A week at my table

It’s terrible to admit, but I used to love looking into other people’s trolleys at the supermarket, either nodding in approval or making an (internal) judgy comment. I hardly ever get to do it now, because we get almost everything delivered - v dull for snooping purposes.

Should you have the same basket-voyeur tendencies, I thought I’d share my virtual trolley - this is what makes up a week’s worth of our meals at home. Starting with…

The breakfast pantry

Oh to have a walk-in pantry! Sadly, it’s just a mad scramble in kitchen cupboards/the fridge every morning. (Maybe I should put the breakfast things closer to each other.)

The basic version is:

• Day-old bread (a medium-serious sourdough, I cannot with the stuff that takes a day to chew)

• Wholemeal & plain flour

• Oats

• Free-range eggs

• Salted butter

• Yoghurt & milk

• Bananas

• Bags of organic frozen cherries, raspberries, blueberries and/or strawberries

The luxe edition includes:

• 85% dark chocolate

• Crème fraiche

• Spelt flour, buckwheat flour, lentil flour

• Ground almonds

• Fresh berries

• Date syrup/honey

• Kefir

With these, I can make about a week’s worth of (slightly) varying breakfasts for the children, e.g.

• French toast (egg + tiny dash of milk + bread, fried in extra-virgin olive oil)

• Banana pancakes (1/2 & 1/2 wholemeal and plain or spelt flour, baking powder, mashed banana, eggs, yoghurt, kefir or milk, melted butter, fried in the pan used to melt the butter)

• Crèpes (1/2 & 1/2 buckwheat and plain flour, baking powder, eggs, milk, melted butter, fried as above)

• Almond pancakes (1/3 ground almonds, 1/3 plain flour, 1/3 lentil flour, baking powder, eggs, milk, baking powder, melted butter, fried as above)

• Porridge (in season, it has been TOO HOT for porridge for the last two months)

Topping-wise, if I’m feeling indulgent, it’s:

• Instant chocolate ganache (for crèpes & French toast: a handful of chocolate chips on the hottest side of the crèpe/toast, leave for 1 minute to melt, then swirl with a spoonful of crème fraiche.)

As I’m trying not to normalise chocolate for breakfast every day, it’s usually either served with fresh berries or:

• 10 minute ‘jam’ (technically a compote: it’s a few handfuls of frozen berries in a saucepan, cooked covered for 3 minutes until defrosted, then squashed & cooked lid-off for 5 minutes to thicken, stirred through with a mashed banana for sweetness (I know, it sounds tragically like infant food, but it’s surprisingly good & not detectable as banana) or date syrup/honey. The cherry and blueberry version this morning was excellent.

My breakfast is a bowl of yogurt, with berries, 600 types of nut and seed, and leftovers from the above (usually at least one chocolate crèpe, or bit of French toast.) I’m encouraging the children to try the whole berries-on-yoghurt thing and putting out a bowl of halved walnuts, flaked almonds etc (billed as ‘sprinkles’) for them to try which has a moderate success rate (obv I cannot leave them unsupervised with the nuts, so only put these out if I’m sitting down to breakfast too, rather than ferrying hot pancakes to the table like a 1950’s housewife.)

My husband likes savoury breakfast (any combination of eggs, beans, sourdough, chilli) but there are limits to my domesticity, so he very rarely gets one. But he will amuse the children by throwing a blueberry in the air, and catching it in his mouth. I haven’t yet thrown pancakes for him to catch like a domestic seal, but that might amuse them too.

For transparency, the emergency breakfast is multigrain cereal hoops, or just toast with bought marmalade, which both children are inexplicably keen on. (Rachel Khoo is responsible for hooking them both on Mariage Frères Tea Jelly.)

Lunch

The downside of working from home, one has to organise lunch AS WELL AS dinner. If there aren’t leftovers from the previous night’s dinner to hoover up, then it’s usually heavily reliant on:

• jarred chickpeas or beans (not the giant butterbeans, they’re for special occasions or when pals come over)

• basmati rice

• more free-range eggs

• toast

It’s surprising how far you can get with all of the above and a few vegetables foraged from the fridge, e.g :

• chickpeas warmed through with quickly roasted veg - today it’s turmeric rubbed aubergine, done in the air-fryer - topped with yogurt, spring onions & pumpkin seeds;

• leftover rice fried up with spinach or chard and an egg, topped with kimchi, sesame seeds & cashews;

• whatever Mia has rejected as her lunch, with toast, an apple, and cheese on the side. (A ploughman’s child’s lunch?)

