Please help me with my family's diet, its terrible

[xxxJess123xxx]

Hi all, I have a 2 year old and a 5 year old. Both typically fussy. No allergies.
Our diets are absolutely terrible as I seriously can't cook. I'm the type of person who can't make an omelette or burn pasta for christ sake.
We eat shit basically. Ready meals, nuggets and chips, pizza. Lunches are sarnies crisps and some grapes etc.
I'm feeling like an absolute rubbish mum and I want to change but I seriously can't cook.
Does anyone have any stupidly easy, cheap to make, fool proof recipes for dinners for my family.
I am slightly overweight. Kids are good weights and take a multi vitamin each day. Eat far too much chocolate etc
I feel so ashamed 😞
Thanks x

Excellent OP! I want to see photos later I bet it will be lovely. Good luck!

Thank u 😁 I will defo take piks xx

Today's xx

@xxxJess123xxx

Today's xx

Looks delicious... I'm on my way 😊

@xxxJess123xxx Looks good!! How did the kids do with it tonight? 😊

Excellent! Well done OP.

Id start with some recipe books aimed at "cant cook" people. Personally I like Jamie Olivers ministry of food. Lots of basic recipes in there.

Also you tube videos on how to cook various meals.

My easy cook, one pot meal that results in one meal for today one for another day.
Chop onion. Fry in oil (I use a teaspoon of coconut oil from a jar)

Add other chopped veg eg carrots, peppers.
Add a packet of quorn mince or quorn chunks.
Add in more veg eg mushrooms - whatever you have.

Add drained tins of things like sweetcorn, butter beans, chickpeas.
Add chopped tinned tomatoes.

Add herbs/stockcubes for flavour.

Stir stir and leave to cook for 10 - 30 minutes whilst you cook eg pasta. Jacket potatoes.

Put half the pot of tomato "gloop" in the fridge in a dish. Following day you can eg add pasta to it and put in the oven as a pasta bake. Or heat on the hob in a saucepan - add to jacket pots.

@xxxJess123xxx looks brilliant! Look how far you've come in less than a week!

I found the flavour quite bland, it was was chicken tonight jar. Kids only ate the corn on the cob 🤦‍♀️ but I'm going to keep trying x

You could use the Maggie Seasoning bags, or the sachets.. They add more flavour then jars x

You're doing so well! Agree seasoning mixes are tastier than jars and you can add a little so dcs can get used to it. We keep a jar of jalapenos in the fridge plus some good quality chilli sauce and so on for spicing up our food, the dcs prefer it milder.

I love cooking but lockdown, working from home with a toddler and general stressiness has forced us to be ultra efficient with lunches and dinners. Here are some quick and lazy recipes:

• pasta salad - boil pasta (trick is to not add the pasta until you have a full rolling boil, stir regularly and keep the lid half off. Rinse with cold water once done to prevent sticking). Add tinned tuna, tinned sweetcorn, chop some cucumber and tomatoes. Good squirt of mayo. Replace tuna with any other tinned fish or precooked chicken.
• everything in the oven dinner - I've realised that using glass dishes helps the cooking speed a lot, so invest in 2-3 heavy glass dishes (a few quid from IKEA). Do chicken breasts or thighs in one dish. Just drizzle with oil and seasoning and bake. In another dish chop peppers, onions, courgettes - any sort of watery veg and bake. This also works well if you empty a tin of chopped tomatoes over the top of the veg as it cooks like a veg stew. You can add a tin of beans or lentils to make this side dish go further.

-nothing wrong with serving boiled peas and/or frozen veg with each meal. There is also nothing wrong with serving the occasional fish finger or breaded chicken, especially if it comes with some veg!

• things like spaghetti bolognese and cottage pie are more labour intensive as it requires lots of veg prep and constantly stirring. Don't bother with these for now.

Good luck OP and don't stress, just try to build your confidence.

Ah well x as you say - try again. You know that the DC will eat the corn. You can try with a different flavouring for the chicken another time. I have been known to rinse off a sauce that no-one likes! And then just bung back in a frying pan with some butter or oil to dry it off and crisp it up! Once you feel more confident, you could add lemon juice, garlic and dried herbs. Or a drizzle of honey or similar.

Yes try again, you know that particular brand is bland so you can either add to it or try another sauce.

I do one in the slow cooker but it would work on the hob and that's to mix Campbells condensed soup with crème fraiche. For me the slow cooker is better because you want it to heat and cook but not boil.

For 2 chicken breasts I use 1 tin of soup (it HAS to be a condensed one) and one tub of crème fraiche - just put them in a pan with the chicken and simmer (bubbles around the edge of the pan with the odd 'blub' in the middle) on the hob it will be 20 - 30 mins but make sure it doesn't go dry.

I usually use mushroom soup and add mushrooms but you can add whatever you like.

