particular occasion but it was time to freshen up my collection with a few new versatile pieces that were not more white platters. I picked up the stoneware for as little as $1 each from Ikea after realising it perfectly matched another you-wouldn’t-guess-how-cheap-it-was recent purchase: the itty bitty black bottle you can see also on the table. The rustic timber chopping boards (a set of 3 from Target) were another steal – $14 down from $35 thank-you-very-much.

Oh, and the branches with the berry-looking things? Totally picked them up off the side of the road the day before.

Because I’ve been so busy with the business, we haven’t entertained much this year. Actually, I haven’t even cooked much decent food at all this year! I’ve really missed cooking, especially for family and friends, so I enjoyed this a lot. Most importantly, the Dads and everyone seemed to have a great day.

Local readers, how did you spoil your dad? And US friends, tell us how did you celebrate your Labor Day?

I think you’ll all agree when I say that paperwork is one of the biggest clutter culprits in most homes. ‘Going paperless’ is a semi-regular series on eliminating paper from your home in order to save time, reduce clutter and benefit the environment.

Step 2: Digitising

Going paperless with my recipe collection was actually not something I was ever planning to do. My chunky lever-arch file with the dog-eared category ‘tabs’ (aka Post-Its) had seen better days and was very full, but I was planning to do up really cute laminated cards and use my old card catalogue drawers to organise them.

The nostalgic in me feels that when I’m old my kids aren’t going to wistfully flip through a digital folder of recipes in the way that you might with mum’s tattered, splattered and scribbled family favourites.

In the end, though, practicality won (sorry, grandkids). As you can see from the photo above, even when I’ve gone to the trouble of formatting recipes in a nice template and printing them out, I continue to scribble notes and tweaks I’ve made.

Much like my shoe collection, I also don’t want my recipes to be limited by space. I have a number of stiletto-equivalent recipes – sure, I’m not going to make that fancy cake very often, but I still want to keep it for future special occasions. I don’t want to have to go through my collection and cull just because my folder or drawer is full.

So, digital it is!

I did a bit of research on all the free apps for iPad and there was always a feature or two missing, for example, you couldn’t add your own recipes (what?!), or you couldn’t add recipes straight from the internet (or only from selected sites), or it didn’t have photos, or it was all in imperial measurements… or it had a completely heinous design that would make me want to poke my eyes out every time I started cooking.

So I bit the bullet and bought my first paid app (why is it that we don’t hesitate to drop five bucks on a grande latte but balk at the idea of paying the same for a valuable tool that will help us every day?).

It’s called Paprika. The best feature is the ability to download recipes from ANY site. The majority of my recipes come from Taste.com.au so I could kick-start my collection in a cinch. The rest (from cookbooks and my own creations) I’m slowly copying over. It will take some time to transfer everything but it’s an easy job sitting in front of the telly.

It does have a shopping list and feature but I find it a little pointless (I mean, I don’t need to buy oil, salt, pepper, spices, rice etc for every meal I cook). I also can’t work out how to view by multiple categories, for example, if I’m looking for a vegetarian main course I have to view either everything under ‘Vegetarian’ or everything under ‘Mains’.

Apart from that, it’s working great!

Tell me, how do you organise your recipes?

Oh, and I haven’t been paid to write this – or any other – post. I just really like the product!

I’m a reasonably proficient cook, but I have no idea how to use a knife all professional-like. I also didn’t care that much until I discovered the cutest ever way to learn more about it.

This gorgeous knife skills diagram (and part 2) is by Californian artist and sign painter Heather Diane. She has a huge collection of recipes and cooking tips, all in her signature illustration style, over at her blog Illustrated Bites.

Happy first day of winter to all my Aussie & Kiwi readers, hope you’re all keeping warm.

In my first Going Paperless post I mentioned that I put a ‘no junk mail’ sign on our letterbox and now go online for any catalogues I do want. This works especially well for meal planning now that I have an iPad.

The Man and I alternate doing the weekly grocery shopping but I’m in charge of planning the meals. Here is my plan of attack:

• I sit down with the iPad, meal planner, shopping list and my recipe folder on the kitchen table. I usually do this on a Thursday night so I can go out or relax at home on Friday night and still be ready for one of us to do the shopping first thing on Saturday morning.
• I check out what we’ve already got in the fridge that needs to be eaten within a week and write this down, along with anything in the freezer that we might want to use up.
• I head online to view the catalogues for our supermarket and butcher and make a note of anything that we regularly buy that’s on special (the greengrocer doesn’t have their specials online but I just try to keep the produce fairly seasonal).

• We really only plan dinners, so on the meal planner (a Chrissy present, available from Kikki-K) I use the ‘Breakfast’ box to write down any activities that will affect meals (e.g. Ryan working late or netball game @7pm). If we going to our parents for dinner or going out with friends we’ll mark it with a dash.
• From there, I’ll use the recipe folder to try to come up with meals that will use up what we’ve already got, make use of on-sale and seasonal products, fit in with that week’s schedule and are generally fairly balanced and healthy. I often leave one day unplanned as often things come up so we can go out and not worry about having uneaten food (and if we’re home we’ll just pull something out of the freezer or make something from the pantry).
• I’ll pop them on the meal plannner (using the ‘Snack’ box to make notes such as ‘defrost steak’ or ‘make double batch for freezing’).
• I then write down all the ingredients needed on the shopping list. (As you can see in the top picture, I have a pre-printed shopping list template that I made myself, in order of where everything is in our local supermarket. Yes, I am a nerd. And yes, I get annoyed when they move things around in the supermarket.)

My system changed the other day when I stumbled upon a previously unknown-to-me product – adhesive whiteboard sheets (Avery Peel & Stick Dry Erase Sheets to be exact). I’m sure you’re going to tell me they’ve been around for years and I’m the only one who didn’t know about them. Anyway, I immediately snapped up a pack and stuck a couple of them to the inside of our pantry, one for a shopping list and another to keep track of food in the freezer and in particular the fridge that need to be used up, which saves me from having to go through it every week and makes a Pantry Challenge really easy. Mmm, barramundi with chilli jam broccoli sounds pretty good now that I see that…

But back to the meal planning, do you go low-tech, high-tech or a bit of a mix like me? Or do you not even have a system, but just pick up something on your way home from the supermarket or takeaway joint? Or a you a super-organised once-a-month cooker?