This is nerve wracking, now I know how actors feel after the first night of a show when they await the morning papers for the reviews, so far it’s pretty fantastic.
This is another website/blog review of the US version of my book, by Real Mums, Real Views, love it.
It’s fabulous, I read it nervously, I think my book is great, I would, I wrote it and it was wonderful to read this from a font of baby and foodie knowledge that make up the wonderful team at In Mamas Kitchen in the US. Some of the recipes are up on their website too if you’d like to have a sneaky peak.
So thank you guys, I really really appreciate it. Fingers crossed the UK reviews are going to be as good.
The schools are back – how are the packed lunches going? Would you like some inspiration? We covered packed lunches on Feeding the Family on BBC Oxford on Friday’s show and Jo and I have some great suggestions as well as some recipes especially for children who dislike sandwiches.
Making packed lunches for children every day of the week, 36 weeks a year, that’s 180 packed lunches per child per school year. Now that’s daunting, how do you know if your child has actually eaten their lunch or just thrown it away? You don’t, unless you have access to CCT in their class, actually there’s an idea.
180 cheese sandwiches per day per year, or even splitting it into different sandwich filling each day can still be boring for you and for your child so try something different and encourage your children to help you.
Savoury muffins, make them at the weekend and freeze them taking one out each evening to defrost so they’re fresh and moist ready to go into your child’s lunch box the next day. Use my basic recipe and vary them by adding pesto, sundried tomato, parmesan or mozzarella cheese, ham, olives, whatever your child prefers, a few pine nuts maybe. They’re great for children to help with as you just stir everything together.
Flapjack, quick and easy to make and packed with slow release carbs to keep your child going throughout the day, add dried fruit, seeds or nuts (if they’re allowed at school) for extra vitamins.
Scones – my son dislikes sandwiches but loves cheese scones, change the cheese around, add fresh herbs or pesto to them or make cheese scones and fill them with ham and tomato or salad like you would a sandwich.
Flatbreads – OK I admit they take time but they are lovely and cheaper than buying them from the supermarket. Or make breadsticks instead and roll them in seeds, parmesan, oats, whatever you fancy.
We had Annabel Karmel on the show giving her advice on packed lunches too, so if you’d like to listen again or you missed it check out the link to Feeding the Family
Big, big thank you to Andy Richards of Celebrity Chefs for making me his Chef of the Week, this is such an honour and I’m so proud.
It links in brilliantly with the launch of my book tomorrow, 500 Baby and Toddler Foods and finished up the summer holidays after an amazing stint as Master of Ceremonies at Oxford Foodies Festival over the August Bank Holiday. .
Release re Beverley’s new book 500 Baby and Toddler Foods published by Apple Press on 5 September, please do contact us for interviews or further information or Apple Press directly for recipes, press copies for review or any other queries relating to the book. Please click on the link to access the release.
500 Baby and Toddler Foods by Beverley Glock
Two sleeps to go to Oxford Foodies Festival, our lovely Hazel has been over this afternoon planning the Kids Masterclass she’s running on Sunday, very excited.
I’m in the final stages of planning my dems with Castillero del Diablo each day and my own dem on Sunday at 5pm which will be along the lines of an Easy Summer Supper for Friends, so tastes of summer and fruit and veg in season, come along and enjoy the banter and delicious food.
I love this food festival in particular as the standard of food is so high, amazing chefs from local Oxford restaurants all have stalls selling their own delicious versions of their restaurant food, champagne bars (I particularly like these), exquisite chocolatiers usually too, food for the serious foodie. Then there’s the chefs, Daniel Galmiche from The Vineyard at Stockross, excellent wedding anniversary supper there a few years ago when we escaped from a seriously bad ‘health spa’ close by, Gary Jones from Le Manoir aux Quatre Saisons, various lunches for birthdays and anniversaries as we are close enough for a quick taxi home and the amazingly wonderful Katie and Giancarlo Caldesi too, to transport you to Italy from our typical English summer.
If you like food, you must come, it’s a fab day out.
Just nipped to Tesco for milk and as usual bought and spent a whole lot more, must remember to leave the children at home next time, always a bad idea to go food shopping with little’uns when you just want milk.
Small boy (aged 9) was having a stomp about wanting moshi cards, being a moshi monster addict (yes I know the dance and all the words to the moshi dance) this was verging on total paddy until we got as far as the fish counter and the hissy fit changed like this……
“I really, really want them, I’ll pay you back, please, please, please………you really hate me don’t you, I can’t believe that I’m not adopted………..oooh swordfish, please, please can we have swordfish tonight, please Mum, you’re the best Mum on the planet, I love you so much, I don’t want moshi cards anymore please can we have swordfish”
In probably less than a minute – result!
I think it was a result, it was actually a very expensive result, 75p for moshi cards, £7.89 for swordfish for all five of us, hmmm. However, much more nutritional, you can’t eat Moshi cards but you can’t swap swordfish. Thinking about that you can’t actually swap moshi cards as that just degenerates into falling out and fisticuffs and secretly I’m so very proud of that conversation and the fact that Small Boy loves swordfish so much.
