Calling it a day

Hi All,

I am bringing down the curtain on Mamacook.  It's been going for over three years now and during that time I've had some amazing feedback.  I'm at the point now though where I'm going to have to make a big investment in camera equipment to be able to even stand still (as I no longer have access to an SLR as you will have seen from recent photos).  I've got to the point where I'm questioning whether it's the right decision for me and my son.


My son was under 1 year old when I started this blog and now he's 4.  Through my blog I've helped him discover a love for great food and it's helped me challenge myself and stretch my imagination on what kids will and won't eat.

I had intended to continue my blog moving into lunch box food as he starts school but with the changes being made across the UK, this now makes it a moot point.

So I very much hope you have enjoyed reading.  I will keep my blog up and visible for anyone who wants to read it; it is effectively my online recipe book anyway and I keep going back to posts I love.  I just want to spend less time promoting, researching and testing recipes and more time with my son.  All bloggers like to claim they don't look at stats but we're all naturally competitive and I don't want to be ruled by that anymore.  I do have a couple of posts left to write and a couple banked but, I can honestly say my heart isn't in it as much as it was and I think it's starting to show.  I'd rather finish on a high than feel like I'd let things slide and there are so many fantastic blogs out there now with really exciting recipes and much better photography than mine!

I really hope you've enjoyed reading and will continue to read.  That is the nature of the internet, my work is published, out there and hopefully helping other parents feed their kids interesting food.

I might, some day, take my experience and start working on another blog but for now, this has been some of the hardest but most enjoyable 3 and a half years of my life.  Thank you for reading.

Heidi (Mamacook)

Update:  I have now launched my new blog, Eat Like You Love Yourself.  Please take a look.  The blog is all about food for busy people who often eat alone but don't want to eat rubbish!  Here are a few photos to wet your appetite!

Banana and Honey Ice Lollies

I've never bought an ice lolly for my son which has led to full on, lying back, kicking, screaming because he wanted more.  Apart from my son's behaviour (and not wanting to reward it), it's not going to make you feel too bad giving him two.

It's also a great way to use up and store bananas which are past their best as you do want them slightly over-ripe.

Banana and Honey Ice Lollies - makes 4-6 depending on mould size

Ingredients

1 ripe banana
2 tsp runny honey
1/2 tsp vanilla extract or vanilla bean paste
100g, 3.5oz Yogurt (low fat is fine)

Method

Peel and chop the banana.  Blend the ingredients together.  Pour into an ice lolly mould and freeze until solid.  Run some warm water over the outside of the mould to release them.

Don't give to under 1's due to the honey (you could always miss it out if your bananas are super ripe and sweet.)

Minestrone Soup for all ages

Soup might not seem like the most summery recipe but with a drizzle of olive oil, this really hit the spot, especially when the weather is less than you'd hope for.

Minestrone Soup - Makes enough for one adult and one child with leftovers, freezes well.

Ingredients

1 onion, finely chopped
2 tsp olive oil
1 courgette (zucchini) finely chopped
1 rib of celery, finely chopped
1-2 carrots, finely chopped
180g, 6.5oz Smoked bacon
2 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
1/2 tin borlotti beans (120g, 4oz drained weight)
45g, 1.5oz small pasta shapes - I used alphabet shapes because I thought they were cute
1 tbsp fresh parsley
1 large fresh tomato, chopped
1 tsp pesto
Olive oil and grated cheese to serve (optional)

Method

Gently fry the onion in the oil for a couple of minutes.  Add the courgette and carrots and fry for a couple more minutes.  Add the garlic, celery and chopped bacon and fry until the bacon is looking cooked and the onion is translucent.

Add 650ml, just over a pint, of boiling water and the borlotti beans.  Simmer for 5 minutes or until the carrot is almost cooked.  Add in the pasta and tomato and boil until the pasta is cooked, this will depend on the pasta type so be guided by the pack.  Mine took 4-5 minutes.

Add the pesto, stirring in and serve with chopped parsley and cheese sprinkled on top if liked.  A lovely summery soup!

If you like this, you might like my lovely Moroccan soup too!

Or why not try this lovely chowder?

Stuffed Mushrooms

Stuffed mushrooms are one of those foods people think are difficult to make.  "Life is too short to stuff a mushroom" a phrase apparently coined by Shirley Conran.  Stuffing a mushroom does sound difficult, or fiddly but I promise it's not.

 

This super simple stuffing also makes it easy (and delicious).  I just had this as an adult meal for one but my son, a fan of both mushrooms and cheese would love these.  Do include the herbs, after all, without them they'd be a two ingredient recipe and that feels a little bit lame!

