Cooking for a family of 6 during lockdown

I love cooking…..or correction, I used to love cooking. Covid-19 has tested my love for making food for my family of 6. It has become a relentless, continuous journey of food planning -> food purchasing -> food preparation -> tidying up after the meal. And then the preparation for the next meal starts almost immediately.

My youngest son is only 8 months old, so just at the stage of crawling and yanking at anything in reach (usually a plant or a laptop cable), shutting all doors on his little chubby fingers, picking up anything sharp and shiny (usually the scissors that the other kids have left on the floor), putting anything tiny in his mouth (the other day it was a snail…..a live snail!) and generally looking for some sort of entertainment in something that he shouldn’t be going near. He is demanding of my time (much like any baby, although I had absolutely forgotten how demanding babies are). He is also thoroughly bored with all the faces in this house and of all his toys. So, he is also pretty grumbly.

The other children are also bored of all the people in this house and so are finding entertainment in winding each other (and me) up. And being ages 6, 6 (twins) and 10, they also need a lot of cajoling into doing any school work. After I have stood over them asking them repeatedly to concentrate, tried to answer any questions (anyone know what a fronted adverbial is?) & marked the school work, whilst holding onto a cross baby, food preparation is another thing on my to-do list which usually gets done with a frown on my face (pretty sure I am going to emerge from this looked 20 years older).

I try and do bits and bobs of food preparation as I am going throughout the day which requires organisation and a clear food schedule written/printed out for the week. I.e. I might start peeling the veg for dinner in the morning if I have a few mins spare over breakfast etc. I also include on the menu stuff that can be made the night before, like stews or bean chilli or lentil bolognaise. My partner is usually in charge of doing evening food prep whilst I am in charge of doing most of the daytime food prep. So, clearly defined roles has also worked pretty well for us. We all eat our meals together to save on making one meal for the kids and another for the adults. This obviously isn’t exactly ideal as I have to think carefully about what to make to ensure that mealtimes don’t become a battlefield. We also end up eating pretty similar stuff week on week. I try to do a couple of different things a week interspersed with the fail-safe stuff.

One positive to come out of this for us is that the kids have got so much more used to eating “my” food, i.e. lots of dishes with lentils/chickpeas/pulses and salads. Their repertoire is still not wildly large and I’ve had to introduce these things very slowly so they almost don’t realise they are eating these thing more regularly. However, they have been very good and although they don’t love a lot of the things I put in front of them, they will usually eat it all without a big fuss. I genuinely used to be scared of some meal times when I knew I was putting something in front of them that I knew they wouldn’t eat. But very slowly something has changed in them. Maybe it’s them getting older and not so dramatic about new foods or maybe it’s just that it’s been such a gradual increase that they’ve not even noticed. Or maybe they are bored of being little martyr’s about food that is different.

At the beginning of lockdown I had grand plans of teaching each child (not the baby obvs) one main meal that they could make so that they could each cook dinner one evening. Suffice to say, that hasn’t happened. I haven’t even tried to make it happen. I just can’t be bothered and have realised that I value us not arguing more than anything else. We have done a lot of baking cakes and cookies as they are fully invested with that and will do most of it (leaving a huge mess behind them for me to clear up). They also love pasta so we attempted to make pasta one day too but it was a massive stress as there was flour flying everywhere. It also tasted like a wet dense slug when cooked. Other fails have included a chocolate swiss roll. Why I agreed to attempt that with them when I definitely could have persuaded them to bake a bog standard cookie, I have no idea. It looked like a dry cracked turd covered in icing sugar. It did actually taste nice though. So my conclusion is to know your limitations when cooking with kids and/or have a baby in tow.

We tried getting a takeaway once but we all started arguing over what restaurant we should choose on Deliveroo until we gave up and cooked. I’m looking forward to our local café/pub opening. I’m desperate for a meal that I haven’t cooked and one that I haven’t had to make kid-friendly.