if a parents feeds their child a microwave macaroni/curry/lasagne ready meal every night...

[MummikinsOopNorth]

...because she dislikes cooking and is terrible at it, is it bad parenting?

What if it's M&S filled pasta?

The worst for salt, old M&S.

Every night? I think that's too much. There's too much salt and general crap in ready meals to make it a main part of your diet.

It's really not hard to bake a potato and shove some tuna or something on it, or stick some veg in a steamer / pan. You don't need to go all Nigella to make decent meals.

Don't be scared!

My dcs do love a pot noodle, we spend every summer in China where they make them for children.

Yes, I also don't care if it is Annabel Karmel, Waitrose or Asda Cheap No frills macaroni cheese or whatev, it is all the same and none of 'em are any good (and I was going to post that before LEM did, am not being stalker!

I am no angel - dd will like any normal kid get frosen pizza or something, in fact one of her favourite meals (does that say something for my cooking?) is that batchelors pasta n sauce. But then again she is 14 and loves all sorts of crap anyway. But that said MOST nights she gets something cooked from scratch.

And I regularly use the ready made mashed potato from the chilled cabinets because sometimes the thought of peeling, boiling the mashing spuds makes me want to throw my saucepans in the bin and swear loudly at the oven.

my dp and I were cooker/hob less for about 6 months once when we moved house into one that did not have a workable kitchen.

All we had to heat food was a microwave and so lived (mostly) on microwaveable ready meals plus the odd jacket potato etc.

I have to say I have never felt so generally unwell before or since. We used to fantacise about an oven cooked meal!

This was pre-kids but I would never subject my dc to a mostly microwaved diet as it is just not good for you.

Frozen pizza....the crime! Have you tried Jamie's pizza, I make about 8 full size pizzas for way under £10 and have enough basic sauce for a large lasagna or bolognaise.
Personal shit food favourites of mine, that I rarely/never eat, are Brains faggots and Bernard Matthews drummers(Do they even make them anymore?) usually with spinach to make me feel less ill!!!

Can somebody give an example of a cookbook for simple techniques please ie cooking a piece of fish, how to cook rice properly, basic stew receipe etc

It's not being a bad parent but it is being a bit lazy.

I am having a bit of a lazy time at the moment - blame it on the snow/cabin fever! - but it is not necessary to use microwave meals (although I love a saturday night pizza!). So tonight I will be serving jacket potatoes with bacon and cheese, with a salad. DS and DD will get sweet potato with cheese. It takes VIRTUALLY no effort whatsoever (don't tell DH that though!).

Yesterday we had meatballs, a tomatoey sauce and pasta. Took a few secs to chuck the meatballs in the oven, a few minutes to fry some onion and garlic, empty a tin of tomatoes and some herbs in to a pan, and boil some pasta.

Being a good cook is not a precondition of providing (vaguely) healthy food - it is a bonus!

The Jamie Ministry of Food book is very good re basics, basic stews, curries, things with mince, how to cook rice, basic salads. It is rather patronising in design (e.g. picture of Sharon 'single mother' from Rotherham holding aloft a cake iyswim) but the recipes are sound.

Not to be a trollhunter, however the OP seems to have disappeared and she started a strange baby names thread yestyerday which also went unanswered one of the names is Imajyn fgs

mii - Delias Complete Cookery Course is good. Normally I find her food a bit OTT re. ingredients and complexity but this is a good 'bible' (brilliant 'recipe' for perfect rice).

I also like the Womens Institute Book of Home Cooking. Lots of basic stuff.

I do understand though that for some people cooking is daunting - so for a lot of us pasta with meatballs would be easy but for someone who really dodn;t know what to do

-struggle peeling an onion
-wouldn't necessarily know which part of garlic to use and to throw away
-would not know how to make meatballs or when the meatballs would be cooked
-would not know which herbs were what
-would not know how best to use pasta

Pl;us if you are buying ingredients from scratch and do not have a stock cupboard full of essentials, buying all this lot would be a lot more expensive that a £2 ready meal.

Erm, MillyR, what the heck difference does it make if the parent in question is single or not?

and can we have less of the FFing please people. I'm perfectly intelligent yet really struggle with cooking. It's not as easy as you might think 'just to grill a chop' if you have never been taught and are worried about poisoning your children if you don't get it right.

though of course you are entitled to be judgey if it pleases you...

