Tell Tefal about your Mum’s best evening meals - win a digital cooker worth over £300! NOW CLOSED

[AmeliaMumsnet]

Many of us look back longingly at our Mums’ home cooking but, with full-time jobs and busy lifestyles not to mention that take-away restaurant just around the corner it can be hard to get your own cooking up to her standards. That’s why Tefal want to know about the best things your Mum used to make for you on weeknights - that you wish you had the skills, confidence and time to cook for your family.

Here’s what Tefal have to say: ‘You don’t need to be a masterchef to achieve delicious meals in no time! Tefal have innovated again, and now give you Cook4Me.

Cook4Me is a one-pot digital cooker, ideal for mums looking to make fast and fresh meals. It is easy to use and intuitive: Cook4Me comes with 50 built-in recipes, and features a digital screen with guided cooking steps. Cook4Me cooks under pressure, which means you will save a lot of time. For example, after browning and pre-heating, it cooks a Chicken Tikka Masala in 3 minutes, a Thai Green Chicken curry in 4 minutes and a Risotto in 9 minutes (and no need to stir!)… It is the ideal all-in-one cooker, with up to 6 cooking manual modes: not only does it pressure cook, but it also steams, browns, simmers, gentle-cooks and automatically keeps your food warm. Its dishwasher-safe bowl can feed 6 people, perfect for the whole family or for batch-cooking.

Cook4Me comes in a standard version, with 50 built-in recipes, and in a Connected version, that works with My Cook4Me app, giving access to over 100 recipes.

You can use this link to purchase a Cook4Me of your own, at a fantastic 50% off retail price.’

Whether it’s a signature risotto, a flavoursome curry or the classic chili con carne, post on the thread below your Mum’s best dishes that you wish you could replicate. Everyone who posts will be entered into a prize draw where one MNer will be randomly selected to win a Cook4Me.

Thanks and good luck with the prize draw.

MNHQ

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Beef mince stew with lentils and veg. She cooked it in a teal pan that was like a heavy frying pan with big glass lid. We loved that as kids and she found it easy to make.

My mum makes an amazing red pepper and cheese risotto. It is still hands down my favourite meal. Xx

My MiL's steak & kidney pie!

Cosy corn beef hot pot - tinned corn beef with sliced potatoes and onions. Baked in oven with salty gravy so the inside was soft and the top layer crispy. With sliced white bread as a side absolutely amazing 😀

My mother is the best cook I know. Her meals are incredible. My favourite is her lasagne, it is always perfect with just the right amount of crunchy edges. Served with a crispy salad. I've made myself hungry thinking about it!

My Mum used to always make a cottage pie or shepherds pie out of the leftover sunday roast, it was gorgeous nothing like the yukky cottage pies that often pass for this dish when it's made with minced beef which is from a far inferior cut of meat than your topside or top rump sunday joint. We weren't particularly well off when I was a child but good cuts of meat were so much cheaper then relatively speaking so you could afford to get a larger bit of beef than you needed so you had leftovers for sandwiches or a cottage pie. Lamb was affordable then too to make shepherds pie, its extortionate nowadays. I sound like an old granny now! My mum used to love cooking with her old pressure cooker she never used pans to boil things everything went in the pressure cooker!.

My mum could make yummy fish pie.... Cheaply. Whenever I have made it it has been expensive and not as tasty!!!

my mum would make a gorgeous lasagne! would love to make one as good as hers. she also would make an amazing banana bread!!

At our house it was fish fingers and chips, egg and chips, sausage and mash etc etc things like lasagne were strange mystical foods that were not welcome in the home. Highlight of my mums culinary life was when the breville sandwich toaster arrived!

I've also just reminded my self of my grandma's love for pot noodles! These were a side dish for everything 😂😂

When I was little and money was tight then simply meals such as new potatoes topped with lots of fried onions were fab... Hungarian goulash is something I regret I haven't learnt from her!

It's a simple one, but my favourite childhood food memory was my mums Scotch Broth.

Coming home from school on a cold wet winters evening, the door opening and just being engulfed in the smell of her broth was so comforting. A real taste and the smell of being home and cosy.

However much I try I just cannot make mine quite as good. It is tasty, but just not as awesome as my mums scotch broth was.

My mum used to make bacon & egg pie every Monday. It was delicious My dad used to (& still does) like to make cabbage bredie once a month or so, it is I think a South African stew (he is from there). He loves it, but it's never really caught on with his DDs!

