Meal Planning Lethargy

I used to really enjoy meal planning for the week, and also enjoy cooking for the family. I liked experimenting as well as making the fail-safes and favourites and I liked choosing recipes that challenged me with either new ingredients or new cooking styles. I loved my kitchen.

Past tense.

Now Tori is older she is turning into a fussy eater. A very fussy eater. She’s reluctant even to try things – you ask her to just try one mouthful and she throws a full on tantrum. It’s tiring and frustrating and I feel like all we are eating as a family is cheese on toast and jam sandwiches.

I know that’s not true – I do cook other things for just me and Caius or even try to give us all the same meal. Arthur is less fussy than Tori but is still wary of new things and when half of the present company rejects your food with tears and tantrums it drains your will to try anything else.

I hate it.

I sit down to meal plan and get the urge to burst into frustrated tears.

It’s not helped by the price of everything and our current lack of a freezer. Eating just seems like such a struggle – I wish I had a money tree so that I could live off takeaways and pre-prepared stuff and not deal with the heartache and headache of trying to feed my family myself.

I think that’s it. I feel like I am failing Tori every time I present her with something she doesn’t like or won’t try and I don’t know how to fix it.

My latest attempt is to order Annabel Karmel’s Fussy Eater’s Recipe Book. It should arrive later this week and I’m hoping that I will be able to tempt Tori into being more adventurous with the recipes in it, or even just persuade her to eat some normal stuff like meat that isn’t chicken or sausages and anything that has a sauce on it. Seriously, if it’s wet Tori won’t touch it – with the exception of spaghetti shapes, which she LOVES. Fickle child.

I really hope that I start to find a few more things that Tori, and to some extent Arthur, will eat so that our diet can expand as a family and I can stop having to cook 3 different meals every night – one for me and Caius, one for Tori and another one for Arthur.

I miss enjoying time in the kitchen, it was good me-time with purpose. Now it just feels like wasted effort and pouring half-chewed money in the bin.

365 Project Week 30 ~ ‘Food’

MONDAY:Tori is ill so she was off school today. We dropped the Smalls off with their Daddy and then crawled our way home and decided we were too tired and wiped out to cook and spoiled ourselves to a Chinese Takeaway. I thought about writing some more NaNoWriMo words, what with it being the end of November on Friday, but trying to focus on the screen for more than five minutes makes my head spin. I think Tori has infected me.

TUESDAY:

Playing NaNoWriMo catch up today. 5, 737 words done and my brain is mush. Luckily I got fed tasty treats by Caius as rewards throughout the day so I kept my energy up and didn’t give up, as I was often tempted to do.

WEDNESDAY:

Picked the Smalls up from Daddy’s today. Tori is still not right, pale and quiet and stuffed full of cold but she was fine enough to munch her way through a chocolate lollipop that Nannan treated her to. If she starts refusing chocolate, I may have to take her to A&E…

THURSDAY:

Tori off school again, she’s really not right.

NaNoWriMo panic happening today. I’ve spent half of the day asleep in bed with a temperature so my word count has suffered and I’m panicking and stressing over it. Caius bought us curry partly so that I didn’t have to cook and partly to see if we could burn out the illness with spice! I much appreciate the effort, even if I do still feel like I’m in an oven and my word count is still 2,090 words short. Not feeling wildly hopeful about hitting the final word count tomorrow.

FRIDAY:

I DID IT!!! NaNoWriMo is complete! Though I think there is still another 10,000 words or so left in the story before I can call it finished. Took Tori in to school this morning but they asked me to bring her straight back because she was so tired and snotty. A fair enough decision as she has basically just spaced out on the sofa all day, poor mite. Arthur is showing signs of the snottiness to now, and Caius. We are an unhealthy household.

