Hassle free dinners and lunchbox ideas for back to school

This year I want to be more adventurous with the ladies lunchboxes. I almost thought my eldest was going to turn into a ham sandwich by June of this year. Thankfully she didn’t start snorting but I really want to broaden all our horizons now that we have spent one year navigating all that starting big school brings. The ladies are back in camp at the moment so it’s perfect time for me to get the thinking cap on while the days are still lazy and come up with a selection of back to school foods that I can basically whip up in my sleep. I’ll throw in a few dinner Continue reading

10 tips for quick dinners

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While I was working I usually got in the door at about 5.30 and had dinner on the table for 6.10. Any later than that and it wouldn’t have been fair on the girls eating so close to bedtime. We did go through a phase of making dinner the evening before but to be honest it felt like there was no break from cooking, heating etc that we stopped bothering with that. And I know lots of people stock pile dinners at the weekends but I found time so precious at the weekends that I wasn’t interested in spending the weekend slaving over the cooker. So it came down to speed cooking in the evenings and it actually worked quite well. So here are some of the tips that worked for us. Continue reading

The Slow Cooker; revolutionising dinner for busy parents

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I bought a slow cooker probably about a year ago now in anticipation of going back to work. For some reason it sat gathering dust until recently but it’s use has become something of a revelation to us. We have used it a good few times over the past couple of weeks and are totally sold on the idea of its use. To contextualise things, we always make dinner the night before so that it simply needs to be heated and the accompanying starch (rice, noodles, spaghetti, pasta etc) needs to be cooked from scratch. I need to have dinner on the table in about a half hour after getting in the door otherwise the girls would literally be eating their spuds in the bath. Continue reading