Freshly cooked meals for children? How often a week?

[Mum84762002]

How often are you cooking freshly cooked meals and how often are you cooking frozen food for your children?

By fresh I refrigerated meat/fish etc.

Thank you!

About 6 x a week. Don’t think food warehouse meat is good quality I prefer fresh.

We are probably genuinely fresh 4 nights a week - chicken, fish, prawns, beef or pork. Of the other days, one night a week tends to be dried pasta with a quick sauce such as tomato and chorizo or tomato and baked feta (usually with a bag of rocket thrown in), one night is something like M&S breaded chicken or pizza and the last night tends to be a takeaway.

Honestly about half of our meals are made from scratch, the other half are either cobbled together from shop bought ingredients or from the freezer. We don't really have ready meals. I have a very fussy child so there isn't as much veg /beans etc as I would like but to be honest this is massive progress for them
The last week:
Homemade pizza and salad
Sausage chips and sweetcorn
Shop bought meatballs and pasta sauce in a pasta bake - veg sticks and hummus to start
Homemade butternut squash soup and rolls
Curry made with a jar of paste
Homemade pea and prawn risotto but the stock was from a cube.

OK you're worried that pure chicken breast, mince or sausages that you buy raw and ready frozen are poorer quality than those you buy fresh. Is that right?

I think you should be careful interpreting answers here because many people will be replying on cooking from scratch Vs beige food. In my view whether you buy the chicken portion fresh or frozen is immaterial. You can buy frozen mince or chicken and still be cooking healthy meals from scratch every day.

With frozen you can sometimes get it a bit cheaper because of the lower transportation costs - this is why I usually buy fish and mixed seafood frozen rather than fresh. At the end of the day a very cheap frozen sausage is not going to the best choice, but I don't expect they are any worse than a very cheap fresh sausage.

Cook everyday, but often use things like pre-chopped frozen onions, chopped sweet potato etc. Bolognese/ cottage pie/curry/ lasagne etc make a bit extra to freeze so it's not relentless.

“Freezer food” to me is nuggets/breaded fish & chips etc, we have this about once a week. Sometimes this quick easy meal is replaced by dried pasta and pesto or something.

6 times per week we generally have home cooked food, we might have bought a large packet of chicken fresh and frozen in batches and use this in the meals but that doesn’t equate to “frozen food” to me. Same if I chuck a fresh mince I’ve got in. I’d never use those frozen mince pellets from those kinds of shops though if that’s what you mean.

5/6 days a week I’m cooking from scratch and I even make bread several times a week but I often buy frozen fish fillets and chicken breasts or thigh or I but fresh kince but some times I freeze it.

Can I ask why you’re asking this question?

I just didn't know if buying ready frozen meat was not good?

More or less every day. Yes, there may be times, I put a frozen pizza in the oven, or frozen fish and chips, but that's once a week at most. The rest of the time, I'm using fresh meat, fish, and vegetables etc.

I wouldn't feed kids frozen meat or 'fresh' meat.

So Fri/sat/sun is always fresh homemade meals, out of the other four days one is usually bolognaise or chicken pasta, one is eggs, beans and toast, another jacket potato and then chicken or fish and potatoes so fresh but fairly easy

Frozen chicken breasts are just a good as fresh, same with beef mince and any other meats.

Sausages are a 'processed' food so are only as good as their ingredients - frozen or not.

I buy mad expensive organic meat and it all comes frozen xx

Edited to say - obviously meat quality differs and food warehouse might have a lot of added water.

Probably 5/6 days a week.

I’d say 6-7 days a week. We eat the same food and I don’t want fish fingers or chicken dippers!

On occasion, they will have beige freezer food like the above because Dh and I are having leftovers but there aren’t enough for all 4 of us, or they didn’t really fancy it anyway. Or sometimes we’ll have fish and chips, but we make like nice fish for ourselves. But my 7 year old does not need a £6 tuna steak 🤣 so he gets fish fingers.

