Family Meal ideas for a beginner please!

[spagbolandcheese]

Please can you give me some meal ideas for my family as I am really stuck. I was brought up mainly on ready type meals and freezer food as my parents worked full time and the lady that looked after me didn't cook, so cooking from fresh is not something I am used to ( although I long to!).

The types of meals I do make are all beef mince based and not much. I can make
Cottage Pie, spag bol and Lasagna. Most other nights the kids eat out the freezer e.g. fish fingers, pizza etc. I hate giving my kids ready meals/ freezer food and want to cook from fresh.

Please give me some meal ideas that are easy to cook for a beginner. I have a few cook books but I don't have much confidence and everything in the books looks scary to cook or too hard.

Thanks so much, i really appreciate any help/advice.

Do you have Jamie's Ministry of Food book?

Honestly, it isn't scary and has some great recipes in.

If you dont have it yet, pop into your local library and borrow it for a while to see if you like it - that is what I do

This is a week for us...

Sun - Roast chicken dinner
Mon - pasta with leftover chicken and broccoli
Tue - Sausage mash & peas
Wed - Nando salmon cubes on skewers with fried rice (lots of veg)
Thu - Meatballs, chips & peas
Fri - Pizza & potato wedges
Sat - Chicken & mushroom curry

i bought the student cookbook by hamlyn recently off amazon - very cheep and lots of normal recipes in that don't require tonnes of different/expensive ingredients. this would widen your options and give you a bit of confidence - boiled eggs, chilli, toad in the hole.......

Another big area of easy cooking is stir-fries. The easiest way to start would be to buy a pack of ready-chopped "stir-fry vegetables" but you will quickly see that you could buy and chop your own selection.

I usually do a chicken stirfry - buy skinned chicken breast fillets and chop them into strips (make sure you don't get raw chicken onto other surfaces and put the scissors away to be washed asap - sorry if you know this already!) then fry the bits in a little oil until they are cooked (cut one in half if you want to check - it should have stopped being pink in the middle). Then add the chopped vegetables and fry some more until they are heated through.

Serve with rice or noodles.

You can vary this by changing the vegetables, or adding a sauce at the end. Bought sachets of sauce are easy, but again you can experiment with things like soy sauce or making your own sweet&sour sauce.

I buy cookery magazines, lots and lots of easy recipes in those.

If you can make cottage pie, spag bol and lasagne, then I'm guessing you can make savoury mince/a rough tomato sauce/white sauce/and mashed potato... honestly you've got most of the difficult bits sorted!
So these should be dead easy for you, BBC food/Jamie Oliver's website will turn up easy recipes:
? Macaroni Cheese (another one where it REALLY doesn't matter) if the white sauce goes a bit lumpy
? (Good quality) sausage and mash with lots of veggies
? Pasta sauces - fry bacon, mushroom, garlic, onion, add chopped tomatoes, or roast up some veggies (peppers, aubergines, courgettes), then add to a tomato sauce made from softened onions, garlic, tinned tomato/passata and some herbs.
? Chilli - similar to your spag bol, but more veggies, chilli, red kidney beans etc. Then have with rice (get long-grain Easy Cook, put 1 mug rice to 2 mugs water, bring to boil with lid on, then turn down to v.low heat and leave to simmer, shaking the pan to stop sticking (keep lid on)) or jacket pots with salad and sour cream.

Oh, and if you can afford it buy/accumulate a couple of decent saucepans - one large non-stick frying pan with lid, and one large non-stick saucepan with lid, plus one or two plain steel pans. Use the non stick for cooking things like rice, omelette, fritatta, fish etc and it'll make your life much easier.

If you're religious about not using metal utensils in them/washing and drying them by hand rather than bunging them in the dishwasher/ NOT cooking things like sausages or anything sugary that might caramelise onto the bottom in them, then they should last for ages (I have some which are 12 years old and stilll going strong).

Another vote for Jamie's Ministry of Food - and yes, I borrowed it from the library too.

I have found a lot of his recipes online as well - some here on the official site.

I taught myself to cook with Delia Smith's Complete Cookery Course book - it's getting dated now but it doesn't assume too much knowledge.

Must add that we have been given the River Cottage Family Cookbook which is written to kids to follow and so is very simple and explains everything from first principles.

I'm quite a basic cook still so some ideas to get you started sorry if they are really basic!!

Spag bol grate in a carrot and a corgette for extra veg

cottage/sheps pie add in peas, green beans, sweetcorn to meat and swede/sweet potatoe/parsnips to the mash for extr veg

chicken breasts cut a slit and add pesto, wrap with bacon or parma ham 30 mins with peas/carrots/new potatoes

chicken breast as above but cover in either cherry tomatoes (really squash them in!!) or slices of tomatoes good slug of olive oil and add chopped peppers with veg.

par boil broccolli and cauli for 5 mins drain into dish cover with cheese sauce, breadcrumbs and grated cheese bake for 30 mins at 220 with roast or boiled pots and carrots. Souns nothing but it is SCRUMMY!!!!

fry leeks, bacon bits and chicken strips in butter for 5 mins, into dish cover with cheese sauce as above but cook at 200. Also nice topped with sweet potatoe mash.

sweet potatoe, corgette, aubergine, onion and pepper chopped, drizzle in olive oil roast for 20 mins at 220 then add pasta small like macaroni works well) pasta sauce and half pint boling water, cover in foil and cook at 200 for antother25 mins.

nice sausages with suede and sweet potato mash and peas/carrots/sweetcorn/green bean/cauli etc

fry bacon bits and olives add to cooked pasta and stir in for 5 mins pesto

fry bacon bits and leeks in butter for 5 mins add to pasta and a cheese sauce - change to whatever other veg you like for quick dinners