I splashed out and made us all Toad in the Hole as a celebratory NaNo dinner and then English Folkfan was a complete star and came round to do the twilight watch so Caius and I could go to a friend’s birthday party. We needed the fresh air and company

SATURDAY:

Today was a fruit salad kind of day. With us all feeling a bit grotty, fruit was a nice easy way of giving us all a boost and making us feel better.  Quite enjoyed a whole day of not writing with no guilty feelings at all, I must confess. I went out for lunch with Liberty and read instead. Starting to feel a bit more human now, though Arthur and Caius are a bit worse for wear today. Tori is a little better but her face is so dry and flaky from wiping her nose all the time that she looks a bit like a clown.

SUNDAY:

Tori is MUCH better today. Still snotty but she ate all her breakfast and is now actually running around and playing for the first time since last Saturday. I am glad to have her back although I do miss the peace and quiet a bit! Arthur is under the weather today though – it’s barely mid-day and he is already down for a well-needed nap.  Fingers crossed all the sleep helps him burn it off faster than his sister.

Meal Planning Monday

Click here for more Meal Plan ideas

This week starts with a night off for me – I am going over to my parents’ house for dinner before going out to play snooker with Caius, my brother and a few friends.

The rest of the week is planned as followed:

Tuesday: Lemon, cream-cheese and salmon pasta (A recipe from the My Daddy Cooks book as part of my Day Zero challenge)

Wednesday: Slow-cook Beef stew & mash (and probably Cheese on toast for little miss ‘i-won’t-eat-gravy’)

Thursday: Bready Scrolls (a favourite from My Daddy Cooks)

Friday: Home-made Fish & Chips (My Daddy Cooks)

Saturday: Pasta & Sauce of some variety

Sunday: Risotto

Meal Planning Monday

Click here for more Meal Plan ideas

 

I missed last Monday…oops! Good job really as out of my scraped together meal plan we only managed one of the meals and that wasn’t on the intended night!!

Ah well, this week is a bit of a mini plan as I am out on Friday so dinner is in the trusty paws of Sy (so it will probably be fresh-out-of-the-freezer pizza and chips ). Here it is though:

M: Pasta and home-made tomato and onion sauce

T: Chicken and pea Risotto and warm crusty bread

W: Sausage-meat stuffed Marrow and Mash

Th: Toad in the Hole & Onion Gravy (My Daddy Cooks)

F: Mummy’s Night Off!!

S: Home-made Fish & Chips (My Daddy Cooks)

Meal Planning Monday

Click here for more Meal Plan ideas

We did pretty well on our meal plan last week aside from me failing to get organised on Wednesday morning before I went out and thus shifting all our meals over a day and knocking the Pasta Bake into this week instead. The Goulash was a big hit and the Spanish rice recipe made enough to feed Sy & Tori the next day as well! And, well, we always like pie so that was a no-brainer.

I will make a note when one of the recipes I am using is from Nick Coffer’s My Daddy Cooks recipe book as one of my Day Zero targets is to cook every single recipe at least once over the next 2 and three-quarter years. Hopefully this will help me and Sy discover foods we didn’t know we liked and get us over some of our fussiness.

On to this week:

Monday: Roast Chicken & all the usual stuff (Sy misses out on Sunday dinners due to work so I do them during the week instead)

Tuesday: Pasta Bake

Wednesday: Oven-Baked pork chops with ratatouille and feta (A My Daddy Cooks recipe)

Thursday: Homemade pizza with chips (A My Daddy Cooks recipe) < It’s Tori’s birthday and pizza makes good party food!

Friday: Sausage & Bean Hotpot with Mash

Saturday: Creamy Pork Stroganoff (A My Daddy Cooks recipe)

Meal Planning Monday

It’s about time I started joining in with this.

I’m only going to plan out our main meals for the week – lunch will generally be sandwiches/wraps of some type or possibly baked potato and beans if I feel the need for something warm. And Sundays is often blank because I go to my parents most weeks and have Sunday dinner there so the evening meal is usually more like lunch (often it’s toasties and a packet of crisps). This does mean that some weeks we will have a mid-week roast but it’s just so Sy doesn’t miss out coz of having to work on Sundays.

