Right folks!
Who wants to join me in the Colin's mother challenge?
First of all, who is Colin? Never you mind.
Who is Colin's mother? She was a smart woman with a plan. A cunning plan. A meal plan. Colin's mother, like many other cunning women, like me and you worked out that if you could locate 14 meals that your family would all reasonably enjoy then you could create the joy that is... the 2 week meal plan.
Why 14 meals? Well, one meal a day for 2 weeks.
What should be in these meals? Meals should be reasonably healthy and largely easy to construct in a limited time frame that the typical family with working parents and small kids has.
Is this a working parent stay at home parent debate? No, I don't care, I'm just trying to sort out my own life and find some decent recipes, not start a debate.
Basically I am on a quest to find meals that my family (4 of us, 2 adults, 2 DS) don't mind eating once a fortnight, so that the whining is lessened and we eventually save time and money.
I have at my disposal:
A Slow Cooker
A Pressure Cooker
A Microwave
A Bread Maker
A Cooker with a timer (which I have a paranoid fear of... the timer, not the cooker)
A Kettle
A Smart Phone :)
So tonight we had boeuf bourguignon (beef stew with wine) with couscous, made in the slow cooker.
Here is a fancy recipe:
www.deliaonline.com/recipes/main-ingredient/meat/beef/boeuf-bourguignon.html
Here is what I did in a quick and dirty way in 10 minutes.
2 packs of Tesco everyday value diced beef
some bacon rashers
2 packs of chestnut mushrooms
3 carrots
half a bottle of cheap red wine
4 cloves of garlic
lots of thyme, 3 bay leaves
Cut the bacon rashers into small pieces, cooked them up, drained most of the fat, browned the beef in the same pan as the bacon. Dumped the whole lot into the slow cooker. Sliced the mushrooms, sliced the carrots, minced the garlic and dumped them all in the slow cooker. Slung half a large bottle of wine on them. Set it at low. Went to work.
Returned home 7 hours later. Weighed out 200 grams of couscous, added 350mls of boiling water. 5 minutes later we sat down to dinner.
Kids happy, husband happy. I'm happy.
Meal 1 for Colin's mother's challenge complete.
Into the fridge has gone, one large takeaway container of boeuf. I plan to harvest this during the week.
Tomorrow.... baked potatoes with toppings (cheese, beans, pineapple, ham and maybe even last night's boeuf!). Everyone picks what goes on their baked potato. Everyone eats, no one whines. No waste.