To be ashamed of my family's eating habits and to ask for help in how I can learn to cook

[MrsSeanBean1]

I am married with a 2 year old DD and a 4 week old DS. I have always hated cooking and been absolutely hopeless at it. Ever since I left home in my mid 20s I have lived on ready meals and eating out (I am now 37). Now that I have finished my family I really want us all to get fit and healthy, particularly as I am suffering from health anxiety due to many of my family members being diagnosed with cancer over the last few years.

Both my husband and I are overweight, I am actually very obese. When I had my much longed for DD I vowed that she would never suffer with weight problems like I have all of my life (I was always rewarded with food and now have a very unhealthy relationship with it). I have done my very best to stick to that and my DD eats very healthily. She loves fruit and veg, and I cook her a very basic organic meal every evening. Usually this is pasta, veg and a cheese sauce or potatoes, veg and meat. These meals are very plain and boring (no salt, seasoning etc.) so my husband and I don't fancy it. This means that we end up with a quick ready meal after my DD has gone to bed. I can see how ridiculous this is as I am 'cooking' for my daughter so could easily cook for everyone.

I never learnt to cook at school. I went to a very academic girls grammar school who did their best to keep girls out of the kitchen so home economics lessons were very few and far between. I would love to learn now and have looked into cooking courses at local colleges but cannot find anything suitable. Most basic cooking courses are aimed at people with special needs or are more specialised. I just want one to teach me everyday healthy family recipes.

I have enrolled on my local Why Weight? programme for new mums to lose weight and have been trying to draw up a weekly menu as a starting point. However, I am finding it so hard. At the moment, over 7 days of evening meals, I have 1 red meat dish, 2 chicken dishes, 1 salmon dish, 1 white fish dish and 2 vegetarian dishes. I think this would be balanced but I really have no idea. I now need to find a recipe for each day and learn to cook it! I really don't know where to start.

I have also looked online for any online cooking courses but can't find any. They all seem too complicated. The only time I've ever cooked successfully is when I followed Gordon Ramsey's Cook Along Live. I found that really good.

Can anyone suggest a way forward for me or am I beyond help?

Soup is easy to make and you could make a large pot to do 3 days then you have a starter which just needs heated up (not suggesting that you need a starter regularly but it means that the next course can be a bit simpler).
So soup, nice bread, and then cauliflower cheese? macaroni cheese? cold chicken and salad? poached egg on toast.

Just making some easy suggestions here so that you don't feel you have to do a meat and 2 veg meal every night.

If you gently cook some fine chopped celery and onion in butter for 10 mins it makes a tastier stock, then you add grated carrot, more onion, sliced leek, even fine chopped broccoli, tomatoes, chopped cooked chicken, red lentils (whatever you like) and water with stock cube and you have your soup. Mash it with a potato masher if the pieces if veg are big.

Practise is the best thing for cooking so you will improve over time if you keep at it.

You absolutely don't have to make food bland for kids. In fact, they like food with flavors just the same as adults. My son was weaned on garlic soup. Just don't use lots of chili.

I have been sautéing kale and collard greens and other similar green veg in a wok with bacon and garlic (+ salt and just a mini sprinkle of cayenne to give it an edge...not spicy, just edgy). It doesn't take much bacon (chop it up into pieces and cook it to almost crisp and then add the garlic and then the veg) and it makes them extra yummy. All my kids' friends mothers keep asking what I do to my vegetables to get their kids to eat them....my secret is bacon or lemon juice. I like to boil broccoli or green beans or courgettes and dress them with salt, olive oil, garlic and lemon juice. Kids (and adults) love them this way.

It's probably partly about weaning yourself off the salty and sugary content of ready meals so your palate adapts to the different taste of home cooking. How about easy stir fry and noodles, with soy, ginger, fresh lime to make it zing? Add prawns or chicken, or just keep it veggie. Agree that bbc good food is good.

Definitely Jamie's Ministry of Food - it's really good for simple, home-cooked healthy food. Or, if you're trying to lose weight you could follow a Slimming World weekly menu plan - you can get one free on their website and it gives you recipes and instructions. They have a focus on cooking from scratch, lots of fruit and veg etc so it might be helpful to get started?

Oh, I also got the Baby-Led Weaning Cookbook when my baby was little, it has some easy family-friendly recipes in.

I wonder if you could speak with your local college or local children's centre and see if they could explore the appetite (ho ho) for such a course? There may be others in a similar situation and if it was promoted properly could get a good turn out. But yes, everyone here has good tips. You're actually cooking already, you might just need to spice it up a bit. Good luck!

Come to me and I will teach you to cook!

Dh is also a chef and does cookery courses based on your own specific wants and needs.

Where do you live?

I think a slow cooker could be a good idea, especially if you don't like cooking as it takes minimal effort. Use leaner cuts of meat, fry them off first, bung them in the pot with veg and stock and forget about it until dinner time. It also means that meat is lovely and soft for little ones and if you make a large batch of beef and ale stew or chicken casserole, then you can use left overs to make pies the next day (or to freeze).

I think you should be a bit kinder to yourself, you are cooking well for your daughter and you have a tiny baby! DH and I are shattered by the time the dc are asleep and je house tidy so we struggle too. What we do is

• make great big batches of bolognese sauce, cottage pie, etc from te bbc good food site. I buy those Chinese takeaway tin foil containers from amazon and freeze 5 at a time, then we need only cook pasta.
• we have jacket pots once a week with tuna or freezer chilli and salad
• it doesn't have to be complicated. No need to make elaborate meals every night. We often have a cheese omelette and a bagged salad or beans on toast if we're really tired. They are both healthy!

