OMG - Ive just watched new Jamie Oliver Prog and cant believe a 5 year old's fave meal is a Kebab!!!!

[mumma2cjh]

I felt soooooooooo guilty the other day as in a md rush I gave my 3 year old fresh pasta nad pesto followed by strawberries, grapes and apple slices....After watching JO's new programme I feel totally relieved.

Im not a great cook but would never, never, never feed my 3 year old kebab meat or chips and cheese from a take a way!!!!

I've eaten pigs womb in a Korean restaurant. Does that make me middle class, working class or just a bit stupid?

OMG LaVie - it's lunchtime!

I think it makes you adventurous LaVie!

sorry it was nice until someone told what I'd actually eaten then I felt rather nauseous.

don't know if I dare ask, but what was it sevred with LaVie??

that should say served, sorry

noodles I think. I also had ox tongue. which sounds kind of ok except it was actually a massive ox tongue served on a plate! Itried it but couldn't finish it, not suprisingly!

tbh pesto is not THAT healthy. Its just olive oil mixed with nuts and cheese and basil for colour. My DD likes it because it's salty - not because it's posh. It was a poor person's way of making carbs into a meal - basically take veg (cheaply grown at home) and dried pasta (flour and water) and load it up with oil to get the calorie count up. Nuts and cheese added protein.

kebabs, properly made, are probably a better balanced meal - meat, salad, bread.

Pesto is healthy. Oilve oil - healthy. Cheese - parmesan, low-fat, healthy.
Basil - healthy.
pine nuts - low cholesterol, healthy.

Kebab - salad healthy.
Meat - soooo not healthy, full of high cholsterol fat and bacteria
pitta - healthy.
Kebab ok if bread and salad included. The kebab last night had neither.

The problem is that the children were having it practically every day.

I've never been ill after a kebab I have to say

George Orwell (being perhaps more insightful, if less hands-on than Jamie) did a chapter on working class diet in The Road to Wigan Pier. And his conclusion was: yes, you can get a healthy diet on very little money. Boiled potatoes and apples don't cost much more than fish and chips and sugary tea. But it's precisely when you're down at heel and bored and stressed and worried and cold that you're not going to want to have the good, boring alternative. You are going to want a treat, something a little bit forbidden, something you send out for, a little bit extra. And calorie-rich and sugary, because that cheers you up. It's about quick fixes. I have found this too, in the days when I was poor and did not have the responsibility of children.

Seems nothing much has changed, really. It's not just about cooking skills (after all we were none of us born with the ability to change a nappy- but most Mums, regardless of class, manage to learn that one). It's about comfort.

I hope if we were to fall on bad times that I would still be able to stick to what I knew was best. But let's face it, it's an awful lot easier to make my kids eat liver and boiled spuds when I know that they live in a comfortable and safe place, have lots of fun toys, don't have to be the only ones who have to stay at home from the school trip because I can't afford it etc etc.

In no way is a kebab a balanced meal 600 calories per 100 grammes!

if you have a flat screen TV and your kids eat takeaways all the time then its poverty of aspiration not financial poverty

Someone did say that earlier on Cory - it's not lack of money, time or knowledge. It's sheer can't-be-botheredness. Yes I understand it, but it's like the people who complain about having no money when they;ve spent it all on a pair of shoes. It's not that they haven't got the money, it's that they don't want to spendit on boring stuff.

Well I've enjoyed reading this thread whilst I've been polishing my halo.

I am reminded though of the time I took a job washing up in a restaurant kitchen when I was about 11 years old. Sadly I must have been dreaming of the Bay City Rollers whilst working as I did a very poor job indeed of washing up a mincer. The chef went ballistic a few days later when he started mincing some beautiful steak...... maggots came through the holes at the end of the machine. I can still see the little wriggly lovelies now. [whole body twitch and urging.]

My hygiene standards have improved with age. Honestly.

I think that's what annoyed me about that mum on the programme last night because she started crying saying she had debts and no money etc and yet she's buying take-aways every night and smoking - I certainly can't afford to do that! Even if she can't cook, surely she could open a tin of beans and put some bread in a toaster and grate some cheese on top? She then laughed when she asked her dd what her favourite fizzy drink was??? That's got nothing to do with poverty or class, that's just stupidity.

Quite. That was the original point about pesto - it's really NOT HARD to make a decent meal.
Altho it was quite touching when she made a pancake for her ds.

And pancakes are not the healthiest meal going either. No protien, no vitamins...

shame on you JO

nothot on Wed 01-Oct-08 16:26:26
"Someone did say that earlier on Cory - it's not lack of money, time or knowledge. It's sheer can't-be-botheredness. Yes I understand it, but it's like the people who complain about having no money when they;ve spent it all on a pair of shoes. It's not that they haven't got the money, it's that they don't want to spendit on boring stuff."

Well, when they make a programme like that obviously they're going to choose people who can be relied on to make themselves look bad and Jamie Oliver look good. They're not going to show people like my friend who is terminally ill and lets her children get away with eating a less healthy diet because she reckons they've got enough stress in their lives already without spending their last months together arguing about food. They're not going to show people who are genuinely poor or stressed or depressed. Or people who live miles from the only shop that sells anything other than cheap pre-packed stuff and who can't afford the bus fare (I have seen some ghastly shops in poorer areas!). Depression is not actually the same thing as can't-be-botheredness.

'did he show her how to make beans on toast? did he show her how to even microwave a jacket potato and put beans on it?'

Is it that hard to suss out? She did not say she is disabled. And even then, fuck, DH is nearly illiterate and can suss that out.

My 5-year-old can suss out the toaster.

As DH pointed out, David Blunkett went on Gordon Ramsay's show and chopped a bunch of veg and made mince for a pie and he can't see FA.

Chicken kebabs aren't low in fat. They're made with just about every bit of the chicken, skin and all, and when accompanied by cheesy chips from the chippy every single night it's not hard to figure out what affect that has on your diet.

There's not being able to, and there's being too feckless to even learn and stick with it.

There's can't and just haven't learned how.

But really, at the end of the day, there's no real excuse (some disabilities aside).

'Depression is not actually the same thing as can't-be-botheredness.'

I'm depressed.

Very, very much so.

Been suicidal, made attempts on my life, now under care of psych consultant and on increasing dose of ADs to hopefully head off another crashing case of PND.

I get so fed up of the depression excuse as a cop out for just fucking up everything including your kids and their health.

Yes, I realise it has that effect in some cases, but in a lot it doesn't have to.

Is it a struggle? You'd better believe it! Every single day, minute by minute sometimes. You want to scream, you want to vanish, you want to die.

You have to bother, you have to FORCE yourself to go there - no one else can do it for you - or you will die. It's that simple and that hard. It just is what it is.

But life is hard. EVERYONE has a cross to bear of one sort or another.

I don't want my illness to be an excuse for people to label me capable of being nothing more than a feckless loser not able to look after myself and my kids.