What shall we cook today?

There is a moment of realisation for every adult once they leave the childhood nest..... 

You now have to decide what to eat for dinner the rest of your life.

I must admit that responsibility freaked me out when we were newly married, and we'd be wondering round the reduced sections of all our local shops feeling lost some nights, wandering what to cook. Then we used to have some fun with it, setting ourselves challenges with a budget limit, or with a specific task. 

I will also admit that the naughty thrill of being 'allowed' to have pizza for breakfast or just dessert for dinner has never left me. 

Now we have children and we are responsible adults, we have to have a clearer goal what to feed them. 

I'm only just realising what it's like once they reach the stage when they are never full. What's with that? I don't remember going through that stage. 

They are shooting up like sunflowers, their feet are sprouting out and I can't keep up. 

I really recommend a rice cooker if you like eating the dish, we've just recently acquired one for the first time and it's so handy. One day we dropped the ball and didn't have a dinner plan. We had rice prepped for the day so I left the ex chef of the house to create a dish from leftovers. He obliged. It was lovely! 

It was a one pot meal consisting of rice, a medley of meat, onions, peas, carrots, and asparagus, tossed in a homemade tomato sauce...there will have been a dozen other ingredients I will not have noticed as I am not a chef. 

This week I decided to have a day batch cooking to give myself a head start for April. 

Eight hours later there was now four weeks worth of carbs in the freezer. 

The children now have a different carb for every day of the week. Savoury biscuits, pizza, chocolate and honey cake, chocolate pancakes, mashed potato pancakes, roast potatoes, and finally rice which we cook on the day.

You may ask what the children were up to during those eight hours, they were all feeling under the weather with this nasty cold circling the community, so it was duvets and movie day. 

I ventured upstairs regularly to give them a sample of the next round of carbs I had just finished, including a homemade deep pan pizza. They ventured down for water, calpol and fruit on a regular basis.

They even wanted to do a little bit of schooling which surprised me, considering how they felt. Kira helped me with the pizza dough, reciting her six and three times tables. Sophia wrote out all the freezer labels. Xander took down his toys and were playing colour games with me between English, Spanish and Japanese.

Sophia likes to be given the responsibility to choose dinner sometimes and she's very good at exploring the cupboards, fridge and freezer to create a meal plan. The last time she was asked to this, she chose chilli, mashed potato, and a side of four vegetables. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Learning From Your Environment

Image
There is so much potential for learning on car journeys. This time Sophia's attention was caught by seeing electricity pylons and wind turbines and she was avidly asking questions about these. I briefly introduced them to her and offered to set up some follow up science educational YouTube videos at a later date. Good old 'Dr Binocs' came through and the children have been eagerly learning about fossil fuels, renewable energy and electricity. Sophia has started writing down her thoughts and knowledge on electricity in her new science book. It is a great sidestep from their current topic of light, which is being learnt enthusiastically. They have loved their light experiments, as simple as they were, including going into a dark room and shining a torch, seeing how a pencil seems to change when placed in a glass of water, just with a light shining on it. Observing what materials allow light to pass through and which cast shadows, and performing shadow puppet plays on the wall...
Read more

Role playing Is A Serious Business!

Image
The morning period is personally the best time of day for lessons for my girls. They are alert, focused and raring to start lessons, consequently breakfast lessons are an established learning time. I have a captive audience, they are in the kitchen with me anyway learning how to prepare the food, tidy down and set the table. This session can be the best for attention span and concentration out of the entire day, so I have learnt to capitalise on this precious half hour.  This morning we learnt twenty spellings from two word families. They are storming through their word lists, quickly approaching the 200 mark in only a couple of months. I cannot recommend this learning style enough, the girls are retaining their spelling knowledge and are actively using the words in their artwork in their free time. Today they also requested spelling tests to be their handwriting practice, and did further spelling practice on top for another half an hour through choice.  The rest of breakfast ...
Read more

Always be thankful

Image
 It was December 2021 when Miss Jo, The Children's Coach contacted me and offered the girls free places in her January zoom class. This was the tutor who had organised and ran the summer fun project which the girls had been nominated and awarded for bravery. The girls absolutely loved her as a teacher and had immediately bonded with her. They wrote her letters and talked about her every day during this project.  I took her up on this very kind and generous offer and the girls had a regular half an hour zoom class every Thursday on the theme of gratitude. The girls were the youngest ones in the class and they handled it really well.  Sophia wrote the classes on the calender, scheduling in the lessons, for the month. Kira took a postcard written to her by Miss Jo, which she had received the previous year, to bed with her every night until the classes took place. She read it to me as her bedtime story.  The first thing Kira said to Miss Jo on class, was to thank her for...
Read more