Top Tips

Home baking is apparently becoming all the rage in these harsh economic times, so with the school holidays approaching we thought we’d give you a couple of ideas for easy Easter bakes you can make with the children.

First off, here’s a reminder of some of our top tips for cooking with children:

1. Choose simple dishes to ensure success.

2. Teach your children the rules of good hygiene (especially washing hands!) and get them to wear aprons.

3. Often as parents we think  we know what our children are capable of – test this a bit and you’ll be  amazed at what they can achieve!  Depending  on their age, get them to read recipes, weigh ingredients, help clean up, and then lay the table.

(If you’d like to read our full article on cooking with children, then click here)

For simple Easter dishes, we’d suggest Easter biscuits and Chocolate Nest cakes.

Easter Biscuits

You will need:  75g block margarine (eg Stork), 75g caster sugar, 200g self-raising flour, a pinch of salt, ½ tsp mixed spice, 75g currants, 1 beaten egg.

How to make:

1. Pre-heat the oven to 180C or Gas 4, and grease a baking tray.

2. Sieve the flour and spice, then rub in the margarine until like fine crumbs.  Stir in the sugar and currants.

3. Bind together with a little beaten egg, and knead to form a stiff dough.

4. Roll out thinly until about 5mm thick.  Cut into rounds using a 7cm cutter, place well apart on tray, and prick with a fork.

5. Bake until light golden brown for about 18 mins.

Chocolate Nest Cakes

You Will Need: 20 paper cake cases; 200g chocolate; 200g cornflakes (or shredded wheat, or similar cereal); mini eggs

How To Make: Put the paper cases in bun trays. Melt the chocolate in the microwave. Stir in the cereal. Pour into cases and make a nest shape. Decorate with mini eggs and put in fridge to set. Enjoy!

Many parents find they cannot get a thing done in the house when they have their children to entertain.  So why not do things differently?  How about getting your children to help you in the kitchen and actually make some of the food they eat for lunch or dinner?  It’ll get them away from the TV, teach them some valuable skills, and boost their self-esteem.  OK, in the short term, it may mean more mess – but think ahead a few years to your child able to make the family lunch when a teenager.  Menus4Mums and Crafty Cooks, who run cooking classes for children, have joined forces to bring you these top tips to try.

Before You Start

• Choose some simple dishes to ensure success.  For example, filled jacket potatoes, chicken wraps, sandwiches, tomato pasta sauce, garlic bread, fish goujons, fruit skewers.
• Involve the children in shopping, do it when  you have time and try places other than a stressful supermarket.  Use farm shops and butchers where the  children can look around at the food, teach them how to choose a good  item, be it as simple as checking an apple for bruises, the more children  are involved the more fun they’ll have.
• Teach your children the rules of good hygiene  (especially washing hands!) and get them to wear aprons.
• Combine cooking with maths! Let the children help you prepare for cooking by weighing out ingredients – try and use either balancing scales, or scales with a dial that they can understand.  If using a dial you can place a sticker where the dial needs to go for the right weight to make it more visual for them to understand.
• Set up a chair so the children can wash any  fruit and vegetables in a sink of water, they’ll love it!
• You are the best judge of what your child is  capable of, but generally speaking, most primary school children should be able to do basic cutting up under supervision, and younger children could  decorate pizzas.

Whilst Cooking

• Often as parents we think we know what are children are capable of – test this a bit and you’ll be amazed at what your child can achieve!  Depending on their age, get them
  to read recipes, weigh ingredients, put vegetable peelings for recycling, help clean up, and then lay the table.
• It’s all about the utensils you use. Children as young as two make their own pies from scratch at Crafty Cooks. You can buy rotary graters which allow them to grate cheese, carrots etc without adding fingers to the mix.  A good peeler can give a child a huge freedom when peeling vegetables. Little rolling pins are a great investment to help them cope with pastry and dough, if the pin is too large and cumbersome they’ll just get frustrated.
• If making pastry, make it from scratch and let your child rub together the flour and butter until magically the butter disappears and they have a bowl of sand. Not only a useful life skill and a money saver but great for muscle development to help with handwriting!
• It’s important for children to learn about safety in the kitchen, let older children stir sauces and chop vegetables, just make sure you teach them how to do it safely first and always supervise!

And After…

• Don’t let your children do a runner after the cooking is done, the tidying away is just as important! Let them help you bring the dirty bowls over and sweep up the floor. Their future spouses will thank you!

As if you didn’t know, it’s Mothers Day on Sunday.  Great, we can’t wait for a nice, relaxing day putting our feet up!  The only problem is that we are also daughters, and therefore need  to make a fuss of our own mothers and mothers-in-law.  One money-saving solution is to invite them round for an old-fashioned Afternoon Tea, rather than an expensive family meal out.  So we thought we’d give you our recipe for one of favourite cakes, Lemon Drizzle Cake.  It’s really easy and quick – just like the dinners on our meal plans, in fact.

The recipe below is for a 1lb cake.  It’s an ideal size if you don’t wanted to be tempted by leftovers – and it’s a great size for a school cake sale.  But if you’re feeding a crowd, the recipe is easily doubled – just use a 2lb loaf tin and allow extra cooking time.

Lemon Drizzle Cake

• 100g soft margarine
• 100g caster sugar
• 2 eggs
• finely grated zest of 1 lemon
• 100g self-raising flour

For the drizzle: 1.5tbsp caster sugar and juice of 1 lemon

Instructions:

1. Heat oven to 180C or Gas 4.  Line a 1lb loaf tin with greaseproof paper.

2. Beat the margarine and sugar with an electric whisk for 2 minutes.  Then add the eggs, whisking a bit betweeen putting in each egg.

