Cooking "properly"...

[LissyGlitter]

I am now officially a SAHM. I am really enjoying it, but I have a teatime problem. DP is hard to feed. He's not fussy (far from it, he will eat anything) but he much prefers "proper" food - ie cooked from scratch, local ingredients, all the stuff we are meant to do. i would appear to have forgotten how to cook somehow (been with him nearly 4 years, he has done most of the cooking as we have both worked/studied/whatever).
I am fine doing mine and DD1s lunches (baked potatoes, sandwiches, beans on toast, boiled eggs, etc) but when it comes to something more substantial for the evening meal my mind goes blank. He works in a warehouse so he does need a decent meal, and I feel mean making him start cooking as soon as he gets in from work (he has to if we are to eat before DD1s bedtime)
Added complications are that we have an aga-style oven that I don't fully understand and we are quite poor. Also he does have a thing for "foreign" food (he tends to cook things like jambalaya or gumbo as his staple, fallback dishes) and I am a fan of very "English" food like pies and potato based things. We will both happily eat the others favourites, but I would like to make him some things he really likes every now and again.
DD1 will eat anything she sees us eating, and DD2 is three weeks old and breastfed, so we are fine there for a while.
Is there a book or website that would help me? Or do you lot have any easy recipies I could add to my repetoire?
I do my main shop online with Tesco (I know, not so ethical, but I don't drive and a weekly shop on the bus with a newborn and a toddler is beyond me at the moment) but we do have a brilliant butcher and a couple of good greengrocers in our local row of shops where I could get bits and bobs through the week. No market though, unfortunately, unless I go into the centre of Newcastle, which is a bit much for a bit of shopping. We have a well stocked store cupboard though, due to DPs hobby of cooking.

Jamie Oliver book? I have Gran's favourite recipes which is all fresh, ingrediants and has some 'foriegn food' in too.

Easy cheese sauce recipe -
Milk
Add cornflour (mixed with warm water into a paste) untill it thickens)
Add cheese to taste

Mince in gravy with dumplings
Fry mince (from local butcher who tells me it comes from a nearby a farm)
Add hot water and 3 oxo cubes
Add cornflour untill it thickens (see above)
Add pre boiled sliced carrots (from greengrocers over the road who has own allotment)
Add tinned peas

Dumplings - make with suet - instructions on the suet packet.

Sorry I measure nothing, I just tend to throw the amount that looks about right.

go to the lib and borrow Jamie's Dinners, the Dinner Lady Cookbook, Tana Ramsey and any Rachel Allen ones you can find

Basically you need a repertoire of 8 or so dishes you can go round and round with. Mine includes
shepherd's pie
chilli con carne
bolognese
risotto (oven baked one based on this recipe with either bacon or smoked salmon fillet)
curry
pasta with meatballs made from the insides of good sausages
roast chicken or traybaked chicken joints
steak, fried, sliced thin and stuffed in baguettes

The key thing about most of these is you can make them in bulk, that is to say 6 or 8 portions, and therefore only need to actually cook three or four nights a week rather than 7.

menu planning is your friend

I may just do that mince and dumplings tonight! That is, if I can get DD1 to have a nap so she is in a good enough mood to walk with me to the shop...

Chicken casserole
Brown some chicken thighs or quarters. Stick in an oven proof dish.
Add chopped onions, carrots & mushrooms
Chuck in some frozen sweetcorn & peas
Add about a pint of chicken stock and shove in the aga for 2-3 hours on a low heat.
About 1/2 an hour before the end add about 2 tablespoons of chicken gravy granules & stir.
Serve with crusty bread
You could also add dumplings about 1/2 hour before the end - add a good pinch of mixed herbs to the packet mix before adding the water for a nice taste

I wsa thinking of meal planning, at first I thought it reminded me too much of my nana, then I realised she is 81, my Grandad is 98, they are both going strong,and my Nana has brought up two of her own kids, and looked after three grandchildren and countless kids in her years as a nanny and nursery nurse, so she probably knows more than me about managing a house and family!