My mum still has a lot of her original kitchen equipment such as her Kenwood Chef from the 1970s & her pressure cooker & roasting tins from the same era. It would be interesting to see how this 'modern gadget' stands up to the old-fashioned ways.

My Mother made amazing seafood lasagne, cod, haddock, prawns etc with peas and onions layered with pasta in a herby white sauce.
She and my Father made a great team serving up homemade Indian dishes. One dinner party, it was only once the various curries, Gujarati beans and aloo Gobi had been demolished that they realised they'd forgotten to serve any rice

My mum and dad always are from Goa, India and they made lots of delicious traditional dishes when we were growing up. Food is a big part of their culture. It's meant that I'm more adventurous with what I eat and also enjoy cooking myself. Nothing beats going home for mums food and my kids love it too. I always put in my requests for a chicken or fish curry.

I recall the comfort of coming home to the smell of my dad cooking. He'd make wonderful stews, curries, pizzas and pastas. He introduced me to herbs, spices and being adventurous when cooking. As a vegetarian he spent time working out how we could use his tried and tested meat dishes with vegetarian alternatives.
I loved the quorn curry he would make. It was full of fresh, crunchy that contrasted the succulent and flavoursome quorn chicken style pieces. He'd try different spices and taught me how to cook rice the 'proper way' 👍🏼🍚

my mum used to make something called chicken creole it was amazing flavoursome and my absolute favourite, I used to get super excited knowing that was for dinner, I've never been able to recreate it

Cheese pastry with amazing mushroom sauce. She went to cooking classes and we got to try all the different recipes. Other than that, can't beat homemade / home grown apple crumble!!!

Her dinners were quite standard but to be honest it's the puddings that stood out for me.
Pineapple upside-down pudding with hot melted syrup.
Steamed sultana pudding with custard.
Steamed chocolate pudding with white custard (I have no idea what that actually was, come to think of it)
A kind of shortbread sandwich with jam in the middle.
Lemon meringue pie.
A spongy lemon and raspberry pudding which was runny underneath but like sponge cake on top.

I think that's the biggest difference between me and her in terms of cooking. Working full time I just don't have time for puddings apart from on a Sunday whereas we used to have home made pudding every night. It was a sad day (for my stomach) when she went out to work full time and we ended up with a choice of yoghurts instead .

My mums samosas are totally unbeatable, no one else can make the pastry as thin and crispy as she can!

Mum's cauliflower cheese was to die for!
She was a really good cook, brought up in France so we had a lot of Frenchified stuff, also spenct my first two years of life in Italy, so influences from there too. My grandmother was a fab cook too, and grew all our veg and fruit.none year she grew sweetcorn, another artichokes, etc, as well as the basic carrots, spuds, cabbage, peas, beans.

Mum also made a gorgeous pudding called Boodle's Fool, and an orange cake which was always a special treat.

My preferred birthday meal was what mum called boeuf bourgignon but which was more like beef fondue, followed by syllabub.

My dad tended to do more of the cooking as he was a chef to trade and my mum was ill on and off.
He made great mince and tatties and did a mean roast on a Sunday, complete with all the trimmings.
But it was his cake decorating that was out of this world and something I can only dream of as I will never be that good.

My mum's shepherd's pie. Can't fault it. Can't replicate it. Grr.

My mother makes the best yorkshire puddings in the world, they are enormous and delicious and no matter how many times I have followed her recipe mine never come out quite as good! Me and my siblings still fight over the "spare" now we are all grown up.

She says the secret is beef dripping!

My Mum was a great user of the pressure cooker in the early 1970's and I recall one of her first meals cooked in it; it was a beef stew with dumplings cooked in the gravy and inside the pressure cooker. The dumplings were huge and grew up into the domed lid :) I remember her serving it up to my brother and I telling us to break the dumplings; "don't cut the dumplings with a knife they'll go sad" she told us. That meal was fantastic. I got my own pressure cooker from my first MIL who failed to add liquid to her first meal in it and managed to 'blow it up' she said so was scared of it. I used it for many years and then thought I didn't really use it anymore so gave it to my brother who had worn his out. Within weeks I realised I did actually use it and wanted it back, but he wouldn't entertain me on that one. Got a stainless steel one from freecycle, but it burns everything for some reason so I gave up.
Never replicated mums stew and dumplings...