Busy parents, home-made meals, how can it be done?

Having home cooked meals ready for when you get home is really easy, doesn’t even require much preparation – believe it or not.

There’s not need for it to be expensive either.

Essential ingredients:-
1 x freezer
?? x single serve or multiple serve freezer containers
WASHED potatoes (very important – the washed bit)

After that the world is your oyster

I’m the first to admit it – I’m no masterchef, even if I do have a cookbook to my name Marysville Cookbook It’s amazing what generational education can teach you. These recipes are from my grandmother and mother and some I've collected myself

Simple recipes are the key to any success in the kitchen, simple ingredients, simple instructions, little stirring, little time consuming sautéing, little standing in front of stove type recipes. That is the key to healthy home-cooked recipes for the family.

Trick Number 1 – Always cook more than you need, Freeze the left-over for meals later.
Trick Number 2 – never peel another potato again
Trick Number 3 – want roast vegies? – Cook them in the microwave (about 20min) before transferring to oven and lightly coating with Olive oil to complete the cooking.
Trick Number 4 – a slow cooker is a brilliant thing – learn to use it
Trick Number 5 –next time you need a microwave, buy one you can pre-set the start and finish times – a wonderful invention
Trick Number 6 – Saturday/Sunday when I’m doing other things around the house. I’ll cook a meal or two. Not just 1-2 servings but multiples of, soup/stews/casseroles are a wonderful thing to cook copious amounts of. You don’t have to eat them all at once. That’s what the freezer is for.
Trick Number 7 – Failures more often than not, taste the best.

The 7 steps to success (in my kitchen)

Here is my freezer, a little light on ‘stock’ but plenty of single serve meals, single serve because of family dynamics have changed and this allows for 1-2 or 5-6 quick meals to be on hand at ANY time.

Even Your Eggs Smile

I saw this at a friends house – I found it corny and really sad. I suppose because I haven’t bought eggs for the past decade or more – I’m not use to seeing my eggs smiling up at me as I smash their heads in.

Was this to try and sway people from eating eggs – you know the caged bird thingy?

Or was it to encourage people to eat more eggs, if you think someone cares enough to smile at you?

Don’t know either way – Personally I’m not sure I care.

All I know is that free-range eggs – if you can afford them – are the absolute best, and even better than shop bought free-range eggs are those from a friends' chickens.

Those ‘free-range’ eggs you can get at many Sunday type markets are often not what they seem, they may look enticing on that bed of straw – BUT often they are barn-laid and then presented as free-range.

Sorry kids – but that is marketing for you. The average ‘backyard’ free range eggs- sell for $4.00-$4.50 per dozen, anymore than that and you are being ripped off.!

My Garden, My Food, My family, My Budget

March 2010

These last two weeks have been bountiful in the harvests, and our family has enjoyed eating fresh picked and home-grown food.

Some of the produce harvested this week – Over 10kg of Zucchini, 4kg of Almonds, 3 Chestnuts, 1 Mandarin, 500g of Blackberries. (Please no comment on the quantity of Chestnuts and Mandarines, this is the trees’ first fruiting season)

This week I’ve made Zucchini Chutney, Fig Jam (courtesy of the neighbours) every meal has had Zucchini in it and the Blackberries didn’t make it more than 2m from the bush, the same for the Mandarin and the Chestnuts which will have a ceremonial roasting when we light the fire.

There is currently a debate on eating locally, eating locally produced in-season food. I agree. Alright – you can have strawberries and apples in the middle of winter, but people just don’t realize is that cost of growing, storing and transporting those vegetables to places they are not meant to be in the middle of winter is huge, not just the dollar value – but the cost to environment and your health.

It is estimated that if a family were to eat ‘in-season’ i.e. fruit and vegetables that are grown in the area AND in season at the time of shopping, this could save as much as 20% in plain dollar terms. On the average bill of $50, that would mean a saving of $10 per week which is a whopping $500.00 saving per year. Simply by buying what is right not what is wanted.

Add to that cost, the cost of keeping and transporting out of season and out of area fruit and the cost to the environment is huge. The cost can add up to 500% to out of season fruit and vegetables. Imagine paying 500% for your electricity. Would you do that if you had alternative choices? I don’t think so.

Not everybody has access to a garden, but you have family and friends and often they have fruit trees that are bending, almost breaking with the weight of fruit. Why not stew some, jam some, eat some, just plain old use some.

The cost of good quality jam is around the $4.00-$5.00 mark – why not reduce that to $0.50-$1.00. I made fig jam this week and the cost was $2.00 for the sugar and about 3 hours effort with little monitoring. The jars, well you collect those all year, so the cost is nothing. I made 12 jars of Fig jam which will last for 12 months and there is enough to give away to friends.

My garden grows my food, as long as I look after it. My food is for my family and it must be of a high quality. We waste nothing, if we can’t use it immediately, we find something that can be made so the produce is not wasted. If all else fails we blanche the products and freeze for later use.

My budget for food shopping is pretty good, simply because we buy specials, we buy bulk items and we do without and supplement where we can. So mushrooms in the casserole? You can do without, without affecting the taste!

And if you are looking for a cookbook - look at Cookbook for Marysville

The Ode to Lamb Chops and Joey

Lamb Chops and Joey – How can I explain this?

Alright – I won’t other than we ate them – Lamb Chops the 6month old and Joey the 12month old – both rested nicely in the freezer before being consumed

See we live on a farm – and we often eat the meat we grow. In fact we rarely not know the day the animals were born, they day of each monthly birthday and the day they met their maker.

Lamb Chops – by definition was obviously a lamb
Joey – A little harder to determine was a calf, well yearling in the meat market

There have been many others – but these two stick in my mind for some very interesting reasons.

Lamb Chops was introduced to my family after death, when everyone was sitting down at the table and my 5yo piped up and said “Lamb Chops is yummy” An adult at the table corrected the sentence “No, The lamb Chops are yummy” and the 5yo piped up again and said, “NO, Lamb Chops IS yummy” and then proceeded to inform the dinner guests of who lamb chops was.

Reminder to self, never allow a child to name your dinner whilst still on the hoof, it causes people confusion and also to be ill when they realize where the meat actually came from. For some reason the meat from supermarkets is different!

Joey…………. Well Joey was a darling little boy. (Well, little really isn’t true, all 250kg of him) He was dispatched of in the normal manner and put into the freezer.

Standing at the BBQ a couple of weeks later and guests ask us where the cow was. The 10yo then pipes up and advises said dinner guests that we will be eating Joey for dinner. One of the guests went vegetarian that night, and called us cruel.

I don’t understand, the meat from the supermarket is meat from cows/lambs that once stood in a paddock, ate lots of grass, looked cute and was born to feed them. Yet a cow raised on a friends farm and killed for the same reason, is considered cruel?

Everything in the supermarket has raw ingredients; those raw ingredients are grown on farms. Those raw ingredients are sometimes turned into what I consider inedible foodstuffs, that are prohibited in my house. My children have tasted ‘real’ milk from real cows. Many children have no idea where milk comes from. When asked they think it grows and comes from the supermarket.

Everything we eat comes from the land, not the supermarket. Teach your children this.