What do you do, the same meals each week? Or sit down and plan the week on a certain day each week?

I treated myself to some Le Cruset pans the other day too...I had been saving up for a Wii, but at the last minute spent it on pans instead. My teenage sister was horrified

I sit down each week with a couple of recipe books and decide what we are going to have, then buy on line. My sister is not a cofident cook but is enjoying working her way through the Jamie Oliver Minstry? Book. Also AGA typ cooker, in the top oven the rule is the closer to the top you cook the food the quicker it gets done.

I haven't got it myself, but lots of people here have sung the praises of Jamie Oliver's Ministry of Food.

Some of my staples are:

Mince - we usually have one meal a week based on mince, typically shepherd's pie, spaghetti bolognese, meatballs in tomato sauce with spaghetti or chilli. Sometimes instead of doing shepherd's pie, I serve just the mince part along with yorkshire puddings. Sometimes for the chilli I serve it with wraps, yoghurt and grated cheese instead of just with rice.

None of these is difficult, but all are satisfying meals.

Beef - I occasionally make a beef casserole (stewing steak, onions, carrots, celery and a tin of tomatoes, cooked in the oven at a low heat for up to 4 hours), and serve this with mash or rice

Roast chicken - either with all the traditional trimmings, or with freshly baked baguette (I buy Sainsbury's Basics, 2 for around 60p?) and roast vegetables (peppers, onions, courgettes, carrots)

Cauliflower cheese with green veg

And around once a fortnight we have a 'Big Salad' - lots of little salad dishes, mostly vegetarian, e.g. sliced fried peppers, with balsamic vinegar, home made coleslaw, green salad, tomatoes and mozzarella, etc

HTH!

I haven't got it myself, but lots of people here have sung the praises of Jamie Oliver's Ministry of Food.

Some of my staples are:

Mince - we usually have one meal a week based on mince, typically shepherd's pie, spaghetti bolognese, meatballs in tomato sauce with spaghetti or chilli. Sometimes instead of doing shepherd's pie, I serve just the mince part along with yorkshire puddings. Sometimes for the chilli I serve it with wraps, yoghurt and grated cheese instead of just with rice.

None of these is difficult, but all are satisfying meals.

Beef - I occasionally make a beef casserole (stewing steak, onions, carrots, celery and a tin of tomatoes, cooked in the oven at a low heat for up to 4 hours), and serve this with mash or rice

Roast chicken - either with all the traditional trimmings, or with freshly baked baguette (I buy Sainsbury's Basics, 2 for around 60p?) and roast vegetables (peppers, onions, courgettes, carrots)

Cauliflower cheese with green veg

And around once a fortnight we have a 'Big Salad' - lots of little salad dishes, mostly vegetarian, e.g. sliced fried peppers, with balsamic vinegar, home made coleslaw, green salad, tomatoes and mozzarella, etc

HTH!

Whoops!

MrsB do ovenbaked risottos really work? Could I just adapt a standard risotto recipe (eg Milanese)? Is there anything special one would need to do to adapt it?

Lissy - agree with MrsBadger about cookbooks but would also add Jamie's Ministry of Food.

I semi-meal-plan - we have a number of simple staples for which we always have the stuff in (eg sausages and mash, pasta with tomato sauce of various kinds) but each week before going shopping I will think 'right, this week I'm also going to cook x, y and z'. At least one of those will be something I can cook in bulk and freeze (am having particular success with vegetable curries from Ministry of Food at the moment) so 2 or 3 double portions will end up in the freezer for weeks ahead.

x-posts with Santa and 5gomad re Ministry of Food!
I am a confident cook but the back-to-basics approach in MoF is good for giving you a simple base around which you can improvise (eg with stews).

The other thing which helps with menu planning is thinking in terms of patterns - eg you have a roast chicken one day, do something with the leftover meat another (eg pie) then make stock for risotto another. Or roast lamb followed by lamb curry.

Meal planning chez badger:

our Tesco online shop comes on Friday night, so has to be ordered on Thursday.