Dinner

This is now very largely ‘things I feed the kids, which Tim and I can eat too’. I just cannot cook two separate meals in the evening, on top of keeping the children entertained, the plants alive, the dog intellectually stimulated and the cat waited on - it is ALL TOO MUCH.

So the weekly children’s rotation is something like:

• For them: turmeric & ginger fried tofu & cauliflower with noodles;

  • For us: add wilted chard, chilli oil and peanuts.

• For them: pasta with puttanesca sauce & cheddar;

  • For us: add chilli oil, and sub the cheddar for parmesan.

• For them: some type of fish, breaded OR fried in butter OR from a box, made by Captain Bird’s Eye. Frozen peas (which they like to eat actually frozen? Bizarre), roasted tomatoes and home-made air-fryer chips. (Also if CBA to cut chips, vg with baby new potatoes, halved and then doused in oil, garlic & rosemary.)

  • For us: I tend to do down the lunchtime route with this one, and stir the roasted tomatoes through a jar of beans, and then FOR A TREAT top it with a fillet of fish I’ve cooked just for us, e.g. crusted with Dijon mustard & pumpkin seeds, or with harissa & flaked almonds.

• For them: spiced meatballs* with cashew fried rice, pomegranate & roasted broccoli;

  • For us: we’d just eat this as is tbh, it went down v well for dinner with a pal the other night, albeit with a broccoli pomegranate salad, a variation on the broccoli date salad from The Green Cookbook. My proudest parenting moment to date was Alba offering my friend Jo the bowl of pomegranate over the table, saying ‘Would you like some?’ and spooning some out before tucking in herself. So. Cute.)

• For them: conchigle with bolognese* sauce & parmesan;

  • For us: the same, but I serve a little salad on the side - Mum’s grated beetroot & carrot salad with lemon juice, olive oil & mint is this week’s favourite.

• For them, when I have lost the will to cook, Deliveroo mini-margarita pizzas, in front of the TV.

  • For us: Tim cooks. Bliss.

One of THE most helpful tips I read on feeding children a varied diet was to put some veg on the table first - e.g. the carrot sticks, cucumber, roasted broccoli, roasted cauliflower, peas or whatever - and assure the children that the pasta is ‘on it’s way’, timing things so the pasta arrives once something vegetable-adjacent has been eaten. (Mine want to dip everything in soy sauce, which am allowing on the basis at least they’re eating the veg.) Fruit disappears in seconds, so that can go on the table at any point.

The shops

In lieu of in-person shopping we now largely get:

• a Riverford delivery once a week. (I don’t buy the pre-made up veg boxes, so pick the things I want individually, like any ordinary online shop.) I love the quality of the fruit and vegetables, which taste wonderful and don’t have that slightly plastic-y feel of supermarket veg. They do lovely cheese & milk & eggs too, and you can either compost or send all the packaging back to them for re-use, so no single use plastics. Not paid or sponsored to promote them, just love the produce! This link is the one that everyone gets when they refer a friend if you fancy £15 off your first shop.)

• Top-up shops from Co-op, which delivers! Hurrah!

• Interesting flours, e.g. spelt, buckwheat, lentil, rye etc from Hodmedods (thank you Catherine Phipps for the rec!)

• Nuts and seeds from Buy Wholefoods Online, which are great quality - I store open packets in a box in the fridge, and if buying in bulk, extra packets go in the freezer so they don’t spoil.

• Fish from local fishmongers - I love my local but there’s something up with their website atm so will share the link once sorted!

On the meat, I put a * in because mindful of sustainability, we get a box of organic beef mince from Riverford once a fortnight, from which I can get two meals for four: one is always a variation on meatballs. You probably have a favourite method - my quickest for when the children are about to lose it from hunger is blitzing an onion and the spices (a new favourite blend is cumin, turmeric & ginger) in the food processor until very fine, then whizzing in breadcrumbs, an egg and salt, then adding the mince & blitzing again until very smooth. (Often the flavouring is rosemary and sage, or a big handful of chopped mint and coriander.) Half of that mixture gets made into mini-meatballs (air-fryer, 15 minutes, perfection) the other half goes into the fridge to get fried off for the next day’s cheat’s bolognese. (In which case I don’t bother adding an onion, as it’s already in the mince.)

And with that, I’m off to the local fruit & veg shop, because v helpfully they give children a free banana each (which slightly makes up for the mangoes & apricots the children make me buy.)

I am as you can see in need of some new breakfast ideas, so would love to hear from you with your favourites.

And thank you very much on the lovely messages after last week’s post, it has been A WEEK so I am a little behind on replying to them all but will get there this! x