We do eat food from the freezer, but like homemade soup that I made from the garden and froze. Or tonight we’re having sausages in rolls. The sausages are from our own pigs. I have three pigs worth of pork in one freezer that should last us 2 years, but that’s probably as close to made from scratch as you can get, as we literally made them from scratch. 😂

It’s not because I’m a martyr. Mostly, it’s because I’m fussy and I like nice food, so we have nice food every night, except a couple times a month when we don’t.

Everyday for us with the exception of takeaway once a week at the most. Again, not meaning to sound virtuous, and I'm not a great cook, but this is something I feel is really important. Particularly as my kids get older and more in control of their diet out of the house (and therefore eating more crap) at least I know they're getting one decent meal a day. It's simple food though, last night fish chow mein, which was really quick (not using a ready made sauce but I have all the components of the sauce in stock) - today is jacket potatos with tuna mayonaisse and salad. Tomorrow chicken curry (home made sauce).

What do you all eat then usually? I’d say we eat fresh meals 5 days a week and then a couple of days we might either have freezer food or a takeaway. I wouldn’t want to eat freezer meals too often.

Some meat especially cheaper stuff, frozen or fridge, has stuff added to it so check the ingredients. But I don't think there's anything wrong with using frozen meat in general.

We use frozen meat from Farm2Fork which is very high welfare and quality, but is frozen for freshness and I have no issues with that.

Re cooking from scratch, I cook from scratch every night apart from the odd takeaway (once a month or so). But I do use prechopped and frozen onion, frozen veg like peas and sweetcorn, preprepared stir-fry veg, etc. If I do pizza for the kids then it is 'wrap pizza' so it's UPF free and also fast (I use the crostica mollica wraps). If I do chips then I either do them myself or I use the basic Lidl ones which have no unnecessary ingredients. The kids don't like any other beige oven food like nuggets etc.

Jesus does pasta not count?

No, it isn't the norm for some people. Personally I cook from scratch pretty much every day but I wouldn't say I wasn't doing my job as a parent if I didn't do it every single day. Shift working single mums for instance probably don't have the time to cook every single day, it doesn't mean they're not good mums. I'm sure there are things that we all do that silly, judgemental people would look down on us for.

You didn't need to add anything other than "every day".

Probably 5 or 6 days a week. The only “ready made” main meal components we really have are soup, pizzas, fish fingers and tempura chicken tenders for burgers, and try to only have that kind of thing one or two times a week.

That doesn’t mean we’re eating majorly exciting stuff from scratch! Some nights it’s eggs and toast or chicken wraps, but by and large I try and make sure I’m making the majority of the meals we eat myself.

Every day.

Once a week we’ll have a basic thing like jacket potatoes though, so although it’s technically freshly cooked, it’s not really actually cooking.

So frozen meat is absolutely fine - it’s the same as fresh meat - just frozen!

We often bulk buy our meat and fish when it’s on offer and freeze it. We then defrost it and make a meal from scratch using it as an ingredient. I wouldn’t class that or frozen vegetables as being anything less than fresh.

We cook meals from scratch every day, but cook fairly basic meals - mostly grilled meat/fish with vegetables and salad so not hugely time consuming.

We have a number of meals on rotation so we always have the ingredients either in the fridge or in the freezer which helps cut down on the “what shall we have for dinner” mental load.

Does a meal you’ve cooked from scratch and frozen count? I mean obviously it does-but Mumsnet is particularly mad about this sort of thing. I still remember “Oh, I never give the children frozen peas. They’re just sugar bombs”

Cooking from scratch every day is a faff, but bulk cooking from scratch, freezing portions and then defrosting on a daily basis is MUCH easier, without losing the health benefits.

Every day for dinner because we all eat together. I confess to the odd UPF lunch of fish fingers or chicken nuggets but not as a regular thing at all.