Thursday night we make a list of who needs what meals in the coming week (sometimes dh is working late and will eat out, sometimes we have people coming over etc etc), decide what to make for when and make a list of what we need. I go online and buy the stuff.

The plan isn't hard and fast
eg if things arrive with awkward best-before dates we migth eg have the salmon on Saturday and shunt the rest of the meals forward
ditto if we end up having more food than we need, so the unused mince or whatever goes in the freezer for another time.

I also do a top-up shop during the week (mostly because dd loves it ) so I pick up anything we have forgotten, run out of or suddenly decide we need.

Jamie's Ministry of food is ordered from Amazon!

I have a rough food plan that I think about on a Sunday night, though it's not set in stone.

This week we've had fishcakes, chips and coleslaw (homemade).
Stir fried noodles with veg and tofu.
Tongiht is Jamie's korma with veg.
Spag carbonara.
Quiche with salad and leftover coleslaw.
We're eating out for Saturday lunch so will just pick in the evening.
Sunday is a roast (I have lamb, chicken and potk in the freezer, will decide later)

And then I'll roughly plan following week starting with roast meat leftovers.

I'd worked my way through Jamie's MOF. It's not so much that I'm not a confident cook, I am and I love it but during the week I'm looking for things that don't take an age, and I also like that nothing in that book costs a lot, and is easy to find in the small town I live in.

Kathy, the oven-baked risotto isn;t quite as good as the stovetop version but it is sooo much easier that for school-night cooking I don't care.

You do need a pan with a really well-fitting lid (I put foil over a normal casserole then put the lid on as well) and you do have to use the proportions of rice to liquid from the link I posted, but obv the flavours can be anything you like - our best one is smoked salmon fillet with peas and a slosh of Martini, which I lifted from one of the Naked Chef books, but the genuine Naked Chef recipe is saved for dinner parties only these days...

Another vote for Ministry of Food by Jamie Oliver. I love it, and I cook a lot. Its brilliant for proper family dinners, everything i have tried is really nice from it and it doesnt require 4000 ingredients like Delia or anything unusual either. Brilliant book. I just got Economy Gastronomy as well which looks ideal for what you want, but I havent tried any recipes from it yet, so can't say its tried and tested.

I have staples much as everyone else, but I do get bored. I love the 30 minute recipes in Olive magazine - each month I try a few new ones, and if they are good, they get added to the repertoire.

Brilliant MrsBadger, thank you very much!
That's tonight's dinner sorted then.
I do love risotto but things are mad chez Kathy between 6 and 7.30 with a baby to breastfeed (it's his peak feeding time), dd and ds1 to get to bed, and the dinner to have on the table for 7.30 (if dh eats any later he gets indigestion ). So I am currently focusing on things that can be prepped in advance, started off and then won't come to any harm in the oven.

I'm going to adopt Santa's 'Big Salad' too - we also have Big Salad but it is a huge mixed green one and I'm getting bored with it - little bowls of stuff would be more fun.

If it helps, I have a 10mo and a toddler and cook from scratch most days. I keep a record of what I do on my blog here.

It has local, seasonal ingredients mainly, so is quite cheap and the recipes are quick (like you no time in the kitchen with two of them to entertain). It is also quite mixed so some German, English, Mexican, French, Italian etc.

I add new recipes every week.

Gosh this is an amazing thread... am going to bookmark it for all the lovely ideas!

great blog 120cms!

Thanks Kathy . I'm finding it hard enough cooking with one toddler and one BF baby; can't believe you are doing 3! V impressed.

oh, I cheat 120cm - dd is at school and ds1 at nursery all day. (I am on maternity leave but if we take him out of nursery we lose our place there and the waiting lists are v long.) That's why it only works if I can cook or prep in advance, while ds2 is asleep in the mornings.

Ahhh. Wise lady. I have nursery for both of them for two days a week to give me a weekend .

Nice for you to be able to have cuddles with DS2. I remember those mornings well. I used to spend hours making lovely cookies and cakes! I love (sleepy) small babies.