Wanted; quick & easy recipes for novice cook nanny

[SE13Mummy]

The nanny we've just taken on is in the early stages of learning to cook and has asked for 8 simple recipes that she can learn and use over the 3 days per week she'll have our children. We've come up with the following so far;

shepherd's pie with veg
tuna pasta bake
Spaghetti bolognese
Cous cous salad
pasta with veg/philadelphia-type sauce

The recipes need to be suitable for a 3-year-old, 13-month-old and a 9-month-old, easy to prepare, cheap and ideally avoid any use of cod or tomato!

Any ideas? Please?

Fantastic beginners cookbook by usbourne, I can cook and still use this for quick and simple recipes www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0746085389/?tag=googhydr-21&hvadid=5121886295&ref=pd_sl_rz1z28ico_b
I also have some of the childrens usbourne cookbooks they are really easy to follow.

Your spag bol isn't going to be great then, with no tomato!

Is she allergic or just hates them? Funny enough they are the exact 2 things that my DP hates - tomatoes, even to look at make him feel sick. How odd!

Shepherds pie and Spag Bol are my main 2 easy to cook dishes. What about teaching her to make a nice homemade soup?

If she can handle fish than a fie pie topped with mash is very easy to do too, just sheperds pie with different ingredients.

What about tuna fishcakes and salad?

meatballs (don't have to have tomato sauce)
minestrone soup (minus tomatoes) (ds used to love this when he was around 9 months)
roast chicken and potatoes / chicken soup with vegetables and noodles
grilled salmon with peas and boiled new potatoes?

Omelettes with various fillings or frittatas

Cous cous and roasted veg

Braised or stewed beef or a hotpot of some kind (bing all ingredients in, leav in oven for hours)

Perhaps the best way to approach it is to think about a basic dish orcookong skill and come up with as many variations as possible. So you have a basic white sauce which is v easy to make but a pretty essential component in a lot of dishes. You can cook some pasta and then add tuna and sweetcorn or ham and leek or peas and broccoli with some cheese. Pasta bake! Or you could have pre-made ragu, cook some veg and you could add pasta for a lasagne or aubergine and potato for a moussaka.

Once she knows how to make a stew, especially if you have a slow cooker then she can do beef strew, chicken stew (or chicken supreme with her white sauce!), bacon and onion hotpot... Then she can just make some mashed potato, rice or dumplings and you have economical nutrtious meals using the same cooking method.

That way her stock of recipes will increase v quickly and you'll both benefit in the long run. Her from her newly acquired cooking skills and you from a huge variety of foods for your DCs. There are 3 types of nannies who can cook IMO. Type 1 know 10 recipes that they can cook really well and vary a little so they're not serving the same each week. Type 2 are slaves to recipe books but love cooking. Type 3 have learnt the basic cooking skills, have a bit of imagination with a good knowledge of nutrition and can cook practically anything. At the moment you're heading for type 1, which is fine, but type 3 only takes a tiny bit more work on her part at the start as long as you know what to guide her to make.

Apologies for the truly appalling typing there!

risotto is good and very easy. Simply put water in sautee pan, add a knorr flavor cube, add risotto, add whatever veg you find in the fridge. chop it all up and simmer until risotto absorbs water. It is bese to err on the side of too little water and then add if it dries out. I'm afraid I never measure it so can't tell you how much, but you should probably start with at least 4 times (by volume) as much water as risotto.

Thanks for the ideas!

DD2 isn't actually allergic to raw tomatoes/white fish but her big sister had a few mouth-swelling, whole-body-glow-in-the-dark-rash incidents after eating these when she was younger so we think it makes sense for those ingredients to be avoided when someone else is looking after her.

Rachel Allen's book "Home Cooking" is great. I'm a good cook but this is specifically designed to feed a family with lots of kiddie friendly food, plus cake and buns, and even a section on homemade baby food. I thoroughly recommend it. I think she's on BBC on Saturday mornings too so it might be worth recording if she is a complete beginner in the kitchen. Boiling an (soft boiled) egg is still one of the hardest things I find to get right !1