Here we go, on the menu this week is:

Monday: Spanish Rice

Tuesday: OUT < Sy and I are off on Alphabet Date ‘C’ so dinner will be cooked by someone else. And possibly will begin with ‘C’!

Wednesday: Beef Goulash, rice & crusty bread (Or at least it will be if I get organised and get it in the slow cooker for OH before I go out for the day!)

Thursday: Pasta Bake

Friday: Chicken & Sweetcorn pie with chips and peas

Saturday: Honey BBQ chicken with salad and chips

So there we go – what are you eating this week? Our plan is a bit patchy because of us being out on random days but still, at least there is a plan!!

Meal Planning – Not Just A Money-Saver

I have seen loads of blog posts about meal-planning and how cost effective it is and you can’t miss the adverts from places like Sainsbury’s claiming to have plans that feed a family of four on just £50 so I decided to give it a go.

I started by having a look at various blogs and at the Sainsbury’s website for ideas as to what to plan because my initial attempt got stuck after about 2 days because I couldn’t actually think of anything to make. Then, fueled with other people’s ideas I put together a plan for the week and wrote myself out a shopping list which came to about £35 on Tesco online before adding a delivery charge. (That was just for food for me, Sy & Tori – The total bill was higher due to boring stuff like loo roll and toothpaste…) That’s much less than I usually spend and yet we ended up eating better – great stuff!

What did we eat?

Well for lunch most days it was sandwiches – either cheese, ham or BLT. I alternated to keep things fresh – with a packet of crisps. Though one day we did have jacket potatoes with cheese and beans instead and another day (when it was cold outside) I stuck our cheese sandwiches in the sandwich grill and made toasties instead.

Our evening meals were as follows:

Pasta with chicken and bacon in a cheese sauce

Pie, chips, veg and gravy

Cottage pie

Pasta in spicy tomato sauce

Chicken and bacon risotto

and then toasties on the couple of evenings where we weren’t particularly hungry.

One thing I have noticed and enjoy is that we sit down as a family to eat more often now. Before it was so often a TV dinner or us all eating at different times and grabbing something quick and easy but now I’m enjoying cooking and we all get to sit at the table together and share. Arthur joins us too in his highchair even though he doesn’t eat yet which is nice because it means he isn’t ‘abandoned’ in his bouncer chair whilst the rest of us go and eat.

We’re not miliatary with the meal plans – we switch days round and improvise a bit but just having a guideline is enough to get us eating a bit better and the pennies we save mean we can afford treats for pudding some nights and still have a bit left over for a rainy day.

So, what's on the menu this week, then?

Banana Cake – When Mushing *Is* Acceptable…

You may have guessed that I am not the world’s biggest banana fan. Particularly this week. However, there are two times when I *love* them – sliced with custard and in CAKE. Nom!

Today I dug out an old cookbook that I am particularly fond of:

(Sadly it is no longer in print. But it was a big hit in 1995 I assure you…though I do wonder how many copies have survived since then…)

I knew that hiding away inside was a nice easy recipe for Banana Cake by one of my former teachers, Marcia Jones. It involved mashing banana which was wonderful stress relief and I particularly enjoyed that bit.

I’m sure Marcia won’t mind me sharing her recipe (it is delicious) so that you too can prevent banana disasters by using up all your bananas in a cake!!

Ingredients:

4oz Butter

8oz Caster Sugar

2 Eggs (whisked)

3 Bananas (mashed)

8oz Flour

1 tsp Bicarb of Soda

1 tsp Salt

 

I *so* enjoyed doing this bit

Method:

Preheat your oven to 180°C/Gas Mark 4.

Cream the butter and sugar together then gradually beat in the whisked eggs.

Add the mashed bananas and mix well. (It says 3 bananas in the recipe but I used 4 this time because they were midget bananas…).

Sift the dry ingredients into the bowl and fold in until well blended.

Put the mixture into a greased loaf tin (8″x4″).

Bake for 1 hour.

Simples!

