#blogpostsix

With my busy schedule, I can’t find the time to cook anymore. I’ve heard a lot of people talk about meal prep, how easy it is, and how much time you save from having to cook every day. The first time I tried meal prepping, I thought, “Oh, this should be easy.” Well I was wrong. I was in the kitchen for like five hours. It’s not so easy when you don’t have everything planned out ahead of time. Here are five steps to having a successful meal prep day:

1. Plan your day ahead of time - Choose a day that you could use to meal prep. People usually meal prep all their meals on Sunday. Personally, I like to split it up because sometimes food goes bad. I meal prep on Sunday and then I meal prep again on Wednesday. 

2. Figure out your numbers ahead of time - You shouldn’t meal prep until you know exactly how many meals you’ll be having and what those meals are made of. Figure out how many meals you will be prepping for the week and then also outline your daily macros with specific meal guidelines to make sure that you are fulfilling your needs. 

3. Stick with easy food items - It’s great to include variety within your meals, however, it might keep you in the kitchen for hours. For a quick and easy meal prep, stick with basic food items. You want to focus on choosing easy-to-cook food. For example, a quick meal could consist of chicken breast, quinoa, and broccoli. There are so many options out there that you could choose from. 

4. Go grocery shopping - This is an obvious step. Once you have figured out how many meals you will be prepping and how much food you need, make a grocery list and head to the grocery store. It probably won’t be a good idea to use remnants in your fridge and pantry because you’ll most likely run out of food. 

5. Invest in a cooler - This is the best investment for meal prepping. You don’t want to be holding a hundred things in your hand while going to work because let’s face it you’ll probably end up dropping something. Buying a cooler was the best purchase I’ve ever made. When I have class or work, I just put everything in the cooler and I’m out the door. Their controlled temperature helps protect the food and it just makes everything easier. 

After a short introduction of the brief by Jaz, we formed groups and went to go ideate how to respond to the brief.

Firstly, we looked at what the restrictions on the task were.  We had to: • Create an iconic dining experience • Located in the City Botanic Gardens • Combination of urban, natural, cultural and culinary flavours • GoMA “Tables” • Determine a brand, its forms and experiences and a promotional campaign This gave us parameters to follow in the widely adaptable task, allowing us to fulfil the brief correctly and successfully.  With a clear vision of what we had to pull off in mind, we went down to the Botanic Gardens to develop a clear understanding of where we could actually physically implement our version of GoMA tables.  After wandering through different garden installations, we found a large, open, long stretch of grass that could potentially cater for a large amount of people.  To come up with our concept, no methodological approach was taken; rather, we simply bounced ideas off one another and let them grow into a resolved design.  We began by connecting tables to a traditional restaurant in the sense of a culinary experience.  This led to us deciding we wanted to bring the GoMA restaurant to the City Botanic gardens for a unique culinary experience, without the tables, making it a unique and somewhat ironic experience.  This would include a canapé menu styled event where art appreciators in the young, professional adult demographic could come to the gardens on a Friday night after work and experience a live artist and their food collaboration with GoMA head chef, Josue Lopez.  We sourced inspiration from simple things, such as natural wooden finishes, lighting from lanterns and the glowing city (not direct spotlights) and the hanging forms of the structure and large trees in the Botanic gardens near where we conceptualised our design. 

Further iteration and fine tuning of details led us to our final, more realistic design concept:  GoMA tables will be an interactive campaign that integrates experience and culture through a live art creation event in the City Botanic Gardens.  Each month a new artist with innovative cultural influences will collaborate with the GoMA Head Chef to create a canapé menu from locally and ethically sourced ingredients.  The event will run on Friday evening & Sunday afternoons across a 12-month period, with a single artist only featuring for one month. The key aspect of the event is that the artist will participate in live art creation of a culturally inspired table form. Whether this be painting an existing table, creation of a structural piece or anything they wish.  Following the month their table will be put up for display in a GoMA exhibition, and following the 12-month event, all of the 12 tables created will be used to replace existing green tables in the City Botanic Gardens. This aspect ensures that the event is a permanent fixture in the environment in which it was created.  GoMA Tables is an organic and authentic experience that draws on cultural aspects to involve a local audience in a live creation of a permanent piece of artwork. There will be multiple cultural experiences available for the community across a one-year period. The brand is dynamic as it encompasses a range of different cultural influences. The name GoMA Tables is used to highlight the end product, which is a permanent installation in the City Botanic Gardens.

Once we had finalised this main part of the brief, the concept, we advanced onto things such as marketing, presentation visual aids and the promotional video.  To do this to the best of our abilities in the limited time frame we had available we allocated tasks to each group member dependant on their abilities.  Anna and Olivia have almost finished their business and IVD degrees, so they worked on branding, the marketing and the visual PowerPoint whilst Hannah and I worked on the background research content for the PowerPoint.  When that was completed we all quickly teamed up and filmed the promotional video, but ran out of time and had to leave it without sound.

Image: Marketing poster idea for GoMA Tables

Watching the other group’s presentations was one of my favourite things about the task, looking at the wide variations of answers and how diversely the brief was interpreted really showed the way in which creativity is different in each individual.  I believe our presentation went rather well, however it did provide many opportunities for constructive feedback to implement when we do the major charette.  Firstly, our PowerPoint slides were too text heavy and therefore became more of a distraction than an aid.  The video could have been explored further as a tool to tell our concept rather than a montage of related shots.