How it all began…

It was 2012 when I began to regularly plan ahead for specific meals and the shopping required. Our daughter Clara was one and our son Felix just a few months old. I was on maternity leave looking after these two little babies and found that I had to become much more organised both in terms of my time and also in making our money go further. I started to think ahead about what I could make, the ingredients required, and how I could perhaps use the leftover ingredients for other meals that week. It resulted in less time scanning the cupboards trying to think about what on earth to cook, and far fewer last-minute trips to the costly local shop.

The dinner ideas were often hastily scrawled on scraps of paper, envelopes or post it notes, whatever I had to hand! I then did a food shop specifically for these meals and blu-tacked the lists to the inside of a kitchen cupboard door, so that I could keep track of what I’d planned and tick the meals off as I made them. At the end of each week I took down the old list and stuck up a new one, placing the previous weeks’ into a folder, with the vague notion that one day I might be interested to look back on them. I’m so pleased that I did. My weekly meal ideas now provide a personal social history of the food that we’ve eaten as a family over the last twelve years, showing how our tastes have changed, how dinner time has evolved as the children grew older, and how as my knowledge and interest in nutrition increased, our diet has reflected this.

Some of the dinner ideas are written on the back of school letters about trips and sports days, or the reverse of a piece of paper that had been used to score a family card game, allowing little snapshots into my life at that time. One of the very first has a shopping list on the back which includes nappies, baby wipes and mini pots of fromage frais. This brought memories flooding back to me of sweetly pudgy little hands in mine, soft cheese sandwiches eaten on the beach, sandy feet and sticky kisses. Memories that are simultaneously fresh and clear in my mind and yet also feel so very long ago. Time, in that disconcerting way it has, seems to have flown by and yet so much has changed. It seems unbelievable to me that I’ve been squirrelling away these tiny scrappy lists for such a long time, through house moves and school changes, health concerns and holidays and yet here I am, twelve years on, with a folder full of scrawled, scribbled and stained lists of recipes.

These notes document my life as a mother through food, fuelling my family and adapting to the children’s changing tastes. They also reflect how our diet has altered over the years, as we slowly changed from people who ate anything and everything, to a more health-conscious approach as the years went by. Gradually we have become pescatarian, eliminated wheat (me) and cut back on dairy (my husband), reduced our intake of ultra processed foods (all of us), and chosen to be alcohol free.

I don’t intend these blogs to persuade others to follow the same diet that we have chosen - I am not a health expert and have made choices that I feel are right for my family only. The latest guidance from nutritionists is that individuals respond to food in different ways, and the choices we have made will not necessarily suit other people. Rather, these essays are simply a record of one family’s life presented through food. My jottings are an exploratory journey into the way in which our diet has changed over the last dozen years, noticing the fads and fancies and recognising which favourites have stood the test of time.

I hope that my experience will be helpful in showing how pre-planning dinners saves both time and money and that the recipes provide some inspiration to parents who are wondering what on earth to cook this evening, as dinner time rolls around again! I do hope you’ll like it.