OP is this about you or someone you know? Or just a general question?

Getorf - thanks for a very helpful post.

That's exactly why it's not that simple.

Flightattendant, surestart do regular cooking courses that teach the basics

Thanks Angry

But I am terrified (irrationally) of surestart...I had to go there for my antenatal appts and they were horrible to the children.

i am having cbt and part of that might help with the fear of cooking.

Flightattendant - I can see what you're saying but I was never taught how to do most of the cooking I do. I cook most of the family meals simply because I find cooking enjoyable but I taught myself, nobody else taught me. Just flick through some basic cookery books - the more traditional are often the better ones for basic things like stews and soups - and just experiment and practise.
No-one should feel that they have to cook all manner of meals especially if they don't really enjoy cooking but I do think that once you have dcs to feed then you take on a degree of responsibility to master even just basic cookery to make healthy and economical meals from food you have in your cupboard instead of relying on ready meals for every meal.
If you don't want to follow recipes then just cook meat or fish according to what it says on the pack or ask the butcher or fishmonger how to cook it. That's how I've learned how to cook things over the years and then all you have to do is serve with veg and rice or pasta and I fail to believe that anyone can honestly say they can't boil veg or cook a pan of rice or pasta!
It's really not hard to scramble eggs, boil vegetables, mash potatoes or put tasty things on top of toast or baked potatoes.

Know where you're coming from GOML. Bizarrely my mum told me the other week that she didn't know what to do with a garlic bulb (she thought she needed to put the whole bulb in!!!). However, even my mum managed to cook properly for us when we were little. We had things like sausages and veg, pie and veg etc. And even though they are not super healthy meals, at least my mum tried to get a good helping of veg in (which were normally overcooked !).

There are loads of shortcuts as well if people can be bothered to look for them. Supermarkets do raw mince in meatball form so you literally just stick them in the oven.

FA - not trying to be judgey - especially as I am not a great cook myself (I struggle with chops and steak - always overdo them) but a lot of it does come down to making the effort to get a bit of advice and looking for shortcuts.

Flight, might there be something useful here? I've looked at a couple of these videos (knife skills and jointing a chicken) and found them quite helpful.

Agree Flight it is very difficult to cook homemade grub if you haven;t been raised by someone and you absorb that info as you grow up. The amount of times I have served up raw or overcooked to leather food.

And just to learn the basics like how to make an omelette, boil poatoes so they were not rock hard or alternatively boiled to much took some time, as i am a pretty impractical person.

Tbh what helped were those colmans packets. I would follow the instructions on the back of those, this would give me confidence and the cottage pie, bouef bourgignon or whatever I made would be homemade to me (even if nutritionally it would be a bit suspect), and I did that until I had the confidence to follow recipes from books. Now I am more of an instinctive cook and makes things up and just have my fave recipes which I have committed to memory.

So, it is easy to tell a crap cook 'follow a recipe' but some people would not have the confidence in their own innate ability to do so - say like cook an onion until it is soft you may go 'is that soft enough?' and then worry that the recipe is going to wrong.

But it is so worth it in the end and I love cooking (not baking though, you really wouldn't want to eat any cakes I make, I am crap!) and now I cook really complicated means from scratch, for example I toast and grind my own spices for homemade curries for imnstance. And my dd is learning all this as she grows up too.

Thanks guys.

I understand it looks bad.

I worry about this every day and some nights as well.

Probably to an extent that is not normal.
I started a thread asking for advice and printed it off, some months ago, but am still having trouble with the basics despite people being very generous with recipes and instructions.

it's more of a mental block than 'not making the effort' I could stare and stare at a cookery book all day but still not get it.

Your saying 'It's really not that hard' might apply to you but it doesn't apply to me, and I feel sad reading it.
There are other aspects of parenting I am very good at, this is my downfall as a mother, but it doesn't mean I am not trying.

I remember taking a sweet potato with me to MIL when DD was weaning, it was early days and her standard fare - my mil was and said, "isn't that what the blacks eat?" "what do you do with that then" !!

She cooks from scratch, but she can't cook either lol im quite a good cook me, but only really since we have had DD. We used to eat shite!