A Little History!

I'm not a cook! I don't love to cook or bake and I don't follow any of the TV cooking programmes celebrity or otherwise!  I don't recall ever following a recipe as it was written; I've always been short of one ingredient, or just haven't liked the quantities and reduced them drastically! So the finished product is always different to the written recipe and it usually looks quite different too!

So I thought I'd do a blog on what I cook and really see what I come up with. I'm sure if I published them all, they'd make a decent recipe book and even if it was a book that ended up on a charity shop shelf, someone would probably pick it up for a quid or two!

But starting from the beginning - I failed what was then called 'domestic science' in school when I was about 14 years old!  Of course I dropped the subject and took up 'commercial maths' which I think was probably like accounting, which I hated, so I had to go back to the newly named 'Home Economics' and I did pass - just!

As a newly-wed I was working from 8-5 in the city an hour's train journey from home, which meant I had to be at the station before 7am and would only get home after 6pm. So I devised a method to help in the planning of what to cook for my darling new hubby every night: I planned a week's worth of main meals, shopped to a list, and removed the meat from the freezer in the morning before work and it would be ready to cook when I got home!  This plan worked so well I still use it today, over 30 years later, even though I'm not working at the moment!  At times it was fun going through magazines and recipe books finding new recipes and trying them out, or asking the children what they'd like for supper during the week, and with the plan magnetised to the fridge there was no whining What's for supper?!!

This is how the plan looks:

Sunday          Pork & Pasta Stew
                      Blue pg 2

Monday         Cheeseburger Pie
                      (freezer)

Tuesday         Fish & mash

Wednesday   Chicken with Sweet onions
                      101 pg 98

Thursday        Pancake tuna lasagne
                       Blue pg 13

Friday            Toad in the hole

The references underneath are of course, the recipe books to find them in and maybe I'll do a separate blog on the recipe books I've used!

Not everything goes to plan though! For example on the Sunday I suddenly didn't feel like Pasta so substituted mashed potato!

And on Tuesday I discovered we'd eaten the fish when we had a surprise visitor on Sunday so Tuesday had to be a quick-fix dinner from what we had in the cupboard (I'll have to add that recipe in to another blog, I just need to find a name for it!)

Saturdays have always been a lazy, help-yourself, off-the-cuff light suppers and meals - we don't often get take-aways or go out to eat. Chips for Saturday lunch has been carried forward as a family tradition from when I was a teenager! And Saturday suppers can be toasted cheese, or snackwiches, or if Megan's offering to make, pancakes with cinnamon sugar or butter and sugar or orange or lemon juice or cheese etc. etc!

Another 'tradition' for want of a better word, carried forward from when I was at home and we were on a tight budget, was not to have meat every night, but to alternate with another protein like fish or cheese. So in a typical week we'll have three meat meals, one fish meal and one cheese meal or a vegetarian type meal.

It's worked like a charm for over 30 years and no-one's complained!