The Lake Macquarie mum-of-two spent Thursday preparing, cooking and packaging 250 meals to donate to Nova for Women and Children, a shelter that looks after mothers in the community who are doing it tough.

Kaitie cooked up a storm as part of The Healthy Mummy 28 Day Weight Loss Challenge program, which promotes meal planning and smart preparation. She was one of four people who took up the challenge across NSW, Queensland and Victoria.

“Meal prep is one of my favourite things to do,” she said. “It was awesome to be able to organise it with a local women’s refuge.”

With her faithful assistants on hand – her three-year-old and five-year-old kids – she cooked up batches of beef san choy bow, chicken laksa, slow-cooked beef with sweet potato, spaghetti bolognese and tomato and zucchini pasta. Kaitie was about 150 meals in when Topics caught up with her at lunch time on Thursday.

“I’ve got a really sore shoulder from stirring the massive 15 litre pots and scooping [the food] out,” she laughed. “I think the hardest part is putting it all into containers.”

IT’S hard to know when dinner or a catch-up with friends is going to get a little too jolly.

And while Topics agrees it’s very important not to drink and drive, it’s a bummer when you have to call it a night early because you’ve brought your car into town – or to have to deal with collecting it the next morning, if you catch a cab home.

Three months ago, Daniel Spiteri launched Feike, which with the magic of a smart phone app, allows people to request someone to turn up on a pushbike and drive them home in their own vehicle.

From Wednesday to Sunday night, he collects people and takes them home in their own cars – a service that’s proving popular, not just with people at restaurants or pubs.

“The biggest surprise packet was families’ interest, where mum and dad both want to have a drink at a barbecue, both staring at each other at the three beer mark, wondering who is driving, with the knowledge and comfort that their kids will be in their own car seat. Families have absorbed 50 per cent of the market,” Daniel told Topics.

One of the stranger requests, he said, was when a customer asked him to take his car and dog home while he stayed out.

LOOKS like Newcastle council’s billboard campaign that replaced ‘New York’ with ‘Newy’ in a list that included Paris, Rome and London has had some cut-through.

Topics was leaving McDonald Jones Stadium at the end of a recent Jets game when we saw a punter who’d made some adjustments to his I Love New York souvenir t-shirt. 

Showing his Novacastrian pride, (and taking the lead from the billboards) he’d used a black marker to scribble out the letters ‘ork’. Well played.