trifle with real custard and mandarins
lemon and cranberry baked cheesecake
baked apples with currants and brown sugar
cocktail sausages with honey and mustard
chocolate peanut butter squares
cinnamon and apricot fairy cakes
a bit about vitamins and minerals
I must admit that I hardly cooked until I had children. Gordon was always working until at least midnight and I was working all day and studying for my teaching course in the evening – I became a Montessori nursery teacher. I more or less lived on quick and easy foods like beans on toast or breakfast cereal. My interest in food only really started when we had children and our first, Megan, began solids. Suddenly I was responsible for everything that went into her tiny tummy. Gordon was working and it was up to me to cook for her. That was when I started to really care about what was in the fridge.
I learnt how to cook as Megan’s diet became more interesting than vegetable purées. The fact that she was a good eater and showed excitement in what she ate, as subsequently did the other three, meant I actually enjoyed experimenting, too. So that is how I started cooking – never seasoning or overcomplicating, just simple, family food. I believe home cooking never needs to be any more sophisticated than this.
I’ve tried to keep the recipes in this book as real and accessible as possible. I’ve included all of my favourites that I use to feed the family, which also means that they have been given the thumbs up by the children. Some of the recipes are more child-oriented – like fish fingers, for example – but most of them are for the whole family to enjoy.
I’ve also tried to include tips on how to adapt some of the recipes to make them more adult. A splash of wine or a bit of extra seasoning is often all it takes. Not only does this save you the time and effort of cooking two different meals, but it also makes eating, especially at weekends, as much about being together as a family as eating good food. That for me is just as important.
The recipes are organized with most people’s weekly routines in mind. In the Breakfasts section, for example, I’ve included a mixture of quick and easy options for weekdays when you are rushing to get the kids to school as well as a few more leisurely recipes for weekends and holidays. The most popular with my children is probably the fruit gratin, so if you can’t quite squeeze it into a busy weekday morning, do indulge at the weekend. I’ve organized main meals into After-school Suppers and Weekend Lunches for the same reason.
I also thought a section on Cooking from the Cupboard was essential. If you are anything like me, sometimes you are just too busy, tired or disorganized to get to the supermarket and you end up staring at the contents of the fridge and cupboards trying to figure out what to feed everybody. I do try to keep a few staples in the house at all times, a few of which I have outlined at the beginning of that chapter. If you can get into the habit of keeping all of these in stock then you’ll find it actually quite easy to rustle up something delicious.
I actually find cooking ad hoc makes me more creative as I match flavours and ingredients that I might not normally. With this chapter, if you don’t have a particular item you can often substitute it for something else. I have tried to include notes on how you could do this in a number of the recipes throughout the book. For example, I really enjoy cooking with pancetta, but if you can’t get hold of it, you can substitute unsmoked streaky bacon or bacon lardons. Don’t be afraid to experiment! It’s how we all learn and more often than not it’ll go down well.
This is also why I’ve included a section on Trying New Tastes. Children – and mine are no exception – can have very fixed ideas of what they think they like and dislike, when quite often they only need a food presented to them in a different way or just as a sneaky aside to other things they know they already love. The recipes in this section are designed to be made in combination with each other so you can end up with a wide variety of flavours on your plates. We tend to use our fingers for these informal pick and mix sessions and they always end up being great fun.
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