Thank you very much!

I need to say thank you to lots of people today but I don’t know who they are exactly.

I found out yesterday I’m a finalist in the MAD (Mum and Dad) Blog Awards 2012 in the Best Food Blog category. I was supposed to be working at home yesterday but I guess I was looking for distraction and found myself on the MAD website. When I saw a little screen shot of the Bangers & Mash blog on the MAD finalists page I literally started shaking with excitement and disbelief. Really? Me? But I’m not a proper blogger. I can’t compete with the big boys (and girls) – can I?

I was supposed to do so much work yesterday, my one day at home all week, but that all went out the window.

I called my Nana Barbara straight away because I had to tell somebody. Oh yes, I did call one of my best friends before her but that went to answer phone and I left a very silly garbled message involving lots of squealing. And then I called Nana because I knew she’d be in and because she is one of my food heroes. She’s probably the only person in my family who knows how to bake, and I love our conversations about food. And her reaction was just perfect. I’ll always be the little grand-daughter who loves to make her Nana proud.

But back to saying thank you. People had to nominate the Bangers & Mash blog in order for it to be considered for a MAD award. However I have no idea other than my closest friends and family members who actually did this, so I want to throw a big thank you out there and hope that if you did nominate me this reaches you.

Why oh why though, when I try to think of ways to say thank you, do I come back time and time again to this corny advert from the British 1980s TV vaults? This was an ad for Cadbury’s Roses chocolates and I know it’s cheesy but somehow it remains the perfect way to say thank you.

Those ad men in the 80s knew how to make an advert that would remain with you for the rest of your life didn’t they? My children embarrassingly know the words to the Finger of Fudge (a finger of fudge is just enough until it’s time to eat) and Club (if you like a lot of chocolate on your biscuit join our club!) songs, despite never having seen the original adverts. And only last week I was having a nostaligia-ridden conversation on Twitter remember lyrics to the Um Bongo and Ki-Ora adverts. Ah, they don’t make ‘em like they used to ‘eh?

But as ever I’m waffling on. Thank you whoever and wherever you are for nominating me for the MAD Blog Awards. If you happen to want to show me some support yet again you can now vote for me to win the whole blooming category. But considering I’m in the last five from more than 130 nominations, I’m really rather chuffed with how far I’ve got already. I’ve got a posh awards ceremony in London to go to in September with cocktails and a three-course meal and everything, so to be honest I couldn’t be happier.

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Fair and square: free school meals for all children in poverty

School dinners should be a fundamental part of going to school for all children, shouldn't they?

As regular readers of this blog will know, it’s important to me to feed my family well but I don’t want to spend a fortune in the process. Quite simply, I can’t afford to. As a self-employed mother whose partner works as a teaching assistant, we don’t have a huge budget to spend on food.

However I still have considerably more money to spend on food than many families in the UK today.

According to the Children’s Society there are around 1.2 million children living in poverty in this fine land of ours who are probably not getting a single nutritious meal all day.

This statistic makes me feel sick to the core. How can we as a civilised society allow this to happen?

The Children’s Society has launched a campaign called Fair and Square, which aims to ensure that all children in need of a free school meal receive one. Free school meals are a crucial entitlement for families living in poverty, ensuring that children from the lowest income families get a least one warm and nutritious meal in the middle of the day.

When I was at primary school, I was a free school meals kid. I didn’t realise it at the time, but these meals were a real safety net.

Staggeringly, around a third of children in poverty are not entitled to free school meals (around 700,ooo children) because their parents are in paid work. Children of parents working 16 hours or more a week are not entitled to free school meals – regardless of how little their parents earn. This is shocking.

And another 500,000 children don’t take up their entitlement to free school meals. This can be for all kinds of reasons, including the quality of the meals themselves and issues around teasing and bullying.

I remember getting teased about being on free school meals when I was little. I found it so embarrassing. At the start of each week, our class teacher would call out our names and those who had to pay would take their dinner money up to him. When he got to my name, and the names of others in the same position, he’d announce “FREE” in the most derogatory of tones I’d want the ground to swallow me up. So I can see why people would rather avoid going through that public humiliation.

I am urging everyone I know and who reads this blog to get behind the Children’s Society Fair and Square campaign. Please join their call on government by signing their petition and spread the word any way you can to ensure that our poorest children get the free school meals they need to survive.