Just remember a really lovely cheesey chicken thing I do that's dead simple.

Just fry off chicken breasts, garlic, onions and mushrooms until cooked.. Add a tub of philidelphia and a splash of milk, stir through on a low heat until melted. Add some extra grated cheese. Then serve over new potato's and broccoli.

It's lovely as a pie filling too.

A meal that goes down well here is chicken and chorizo pasta.

Dice two chicken breasts into small pieces.
Use half a chorizo sausage - chorizo has a white "skin" on the outside that you need to peel off before slicing the sausage into small slices - about a pound coins thickness.
Chop one onion into small pieces.

Fry the chicken in olive oil until it is sealed - it is no longer pink and has turned white. Then add the onion and chorizo. Continue stirring until the onion pieces are soft.
I add salt, pepper a crushed garlic clove (I use a garlic mincer) and paprika at this point.

Pour in one (large ) glass of red wine. Lower the heat and allow it to simmer. The wine will soon thicken will appear less watery. This is called reducing.

Add a carton/jar of pasatta and allow the sauce to gently bubble. The chicken will finish cooking in the sauce. If it starts looking like sauce is reducing too much you can add half a mug of water and stir it through. You can add as much fluid as needed but little and often is better than lots all at once.

In a separate deep pan boil some water. When it is boiling and a good sprinkle of salt and some olive oil. Then add in your dried pasta. I do a 500g bag for five of us.

The key to pasta for me is tasting it. After 8/9 minutes or so fish a piece out and try it. If it's much too hard leave it for 3/4 more minutes. If it's almost right try it again in a minute or so.

When you're happy with your pasta, strain off the water and then mix your pasta and sauce together in the largest pan.

Serve up and enjoy!

How do you feel about fish? It is honestly so easy to cook. Salmon, maybe?

You can cook it in a frying pan or in the oven. If you're not confident about a frying pan, then buy a packet of boneless salmon fillets (Sainsbury's do four for about £6), line a tin with sides with foil (this cuts down on the washing up, and keeps the flavours and moisture in), sprinkle some chilli flakes, a squeeze of lemon (it is much cheaper to buy lemon juice in bottles than fresh lemons, you can buy lime juice in this way too), salt and pepper, and then cover the salmon with the foil. Then pop in the oven for 25 minutes.

You could cook jacket potatoes at the same time (they will need maybe an hour and 15-30 minutes in there though, turn them over half way through), and you could also wrap corn in foil individually, and put them in the oven at the same time as the salmon.

Something else very easy and tasty for salmon, or any fish, is to marinade it before you cook it. A small amount of soy sauce, honey and ginger (the ginger puree that you can buy in a tube in Tesco is brilliant - it is with the fresh fruit and veg, they do chilli, garlic, coriander and lemongrass purees too). Mix the marinade together, put the salmon on top and turn it over a few times. And let it marinade - ten minutes would be fine. And then cook it in foil as above.

Potato wedges or sweet potato wedges are also easy and tasty. Peel potatoes (try and use bigger, longer potatoes than small round ones), cut lengthways into halves, then each half lengthways into quarters, then each quarter lengthways into halves.

Put them in a bowl. Add olive oil, some paprike, onion granules, garlic granules, thyme, salt and pepper (if you don't have some of these, then don't worry). Toss the wedges in that marinade. No need to wait for it to soak in or anything. Then lay out the wedges on a baking tray - I try and put the outside curved edge of the potato down first, so that the wedges sort of stand on that as I find that they are crisper and don't stick to the tray that way. And then cook them at 200 degrees celsuis until they're crispy on the outside and soft in the middle. They tend to take a god half an hour in my oven. You could put them in before the salmon (post above).

You could watch some of Jamie Oliver's programmes on C4. Try the Keep Cooking and Carry On which he did for lockdown. The recipes are on the C4 website so you can watch him as you go along.

Fresh simple sauces will always taste a lot nicer than one from a jar, plus you can add exactly what your family like (or more importantly leave out what thy don't).

Cooking takes a bit of practice, it's the learning what to do when it goes wrong, how to add some flavour or thicken up a sauce etc.

We're watching Nadiyas Time to Eat and that's got lots of easy recipes in!

Hey op, did you cook anything this weekend?

I wanna thank the posters who recommended the roasting tin books, I just made my first recipe from there and it was great.

@denverRegina

Get a big roasting dish.

Chop carrots, peppers, courgette, mushrooms, potatoes into bite size slices (no need to peel). Throw in some cherry tomatoes.

Put a big spoon of chopped garlic and oregano in and a couple of big spoons of olive oil. Shake it around and add a packet of sausages or a pack of boneless chicken thighs.

Bang in oven for 40 mins.

Give it a shake halfway through.

Stick on table

Serve with crusty bread

@denverRegina thanks, I made that today and it was delicious.