Stuffed Mushrooms - Serves 1 Adult or 1-2 Children

Ingredients

5 White Mushrooms (I didn't use large open capped ones, just ones around 2-4 cm across.  The bigger they are, the fewer you'll need.)
A few sprigs of fresh herbs, I used parsley, thyme and chives
60g, 2oz Feta cheese, crumbled

Method

Preheat the oven to 200oC, 400F, gas mark 7.

Take the stalks out of the mushrooms just leaving the caps.  If you like the stalks can be chopped up and used in another dish, like Bolognese or vegetarian lasagne.

Chop up the herbs and mix with the feta.

Put the mushrooms in a baking dish and fill the caps with spoonfuls of feta.

Bake for 20 minutes or until browned on top and the mushrooms are cooked through.  Great served with a simply dressed tomato salad.

Make it thrifty

It is possible to buy "Greek Style Salad Cheese" which is often less than half the price of feta which I sometimes do when short of money.  The quality of it is very variable though.  Certainly if having in a salad I would always buy authentic feta but in this recipe the alternative is fine for stuffed mushrooms.

Is food thrift relevant?

Something someone said recently made me think about one of the themes I blog about.  I often write thrifty recipes or give tips on how to make the recipe cheaper to make, cook or ways to use up or prevent waste.  My food is rarely expensive to make.  This is because it's the way I cook.  I care about food, I value it.

When I was little, my parents used to grow nearly all of our own fruit and vegetables.  None of it went to waste.  Gluts were frozen, picked, bottled, made into jam or wine.

I don't want my childhood to sound like a rural idyll because I didn't grow up in a posh place but it was a place which was very much in touch with food and where it came from.  We used to get eggs from a farm in the village and my best friend lived on a pig farm.

I think the distance we have now from food production is part of the reason we don't respect it enough.

So does my approach matter?  My approach isn't because 'thrift', for a while became a food trend; rather, food trends happened to coincide with what I'm about.  But the more I thought about it, as we've been going through this awful, extended recession, the more it did make sense.

When you are in straightened times, necessity can be the mother of invention.  Finding new and delicious ways with lentils might not sound exciting but when that leads to the best vegetarian lasagne you've ever tasted, can that be bad?  In the last few years, I've found cheap ways to eat 7 a day proving healthy food doesn't have to be expensive.

So what is the point eh?  House prices are increasing, confidence is going up, we're all great right?  Well maybe.  But if you think about it, increasing house prices is vanity, it's not real wealth.  If you have a house, unless your mortgage is fixed you're likely to be seeing interest rate rises soon, squeezing already tight incomes.  House prices going up put more and more families out of reach of buying a home.  Reliant on landlords with no real security in their rental outgoings.  As Ken Clarke said this week, British people aren't feeling the recovery yet.

Why does everyone think there is this anti European rebellious feeling in politics at the moment?  People are fed up.  Fed up with feeling the squeeze.  It's astonishing to think this has been going on for 6 years.  For much more than my son's entire life.

Food is one of your largest monthly expenses after a roof over your head.  When incomes decline, some families reach for highly processed foods which seem cheap but offer little nutrition so devising and sharing inexpensive, tasty food high in nutrition I hope will never go out of fashion.

So what have I learned?  Despite my upbringing, some habits had started to slip until we were really starting to feel the bite in 2008 / 2009.  Just like successfully dieting and keeping off the weight, I changed habits bit by bit.  I eat far less meat than I used to and the meat I do eat tends to be things like chicken thighs, small amounts of chorizo or bacon to flavour a dish, fish (if bought frozen is really thrifty) and slow cook joints like brisket.  I shop less often and am more likely to use what's in my fridge or freezer than get something specific in for a meal.  I know that with lentils and curry paste in my cupboard, I'm half an hour away from something decent, tasty and filling.  I freeze ingredients going out of date and often freeze items straight after opening if I think I won't eat the contents in time.  I label everything well in my freezer.  I can't remember the last time I threw something substantial away.

Forget about the money for a minute if you like.  I would argue that thrift is, perhaps the wrong word.  It is food respect.  If you eat meat, eating all of it including using the bones for stock is a way to respect it.  If you have vegetables nearing the end of their usefulness, making soup or sauces is a great way to preserve them because they freeze brilliantly.

Throwing food away means that was a waste, not just in the literal sense.  The food will decompose in a land fill producing methane which is a far more dangerous greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.  Energy was used in making that food and it was wasted. 

So if I've not convinced you that food thrift is worth being a 'trend', I hope I've convinced you it's worth learning how to cook good, thrifty food for the health of your family or if you like. do it for the planet instead or just because it's right.  Because, let's face it, I've never been trendy.