3. Sieve the flour into the mixture.  Add the lemon zest and mix.

4. Spoon into the tin and level the top.  Bake for about 35-40 minutes.  Check it is done by inserting a skewer into the cake – if it comes out clean, the cake is done.

5. When the cake is cooling, mix together the remaining caster sugar and lemon juice.  Prick the warm cake and pour over the drizzle.  Leave the cake in the tin until completely cold.

Happy Mothers Day!

Stop Press: To claim TWO free trial boxes from Kelly’s Vegies subject to sign up, simply enter “Menus4Mums” in the delivery requirements box.

We love fruit and veg etables at Menus4Mums, so to celebrate the launch of our summer vegetarian plan, we decided to take a close look at veg box schemes which have grown in popularity in recent years.  We trialled two veg box schemes:  Abel & Cole, market leaders with nationwide delivery; and Kelly’s Vegies, a smaller, regional scheme.

It was great fun unpacking the fruit and vegetables when the boxes arrived.  Everything was of great quality and tasted delicious.  The children certainly increased their fruit & veg intake (we didn’t want anything going to waste!), and we found ourselves trying out recipes with produce we would not normally pick up at the supermarket – on one occasion, we think we made turnip soup, although we’re not 100% sure what the vegetable was!

As we are obviously committed meal planners, we found it a bit difficult sometimes fitting the vegetables around our meal plans, but we got around this by swapping the veg on the plan for the ones in our box.  We put lots of fruit in the children’s lunchboxes, which can’t be a bad thing, and, when we felt the veg was backing up, we made batches of the most delicious soups for lunches.  All in all, it encouraged us to think outside the box a bit more – pun intended!

We were particularly impressed with Kelly’s Vegies, who operate in South-East England.  Their produce is not organic, but it is of a very high quality and supplied in decent quantities.  The website allowed us to choose a number of items we could exclude from our deliveries, and we could choose extra items such as free-range eggs for £1.20.  Best of all, they deliver overnight which is really convenient if you are at work all day and don’t want your veg wilting in the sunshine.  Why not try them out with our special offer above?

If tempted to give a veg box scheme a go, here are our top 5 tips to consider:

1. Type of produce:  Is it important to you that the produce is organic?  Or that the fruit has as few food miles as possible?  Whilst bananas are clearly never going to come from our shores, if food miles or organic status are important to you check your veg schemes policy on these.  Want to support local farmers?  Then a regional scheme might be best for you.

2. Opt-Outs:  Whilst it might get you thinking creatively, we don’t think we could cope with not being allowed to opt-out of certain vegetables.  If your family are at all fussy, you might wish to check whether your scheme allows this. 

3. Delivery: check what the delivery policy is.  Do you have to be at home, or can the box be left in a safe place?  We particularly liked Kelly’s Vegies policy of leaving boxes on the doorstep overnight.  Also, what notice is needed if you wish to skip a delivery?

4. Trialling:  Can you trial a scheme to see if it’s for you before committing yourself to weekly deliveries? 

5. Read-up on your veg: The produce in a box scheme can wilt faster than you’re used to – it’s less likely to have been chemically treated after all!  So it pays to read up a bit on how to store vegetables to get the longest shelf life.  Google any unusual veg to find out what to do with them – unless you know 101 things to do with kohlrabi.  And check out some soup recipes too!

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Wondering how to make ends meet in the New Year? Want to get your grocery costs down but keep the quality high? Menu4Mums has put together these top tips to help you save on your grocery shop. Why not challenge yourself to see how much you can save?

Tip 1: Plan your meals. Look online at supermarket offers (or look at the Menus4Mums Bargain Spotting page) and build meals around these ingredients. Plan a suitable meal for each day with a good balance of protein (eg meats, pulses), carbohydrates (eg potatoes, rice, pasta), and vegetables. See what needs using up in your freezer or fridge. Think about using up leftovers too. And try to include an interesting variety of tastes and textures. Then write your shopping list. If you just don’t have time to do this, why not give Menus4Mums a try from just £6.95 for 4 weeks?

Tip 2: Never shop on an empty stomach. If you do, you just know you’ll end up at the checkout with a trolley brimming with cake, crisps, and chocolate – and a huge grocery bill to boot! Instead, if you are feeling a bit peckish, have a banana or a quick snack. It could save you a lot of money.

Tip 3: Be wary of Buy One Get One Free (BOGOF) and Buy 2, Get 1 Free deals. You might find it is still cheaper to buy a different brand or an own brand product. Be particularly wary of deals on perishable foods – just because you can buy two bags of pears for the price of one doesn’t mean to say that you will want to eat them all! Finally, many of the deals are offered on foods which are high in salt, sugar and fat, so beware.

Tip 4: Taste test lower range products. We don’t mean suddenly going from premium brands to the most basic products. But if you give some of the middle range brands a try, the chances are you won’t notice a difference. Look at the health data on the packaging too – some lower range foods are actually healthier than the premium varieties.

Tip 5: Don’t use a basket for small shops. If you pop in the supermarket mid-week to top up on fruit or milk yet come out with a £30 bill each time, try not using a basket. Chances are you’ll just buy what you went in for.

Tip 6: Give the supermarket a miss sometimes. Try buying your meat at your local butcher – you’re likely to be impressed by the quality. Plus if you want just 3 chicken breasts, you don’t have to fork out for a pack of 4 so you only end up paying for what you need. Seasonal fruit and veg is often cheaper at your local market or farmer’s market, and you could turn it into a trip out with the family. Or check out your local farm shop for quality, local, seasonal produce.

Come back soon for more topical articles to help you save money but live well.

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