Organising

It’s Slow Cooker Season, Yay!

Posted by Louise NorthHantsMum on in Slow Cooker 1 Comment

To be fair, it’s slow cooker season in our house all year round, but when it turns to Autumn, it feels like my slow cookers come into their own. Right now I have a small joint of pork cooking on a bed of onions and apples. Sounds fancy, but anyone who knows me, knows I’m a pretty crap cook. That’s possibly another reason why I think my slow cookers are great! lol.

I’ve mentioned before on the blog that I love my slow cooker and that we couldn’t live our lives as we do, without it. When we went on holiday recently and stayed in a Yurt, I bought a two person slow cooker which is  perfect for the three of us and it saved me oodles of time and worry about what to eat each evening on our holiday.

There is nothing quite like throwing everything into a slow cooker and then coming back 6 to 8 hours later to a meal that can be immediately served up.

Over the past couple of years I’ve picked up lots of slow cooker recipe’s. Unfortunately I didn’t take a note of where I found them, so I can’t post up the recipe’s as I’m not able to give the credit back to the original “owner”.

I have a friend who recently bought a slow cooker but had no idea where to start. I have over 80 slow cooker recipe’s in my Mealboard App, so I had a look and realised that I can email them to my email account.

So I’m going to try something new. If you have a slow cooker but need some inspiration for tried and tested recipe’s, drop me an email at northhantsmum@gmail.com with the heading “Slow Cooker Recipe’s” and I will bombard send you twenty of our favourite slow cooker recipe’s.

However, please keep in mind that NHM is my hobby, so it may take me a little bit of time to reply to you!

Fingers crossed this works and helps you on your slow cooker journey 😀

My Meal Planning in 2012

Posted by Louise NorthHantsMum on in Food, Health 0 Comment

Following on from yesterdays post about the joy of Slow cookers, I thought I’d follow up with a post about meal planning.

Meal planning is one of the things that helps our family keep on track and stops us from reaching into the cupboard and eating the quickest, easiest and normally most unhealthy, food we can find. I’ve been meal planning for several years but it was more a case of buying in food for the week and choosing which meal we wanted as and when. Now I’m back at work, we have less money and we have a baby, things have needed to be planned better. We’ve started to use the concept of having a certain type of meal each evening. Ours is:

  • Monday – Vegetarian
  • Tuesday – Slow Cooker (We have activities on Tues evening so we need something very quick)
  • Wednesday – Fish
  • Thursday – Pasta with homemade pasta sauce (we have more activities on Thurs evening so need something very quick here too)
  • Friday – Takeout/Dineout/Homemade Pizza/whatever we can find in the freezer
  • Saturday – I normally put in a fancy dish that takes a bit more time if we aren’t out and about
  • Sunday – Roast

This means that I no longer need to think about meals nor do I have to constantly answer my husband’s questions asking what we are having for dinner that evening. He knows that if it’s Monday, its vegetarian (his particular pet hate, but I think we are getting there slowly! What is it about some men and vegetables? lol). If it’s Wednesday it’s fish. Sometimes we chop and change Tues and Thurs so have a slow cooker meal on a Thurs instead of Tues. He knows that if he comes home on a Tues and the house doesn’t smell of slow cooked food, we are having pasta.

We use the MealBoard Application on iTunes as we both have iPAD’s (the iPADS’s have been our one indulgence in the past couple of years!). It allows me to add breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks for each day. I love this because it ensures that we don’t waste that much food and reminds me to ensure that we have healthy snacks available. It also allows me to create templates based on one or two week’s existing meal plans, so I can just copy in a template for future weeks and move things around as I like. I don’t use the templates as often as I could because I like to keep as much variety in our meals as possible. You can sync the application to other Apple products which means that my husband can immediately check what we are having for dinner on any given day, and often he will start the cooking if I’m not back in time.

The MealBoard Application works for us but there are many other types of meal planning tools that you could use.

Using Meal Board and shopping online means that I can plan our meals and shopping in about 5 minutes now. I estimate that this planning gives me about an hour to two hours a week back with my family. Meal planning also helps me to ensure that we have at least one portion of fish a week, at least one vegetarian meal a week and that we are eating as much variety as we can.

I’ve enclosed a few links below that you might find interesting reading…

Sainsburys Meal Planning and Meal Ideas (I really like this site. They have some great recipes that are quick, cheap and easy to make).

Back to the Basics: Meal Planning I love Simple Mom’s website. It’s an American site but she has some great ideas and really appeals to my planning and organising nature.

Imperfect, Flexible, Doable Meal Blueprint

The six meal shuffle: extremely simple meal planning This is also an American website but Megan has some great tips and ideas.

3 Fail proof ways to stick to meal planning An American website but still some great ideas.

 

I love my Slow Cooker!!!

Posted by Louise NorthHantsMum on in Slow Cooker 0 Comment

I realize how tragic that statement is, but at the moment, I really do love it. It’s helping my family eat healthy, nutritious meals that I haven’t had to slave over in the kitchen for hours. I believe that one of the most important things as a Mum is to ensure that your family are eating and exercising well. Both of these set your loved ones up in good stead for the future.

My Slow Cooker enables me to spend more time with my family doing fun things or going for walks and still enables me to feed them well. We had a small slow cooker that was suitable for two people but it never seemed to create enough food for a whole meal. Now that there are three of us I’ve upgraded to a much bigger slow cooker so that I can cook two meals at the same time, saving time, money and energy! We often have one half of the cooked meal for dinner and then I split the rest of the meal and freeze it to use for dinner another day or for lunch at work. We’ve also found that in the colder weather the slow cooker cooks the right kind of meals, warm and nourishing whilst being healthy and nutritious. It’s wonderful to come home to a kitchen that smells of yummy dinner.

I’ve done a lot of research over the past few months since falling in love with my slow cooker.  It’s amazing how many recipies can be adapted for the slow cooker.

  •  If you are cooking your meat for long enough, you don’t even need to brown it off first, just chuck it all into the pot.
  • I’ve read somewhere that in order for your slow cooker to be most cost effective you should use it on the low setting the majority of the time.

I know this sounds very organized but I think you need to be when you have children. A little bit of planning goes an awfully long way and anything that helps to decrease my stress levels is worth it!

Check out the following links which show the best slow cooker’s on the UK market and some easy slow cooker recipes to get you started…