The problem is, this current situation could get worse under the new Universal Credit benefit system, which the government is introducing from 2013. Some families may be worse off if they take on more hours or get a pay rise as a result of the loss of free school meals. Analysis by the Children’s Society indicates this could affect 120,000 families with 350,000 school-aged children.

Sign the petition to ask the government to change the criteria for free school meals so all children in poverty get them. They’re much more likely to listen if they see how many people think the situation is unfair and needs to change. It only takes a couple of minutes and we all get behind the campaign this could add up to a big change for our poorest school children.

Giving children in poverty a free school meal makes sense on every level. They can help children stay healthy and learn. And they can help families escape the poverty trap faced by parents trying to move into employment by making sure that work always ‘pays’.

Free school meals on average are worth nearly £10 a week or about £370 a year. The prospect of losing this benefit creates a massive barrier for parents if they want to move into work or take on additional hours, particularly if they have more than one more child in school. (The Children’s Society ‘Fair and Square’ campaign report)

So once again, please do sign the petition and help spread the word. I am one of those kids who once needed free school meals, and I want to help make sure that the children today who need them are also given that right.

For more information about the Children’s Society’s Fair and Square campaign please visit http://www.childrenssociety.org.uk/fairandsquare.

Food Glorious Food!

This pretty much sums up how I feel about food…

Oliver! is one of my all-time favourite films. I love musicals almost as much as I love food. I’ve always wanted to be in one, but it doesn’t really help that I can’t sing or dance.

But now my seven-year-old daughter Jessie is learning lots of the songs from Oliver! in her Musical Youth club. So this song is heard a lot in the Bangers & Mash house at the moment. Very tuneful, I’m sure…

Anyway, thought I’d share it with you – enjoy! And do sing along!

The Versatile Blogger Award

It seems awards are a little like buses. Nothing for ages and then three come along at once.

In the last week three wonderful bloggers have nominated me for the Versatile Blogger Award. I knew all the yoga and pilates would pay off eventually…

So thank you to Gary at The Greedy Fork, Terri at Terri’s Kitchen and Nicola at Cooknote for adding me to the VBA roll of honour.

The Bangers & Mash blog has only been going three months and I’m just starting to find my feet. So to receive this award was a bit of a surprise. But a very lovely one.

I haven’t won anything for quite a few years. As a child though I was really quite competitive, forever entering some competition or another.

The first competition I remember entering was when I was about five. It was a painting contest at my local youth club and I won first prize. I was so excited to find out that my prize was a voucher but when it arrived a little while later in a small envelope I was absolutely gutted. I had completely misheard you see, and thought my prize was going to be a vulture. Why on earth a five-year-old child would want to win a vulture I really can’t explain but to this day I can still recall that bitter feeling of disappointment.

There you go. A random fact about me. According to the rules of the Versatile Blogger Award I must tell you seven random things about me. So here are six more…

• As a child my favourite TV programme was Blue Peter. Over the years I won four Blue Peter badges.
• I always wanted to be an actress. My first stage role was the Angel Gabriel in my primary school nativity. I was taller than Joseph and therefore denied the role of Mary.
• I studied Drama at Bristol University where I finally got to play Mary in our modernisation of From Creation to Nativity, a medieval Passion play, in which Mary ‘won’ the Baby Jesus as the star prize on a game show hosted by the Angel Gabriel!
• My parents invented my name. Well reinvented it. They liked the name Vanessa and discovered that Jonathon Swift created the name for his poem Cadenus and Vanessa. It was a pseudonym for his ‘squeeze’ Esther Vanhomrigh. My folks decided they preferred the combination of Van and Esther rather than Essa, so that’s how my name came into being. I’m forever having to spell it as you can imagine and most people call me Ness for short.
• I am allergic to kiwi fruit and avocados.
• When I am drunk I can speak fluent German.

Now it’s my turn to pass forward the award to 15 of my favourite bloggers. Ahem. Drum roll please…

Breakfast by the Sea

Curly and Candid

Feeding Boys and a Firefighter

Fishfingers for Tea

Frames of Reference

Gourmet Mum

Jaynerly

Lavendar & Lovage

mythineats

One Man and his Hob

Pea Green Pantry

Red Ted Art’s Blog

Soup Tuesday

The Diary of a Domestic Disappointment

The Little Loaf

So now it’s your turn.

