Finding the chase and cutting to it

When my mum started earning decent money by returning to work full time, my childhood home saw more ready meals coming into the house. “Bung ’em in the oven”s, delicious meals you simply heat through.

My son was much younger than us when I returned to work, and like my mum, we had three or four meals a week for the whole family that were simply reheated, either in the conventional oven or in the microwave. Often, we bought a meal for two adults and boiled up rice or pasta with some vegetables to bulk it out. As my son got older, we added more starch and/or dishes. It has to be said a young child doesn’t need an adults portion.

We had some staples we added to it: spaghetti bolognese was often home cooked or risotto or stir fry. Roast dinners came on the menu as soon as our son was old enough to enjoy them – we bought small joints and didn’t do left overs.

Sounds either like neglectful parenting or perfectly reasonable. Your point?

So much has changed since he’s moved back home as a young adult. We all cook, we don’t always all clean up. My husband is less tolerant of a mess, so during the week, he ends up doing the majority of it. We’re much more, you make the mess, you clean it up during the weekend.

We also do so much more. I tried making my own pizza today – something I’d had no ambition to do before this year. For a type 1 diabetic, pizza isn’t the easiest thing I eat: if I do get the bolus right though, it is a wonderful food, tasty, filling, healthy with vegetables and diary, and a great blood glucose curve.

I am not keen on sweets and desserts in general, but home prepped ones are much easier to consume with consistent results to your blood glucose.

It’s the time it all takes. Not just putting the ingredients together: they all have to be bought and measured out. Then there’s the washing up. I cook lean, producing as little washing up as possible, which means a bit more running around. So, I not only get the calories at the end of the meal but often the little booster I need during the cooking process all adds up in the end 🙁

Then there’s the rubbish. For every success go after several tries, there are often many failures. For all the mess, sourcing of ingredients, jogging up the kitchen or spreading out from the original worktop, success is never guaranteed on go one.

If the taste is just disappointing, we all help out, and make helpful, if not welcome, suggestions. I had mixed results with the pizza today – very nice but a bit thicker than usual.

Of course, it doesn’t stop with reading the recipes in the books in your kitchen. There’s a whole internet out there with blogs, pages, videos, and more.

I’m well and truly down this rabbit hole. Happy eating 🙂