As the fish counter lady was bagging up the swordfish Medium Sized Girl exclaims, hmm, you don’t have any octopus do you? They had huge ones on the fish counter in France or how about lobster? OK that’s going a bit far for a small Tesco in Princes Risborough, usually I moan on about the fact that it’s only good for washing up liquid. Changed my mind there, it’s good for washing up liquid and swordfish, not a bad combination.
The Guardian published a fabulous piece today on ‘savvy shopping’ with 10 top tips on how to reduce your supermarket weekly bill, I’ve written some for the piece which you can check out on The Guardian online. Here are some more:
Baby and Toddler Cookbook
Two weeks to go until my book launch, I’ve had a lovely lady call the office today to ask about the book as she has a 7 month old and wanted to know if it really was no faffing recipes. It really is, honest. The recipes are all based on the food I cooked for my three children who are now 15, 11 and 9.
When you have one child and you’re on maternity leave you have time to cook – providing your baby sleeps and providing you are sensible enough to go back to bed and sleep at the same time as your baby working on the principle that you’re only going to get 4 hours in one go if you’re lucky.
Even with one baby the only time you’re going to get to prepare food and cook is when they’re asleep which means that you are going to miss out on potentially 4 hours sleep, you never know when your next sleep is going to come so this potential sleep time is very precious and in a lot of cases rare. Do you really want to spend that ‘sleep time’ cooking, ‘no’ so the idea with this book is that the recipes can be adapted for all the family and they can be prepared ahead, just about all of them frozen in bulk and taken out of the freezer when needed – you get to sleep, yeay!
Once you get to 2 or 3 children the whole concept of cooking and preparing food goes out the window, so does the concept of sleep, as a new Mum you know you’re not going to sleep for the next 12 months so when you have the choice of sleep or cook, sleep gets it every time, or it should. Jars come in handy, apart from when you have a child like my middle one who totally and completely refused anything out of a jar, even apple puree, no idea how she knew but she did. Nightmare. She started on spag bol at a very early age, the issue now is that tomatoes are not recommended for babies under 12 months due to their acidity. I had to get creative to come with alternative family meals without tomatoes for the first 12 months.
It’s a minefield working out what baby can and cannot eat, more so as the goalposts change frequently. I’ve written a section about the new ‘baby led weaning’ craze – sorry anyone out there who thinks this is a great idea, I don’t, at all, no way. I want to know how much food my baby is eating and the concept is great but mixed with normal pureed food too otherwise you’re either going to feed the whole family stick veg and finger food or prepare different meals again, no, no, no. Sorry, feel a rant coming on.
However, it could be very funny serving up your partner with finger food when he comes home from work, I’d love to see is face, getting a fit of the giggles just thinking about it. Actually, maybe that’s what we should do, just to try it out, go on, if you do please tell me how it goes.
I’m thinking of digging out my old baby diaries and blogging them, taking you through day to day with babies from a while ago, could be interesting so watch this space.
In the meantime, preregister for the book, it’s on Amazon on pre-order and currently making it into the top 100,000, out of 5.2 million books that’s not bad seeing as it’s not even launched yet.
Pete was up at the communal campsite bbq tonight cooking sardines, marinaded in red onions, garlic, lemon juice and olive oil along with lamb chops alongside French and Spanish – all blokes, cooking an array of meats and fish. The difference is that in France the conversation revolved around ‘what have was that marinaded in?’ ‘what herbs have you used’, although beer was passed around so was tapenade, anchoiade, pistachios and olives instead of conversation about football and crisps being passed around. There’s nothing wrong with blokes standing around a bbq talking about football and eating crisps it just seems a little more cultural when you have three different languages attempting to interact and the conversation is about food – still blokes having this conversation you understand. Pete loved it, he was beaming when he sent the children back for more beer and posh nibbles, so as not to let the side down. He did say that the French and Spanish were pleasantly surprised to discover what we were eating, I think they are used to the burgers and chips brigade, and he had to wing it on the ‘whats in the marinade?’ front as he had no idea, but he was in his element.
Tips and recipes were passed on and discussed, how to bbq chicken in fresh mango marinade, discussion about whether the dust from the charcoal increased the flavour of the food or not, appreciation was declared for the wonderful marinade on the sardines and all round slaps on the back for damned good cooking were given. Pete’s final piece de resistance was the cooking of the slices of baguette over the coals, the other’s looked at Pete and asked how he was going to serve these – ‘with olive oil, rubbed with fresh garlic and ripe tomatoes’, well that was it, the ultimate accolade, lots of slaps on the back and the French and Spanish were totally impressed at the English’s ability to cook and appreciate food – ‘pane con tomates’ – Pete has arrived, he is now acknowledged a gourmet on the campsite. Wonder what they’ll make of the bbq breadsticks this evening along with marinated chicken and aubergines.