Add the award to your blog.

Thank the blogger who gave it to you.

Mention seven random things about yourself.

List the rules.

Award to 15 bloggers.

Inform each of those 15 by leaving a comment on their blog.

The art of shopping

How do you shop? Until recently I’d never given the way I shop for food and groceries a second thought. I never thought there might be different ways to shop, or any skill involved.

Shopping had always simply been one of those necessary chores I had to do on a frequent albeit ad hoc basis, whenever the fridge and cupboards started looking a bit empty.

Ever since leaving home at the age of 18 for university, I’ve shopped when I thought I needed to and bought what I thought I needed, generally the same items every time.

Perhaps it’s because I’d never been shown how to cook or shop. I rarely went food shopping with my parents and I never showed much interest in what was happening in the kitchen. Do we need to be shown? Did your parents teach you these things? Or I am simply trying to blame others for my inadequacies? Is shopping really a matter of common sense?

Well, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere in this blog, my husband and I had to cut our budgets last year. Analysing our bank statements, we realised that this ‘finger in the air’ approach had resulted in massive over-spending, a hideous amount of food waste, and – what probably upsets me most – fairly mediocre meals.

When it finally dawned on me that a little simple planning each week would make life easier, it felt like a huge revelation. Silly isn’t it? I’m feeling quite foolish as I write this. It’s all so blindingly obvious when you think about it.

But when you’re rushing around in your twenties balancing work and a hectic social life, and then in your thirties balancing work and an even more hectic family life (with a bit of social life squeezed in when you can), you don’t really step back and think about how you do things. You just do. Or at least that was my problem anyway.

So the glaringly simple solution is to work out first what you’re going to eat and then you shop only for what you need. Easy, eh? Well maybe not. So many of my friends have been fascinated by my meal plans, curious about how I create them and intrigued about how long I’ll be able to keep it up for. Although I’ve come across many people out in the webisphere who make meal plans, I’m the only one out of all the people I actually know who does this.

The meal plan takes pride of place on our fridge

I don’t want to be teaching grandmothers to suck eggs. So if all this is too basic, I really won’t be offended if you quit here. But in case you are interested here is what I do…

My Sunday night ritual

Every Sunday evening, once the children are in bed, I sit down at my computer with a glass of wine and work out our family meals for the week ahead. I found it quite hard work at first. I’d much rather be sat on the sofa watching telly but I now rather enjoy surrounding myself with recipe books and checking out different blogs and websites to get ideas.

Supermarkets

I order the bulk of my week’s groceries online from one of the big supermarket chains. While of course I’d prefer to buy all our food from local shops and markets, the simple truth is that a) as a working mum I don’t have the time and b) I wouldn’t be able to afford it.

The beauty of shopping online is that I avoid actually having to step foot into a supermarket. They are not my favourite places. Although the real advantage of shopping online is avoiding temptation. Whenever I go into a supermarket, I always come out with more than I intended.

Veg boxes and butchers

But I don’t buy everything from the supermarket. I also get a weekly organic vegetable box delivered the same day as my supermarket shop and I buy most of our meat from the local butcher or farm shop, while fish comes from the Saturday market.

I might not have a massive budget but I like to eat good food. In my opinion organic vegetables taste so much better and are worth paying a bit more for, while meat from supermarkets very rarely compares with the local meat your butcher can supply. When you plan your meals carefully, you find you can afford to use good ingredients because you are wasting so much less.  And it’s worth eating meat less often in order to be able to eat better, tastier meat. Since shopping this way, I have succeeded in halving the amount I spend on groceries.

So on a Sunday evening, I’ll check to see what veggies will be included in our veg box and I’ll look at the family calendar to see when we’re busy and need easy meals and when we’re home so can spend more time in the kitchen. And our menu materializes magically from there.

Some days will see us feasting like kings on big roast dinners, while on others we’re eating beans on toast like paupers. It’s all about balance and moderation.

Once I’ve worked out our meal plan, I then get online and do the supermarket shop, highlighting in the diary what meat or fish I need to pick up during the week, preferably on days when I’m already out and about.