Good luck.

Definitely ask at your local children and family (SureStart) centre. We ran courses in the past that would be perfect for you. It had a crèche too.

If you're going to learn at home with books/web etc my main advice would be to start slowly. One new recipe a week (maybe at weekends if there's more time?) would probably be more sustainable than trying loads in one go and finding it too much, therefore getting disheartened.

I am trying to improve my family's diet too, I wish you well :)

Also - you say you are obese - stop buying biscuits, cakes, sweets, crisps, fizzy drinks, breakfast bars and sugary yoghurts. Just stop. Don't have them in the house. You might still buy them while you are out, but you will eat a lot less rubbish.

I've noticed the biggest problem with people who say they can't cook is that they over complicate it...or think they need to follow a recipe without deviating from it.

You need to develop a love for good, healthy food. Watch some cookery shows...I find Nigella pretty easy to follow.

OP - I completely appreciate how you feel. I'm 37 also and have been with my DP for 2 years, before that I was single for quite a while and literally lived off things you chucked in the oven and eating out. Very bad for you.

Once I met DP I was determined that we'd eat nice healthy home cooked food together - I didn't want him thinking I couldn't cook. So I bought Jamie Oliver Ministry of Food and I cannot recommend it enough. I cooked my first ever roast lunch using his cookbook. Lisa Faulkner is also really good.
I can now cook a few things well, but still want to improve my cooking, so I just use BBC Good Food on iPad.

Good luck though, it's all too easy to throw things in oven but now I love cooking and it's a great feeling when my DP scoffs everything and has 2nds. We will be TTC #1 shortly and lm looking forward to cooking for my DC.

Jamie Olivers Ministry of Food - thats how I learnt the basics :) I now have my own food recipe blog!

I can also recommend jamie olivers ministry of food. It's really easy to follow and will take you through all the basics.

another recommendation here for 'How to Cook' by Delia Smith.
It was criticised when it came out for including info about how to boil eggs etc, but by beginning again it's much easier to learn the principles from which you can make meals out of pretty much anything.

I second the idea of a slow cooker. Batch cooking, if you have a freezer is a great habit it get into, it is a bit of effort to start with but good to have kids meals in the freezer ready to defrost on busy days, and batches of soup, stew etc.

Don't be scared of a bit of salt (but rock salt or natural sea salt is better than table salt due to the mineral content). I am fairly liberal with the salt (I cook virtually everything from scratch), and you won't put anywhere near as much salt in a home cooked dish as manufactured ready meals. You need salt, but obviously not in the amounts found in processed food (usually with lots of sugars added too, another good reason to avoid them).

As you mention being obese, I'm going to suggest you read the low carb threads on MN, where I lurk and occasionally post. As someone who learned to cook as in my 30's and then lost a huge amount of weight with low carb, I'd say "give it a go"!

One pot meals are great if you have limited time . Invest in a slow cooker and you can put on dinner whenever you have some time in the day - Bolognese, casseroles, chilli, curry - to serve with rice, pasta or mashed potato. Make a large quantity and freeze for defrosting on another day . Fresh fish you can just put in the oven, flavour with lemon juice, ginger etc. Fish pie/cottage pie you can make the filling in advance and top with mashed potato. Learning just a few techniques and using shortcuts such as premeasured herb mixes and supermarket pastry, will mean you and your dd can share the core meals.

While lots of people have mentioned the BBC good food I don't think they have given the link which is here
Go of the ones marked easy. You can also search through the healthy ones. Just cook for you all, children don't have to have bland.

OP there's loads of excellent advice here. I would just say that Delia's recipes always work and she has done a whole series called (I think) "How to Cook" which covers everything from boiling an egg upwards.

If I were you I would sit down and pick a couple of meals you fancy having a go at cooking - a bolognaise and maybe a cottage pie - and then just get stuck in. Give yourself plenty of time to prepare them and make sure you have all the ingredients you need before you begin.

You might find it's quite good fun too.

Let us know how you get on.

Such great ideas here, i'm going to steal some

May I suggest baby steps. Pick one night a week that you'll cook a family meal. Once you're feeling more confident, increase to 2 or 3 nights a week.

You sound motivated and committed and your dd is lucky to have you for her mum.

I'm teaching my 10year olds to cook atm, it's an interesting process. They choose a meal once a week and cook for the family, we have a rule that they must chose something different every time. There's always something new to learn in every recipe and these are skills that they can apply to other dishes. Their confidence is really starting to grow, it's scary at the start but stick at it, if you can read you can cook!

I might just get Jamie's Ministry of Food too.

oh and if you are used to having ready meals full of salt and sugar, heat would be a good way to not feel like your food is bland, and chilli flakes sprinkled on top of a meal is a good way to make yours and your DH's meals a bit more interesting without having to cook 2 meals.

Do you have a local exchange trading scheme near you? My mum (a retired cookery teacher) is a member of her local one and one off the things she offers is 1-2-1 cookery lessons. There might be a similar offer in your local one.

I would really try and find a cookery course if you can, as it will give you confidence in handling food and show you how to do things properly, ie more easily. I did City and Guilds courses many, many years ago and they were great fun, and very practical, but then they changed and you had to do needlework as well, in case you wanted to teach (?). Perhaps you could have a specialist day/ weekend cookery course as a present to get you going and make you realise you know a lot more than you think. Good luck.