Even I can do it and it tastes divine!! (It’s also extra tasty if you add a teaspoon of cinnamon to the mixture for a warming bit of spice.)

YUM!

Carrot Soup: A Recipe

I got oddly carried away buying veggies last time I went shopping which resulted in me being left with a small mountain of carrots that even the guinea pigs could not surmount. There was nothing for it, I was going to have to make soup.
I’ve never had carrot soup, it’s just never appealed to me but after a quick tweet and some reassurance from folks I decided to bite the bullet and go for it.
Firstly I had a hunt through a soup recipe book hiding away unused on my bookshelf, read through a variety of carrot based recipes with fancy French names I couldn’t say and then decided to make it up as I went along. I quite often do this with things – read 4 different recipes and combine them to make my own version.

It turned out to be delicious! So here we go, the recipe for Carole’s Carrot Soup.

Ingredients: (Serves 2)

2 oz/50g butter

8 oz/225g carrots, sliced & peeled

1 onion, chopped reasonably small (I would say ‘finely’ but I’m incapable of doing that…)

1 oz/25g rice

1¼ pints/700ml chicken stock

Dried coriander (I have no idea how much I put in, 2 teaspoons maybe?)

Salt & Pepper

 

Method:

Melt the butter in a saucepan then add the onion and carrot. Cook them for about 10 minutes til they’re fairly soft, stirring most of the time to stop them from sticking or going brown (and making your soup go a manky brown colour later).

Then add the rice, salt and pepper and coriander and all the chicken stock. I just sort of poured coriander in out of the pot, stirred a bit and added some more until it looked vaguely right. It was quite a lot, I did want to be able to taste it rather than just have it there for the pretty green bits.

Bring everything up to the boil then reduce the heat and simmer for about half an hour, stirring occasionally.

Finally, blitz it all up (better than I did with my useless hand blender – we still had quite a few lumps of carrot which is fine unless you’re after a refined, smooth soup…) and serve nice and hot. Simple!

Nice and tasty and very easy to do. I was pleasantly surprised and will definitely try it again some time

Lasagne…an entertaining interlude!

So, in a desperate attempt to avoid doing any housework I decided to make a lasagne for tea. Not usually much of an issue except that I hadn’t got any lasagne sauces in the cupboard. Cue panic.

I guessed that a normal pasta sauce would be an acceptable replacement for the tomato part of the meal and went on a hunt for white sauce recipes.

The first I found was this one which seemed short, sweet and simple: Mark’s White Sauce Recipe. Easy huh?

Just reading that simple recipe filled me with fear, I am such a cowardly and haphazard cook. There just wasn’t enough detail to set my useless little mind at rest.

I flicked back to my search results and picked another one that just so happened to link back to that original recipe. One that sounded like it was written by someone who cooks an awful lot like me. Frantically. Adam Sampson’s White Sauce Recipe.

Suddenly I felt better. I could do that. So off I went to the kitchen to begin my ‘masterpiece’. (I really should have just tidied up Tori’s toys and dug out the hoover.)

I did the mince first, browning it off with a couple of chopped onions and then adding an oxo cube, some herbs and a jar of basic pasta sauce. Easy peasy, nothing wrong there.

Next I set about the white sauce, first converting the American cup measurements into something I could use and then carefully following the instructions…then I decided to stop making my white sauce and go buy some from the shop.

Why?

Because as I added the milk I realised there was some extra protein in my sauce in the form of several tiny red beetles and what I can only assume were their larvae and eggs floating around adding to the texture.

On closer inspection, they appeared to be living in my bag of flour and I decided I wasn’t going to go through all that pa-lava again and would cheat and buy the sauce.

So much for being good and making my own hey. Clearly the Gods knew that I was never meant to be a lasagne sauce maker…

(And just to round off the ridiculous escapade, my lasagne dish was full of left-over pasta bake so I had to make a round one in my casserole dish. Have you ever tried making rectangular dried lasagne sheets fit into a circular pot? It’s ‘fun’, honest…)