All in all, this will probably take me about two hours each Sunday evening. This might sound like quite a long a time but it really saves so much time and hassle later in the week.

There you have it. That’s how I shop. Now back to my original question. How do you shop? I’d love to compare notes.

PS I’m about to start posting my weekly meal plans – so watch this space!

What’s in my fridge?

This blog is in response to the question posed by Charlotte in her Kitchen Diary earlier in the week.

Just like Charlotte I’m always fascinated by what other people have in their fridges and cupboards. What luxuries do people enjoy? When do people buy own brand? What are their guilty pleasures?

And visitors to my home always seem to like a peak in ours too. So here are the contents of our fridge as of this morning:

It’s looking pretty well stocked at the moment. On Tuesdays we get our weekly veg box and supermarket delivery so there are still lots of goodies in there. By next Monday it’ll be looking rather more sparse. And come the weekend there will rather more alcohol in there too.

But in general, you’ll always find in our fridge:

• eggs
• milk
• cheese (lots and lots)
• fruit juice (the children get through gallons of the stuff)
• salad and vegetables
• pickles and chutnies
• ham
• olives
• hummus
• leftovers

So there you have it. And now I’ll pass the question on. What’s in your fridge?

Why bangers and mash?

A few people have asked why I called this blog Bangers & Mash. So here’s a sophisticated diagram to help explain.

Quite simply Bangers & Mash sums up the kind of food I like to cook and eat.

Simple and unpretentious.

Terrible if you use cheap sausages or don’t put butter in the mashed potato, but when you use quality ingredients it just can’t be beaten.

And that’s the kind of food you’ll find me talking about in this blog.

Why another food blog?

Earlier this year I realised I had to make some serious changes to how I shop for food and cook for my family.

My husband had changed jobs and starting a new career in a primary school, while I was in the process of cutting my work hours to spend more time with our children. Our monthly income had taken a severe nosedive.

One evening we sat down to work out where we could reduce our outgoings. We were shocked, nay disgusted, at how much we’d been spending on groceries. I’d always thought I was pretty organised with our food shopping, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. What made it worse was how blissfully ignorant we were of what a hash we’d been making of things.

On top of the fortnightly deliveries from Sainsbury’s Online, our bank statements told a sorry tale of frequent pops to the local corner shop to top up on things we’d run out of (and of course those emergency bottles of wine required after stressful days) and buying impulse items at markets and farm shops, doing our bit to support local producers naturally.

Despite spending an astronomic amount on food and drink, it occurred to us that we hadn’t really been eating well for our money. All too often we’d go to our (full) fridge but be lost for what to cook for supper. None of the lovely ingredients would quite add up to a meal. So we’d end up resorting to a basic staple (like spaghetti with sauce) or, I’m sorry to say, ordering a takeaway.

Then there’s the food waste. The amount going in the food bin each week as a result of this haphazard approach to food shopping was shameful.

Now I know it’s not rocket science but when the idea of a weekly meal plan occurred to me it felt like a major revelation. My Nana and mother-in-law think I’m hilarious because this is how they always cooked for their families; simply sitting down once a week to decide on meals for the coming week and then shopping accordingly.

These days it’s not how most of us shop or eat. Not the people I know anyway. We decide what we fancy on the day, which means eating out lots, shopping every day or having a fridge full of ‘just in case’ ingredients that end up rotting to a squishy pulp somewhere at the back.

Because life is hectic we think we don’t have time to plan ahead. But I’ve learned over the last few months that spending an hour or so on a Sunday evening planning meals saves so much time later in the week. There are far fewer trips to the corner shop and I love having the freezer stocked with meals for those days when I know I’m going to be too busy to cook, never mind even think about food.

As well as massively reducing the amount of food getting chucked out and slashing our food bills by about half, the simple act of planning our meals has also led to us eating a much more varied, interesting and health diet.

Because I’ve been raving about the benefits of meal planning to anyone who’ll listen, friends have suggested I start a blog to share my experiences. So here it is. Notes from my kitchen for anyone like me trying to feed their family good, tasty, wholesome food on a limited budget, without compromising on quality of ingredients.

So watch this space for recipe suggestions, weekly meal plans and ways to save money as well as details of my culinary successes and failures. I just want to share what works for me and my family in case any of it’s useful, and I’d love to hear from you on what works for you and yours!