Recipe Vault

Disappointingly, I don’t think anyone out there is really providing a practical yet appealing handbook for frazzled parents… A manual you can turn to that helps you get your ducks in a row when it comes to feeding you all with minimal fuss and investment.  I often bust through the door with the kids after swimming on a Wednesday night and think “OMG, it’s almost 6pm, and I haven’t even thought about dinner” and then I’ll have a rummage through the fridge (because heating the oven and waiting for fish fingers to cook will take the best best part of an hour, so that rules that out) and somehow I almost always have something I can rustle up.  There are two essential factors to doing this:

1)   Some prepared meal components and basic ingredients on hand

2)  Children whose repertoire will include more than “just white foods” or pizza.

I aim to tackle point 2 (picky eating) in a subsequent post.

Don’t get me wrong – I’ve in no way “nailed it” in as much as I have kids aged 21 months, 5 (fussy eater) and 7 and a husband who often doesn’t get off work till 9pm, so I have multiple needs to cater for and several sittings of mealtimes in the house not to mention the dreaded packed lunches to prepare in the middle of the morning scrum.  Add to that the fact that I have one supposedly supposed to avoid dairy and the other to avoid wheat and it’s like a culinary version of the Crystal Maze.

I LOVE the theory that you can cook one meal and everyone sits down happily to eat it together without fuss, I honestly do.  But just speaking for me, until the kids are a bit older this is not realistic.  There are reasons for this.  Namely that my husband and I love proper, serious ballsy flavours and “just adding salt” at the end doesn’t cut it in the taste department.  Also there are dishes that are so miraculously virtuous and delicious that two out of three kids will eat in my house, and the other will not.  I refuse to take that dish of the menu reducing the diets of each individual in our family to the lowest common denominator.

I’d like to be able to say that I meal-plan on a Sunday and shop ahead and that there is no wastage.  But that would be lying.  I am a “write the essay in one long panic before it is due in” type of person.   In reality all I have as a “routine” is a clutch of staples that I work on throughout the week if I have a window of an hour or two here or there, which allows me to be flexible and have a few quick dinner solutions in the week.

For some time now I have had a steady stream of friends asking to come and trail me in the kitchen to get some fresh ideas on what and how to cook some staples that kids will eat and that, with minor tweaking will satisfy an adult.  My kids are broadly speaking, good eaters.  Or on their way to being good eaters.  Obviously there are things they balk at, but they are basically forbidden from not trying sporadically even the things that they claim to hate.  I also cook nearly everything from scratch so these two elements elicit a level of awe and admiration from my peers, awe and admiration which is totally undeserved.  My culinary roots are definitely more – but not exclusively – of the Italian ilk and I can safely say that most Italians think nothing of cooking every meal from scratch and therefore I would get NO applause for what I do back home.  In fact they think my Londonified Italo-fusion food is weird and wacky, but I am prepared to take that on the chin if it means we benefit nutritionally.  (Italians are the biggest snobs to anyone other than themselves trying to turn out Italian food).  Anyway, what I’m saying is if that’s your norm, then cooking every meal from scratch is not a big deal.  I’m not saying this level of taking for granted is right, it just is.  More on this in another post.  Likewise family will generally pull together (geography-permitting) to undertake all or most of the childcare.   For instance in my Italian family my aunties are essentially full time nannies to their grandchildren (aah my lucky cousins!).  Devastatingly I lost my mum when my first was 10 months old and so I have been forced to recreate the village atmosphere in which to raise my own children.  Most of my girlfriends are in a similar boat with infirm or in some other way absent parents.  If you have no family community on which to rely it is normal that the combined responsibilities of cooking on top of working and childcare is a huge task and it needs to be made as quick and easy as possible.  I do think it is worth it however.  Both in terms of saving money, the quality of the food and the resulting nutrition, behaviour and energy levels of your children.

My initiations generally go something like this:

I’ll coax the interested party to my local Farmer’s Market and then we’ll go through the basics in my kitchen with the produce we’ve brought back and go through a list of which shops (both online and traditional) I’ll lean on for to keep my pantry stocked.   These at the moment are Ocado, Hubbub, Nifeislife and HookandSon.  I am planning posts on all of these in due course.

Then we’ll have a hands-on mess around with what I’ve bought at the market that day. We’ll make pasta sauce, make stock, throw together a lunch primarily veggie in spirit, in order to remind ourselves that this can be both satisfying and quick.

In this section I aim to provide a compendium of KEY “go to” recipes that I use as the backbone of my cooking and meal-planning for the family. With a little help from these items that you could make on a weekly, fortnightly or monthly basis you can batch cook, freeze, and revisit many of these dishes or dish-components leaving just a few gaps to fill here and there.

For example I tend to make once every week / fortnight or so (the Spin-off suppers I might make at least once a month are listed beneath each):

• Chicken stock
• Beef or pork bone broth
  • Chicken curry (mild)
  • Risotto
  • Stracciatella (in brodo)

• “Sugo” (red, tomato-based pasta sauce)
  • any pasta
  • pizza topping
    • ==>  packed lunch friendly

• Pesto
  • ==>  packed lunch friendly

• Superfood-pesto (aka cancer-fighting Brassica sauce in disguise)
  • ==>  packed lunch friendly

• Salsa verde
  • ==>  packed lunch friendly

• Mince (made in to patties of various sizes and shapes)
  • Wraps
  • spaghetti with meatballs
  • rice with meatballs
    • ==>  packed lunch friendly
  • cheese-burgers

• Veggie / fruit purees/sauces of various types (spinach / apple, sweet potato, lentil)
  • Veggie pancakes
    • ==> packed lunch friendly

My typical suppers will also include

• Schnitzels (in which I interchange or tweak the egg-dipping mixture with ketchup, mayo, sweet chilli sauce or pesto for variety and flavour)
• Teryiaki salmon

• Spin-off Suppers and packed lunches derived from these save an awful lot of time and prevent the kids leaving half of their lunch from sheer boredom.