I don't know what to do with you

Dear Tom

I don't know what to do with you, simply put, but really, honestly, short of coming over there and filling your freezers myself, ordering in a super market delivery on your behalf or batch cooking for you...

You manage to organise yourself enough to go skiing, to do a difficult/stressful job, to turn up for rowing competitions and to go out at the weekends but you still can't remember to get in bread and ham to make a simple sandwich or to make a pot of something tasty for the rest of the week!

One of the answers has to be that cooking midweek meals doesn't need a Jamie Oliver mentality or Gordan Ramsey skills, it just needs a little effort. On Monday I popped into shop and whilst there saw a couple of bags of reduced price casserole vegetables, a quick mental scan of my week showed that come Wednesday I wasn't going to have time to cook, so I popped them in the basket. When I got home I took a bag of stewing steak out of the freezer and  put that to defrost in the fridge. So, Wednesday morning comes, 5 children up, dressed, 5 breakfasts, 5 packed lunches, one hair wash, one load of testing spellings, one flute practise to listen to, on guitar and books to pack, 2 lots of swimming kit ready for after school, when I leave at 8.15 I know I won't be back until 5.15 so..... in 51 seconds I put tea on. 51 seconds included getting out pot, opening veg, meat, adding herbs bay leaf, stock, cold water, putting it in the oven on really really low to cook all day whilst I was too busy to be there!

What I am trying to say is that cooing doesn't have to be a performance, it doesn't have to look like art work or be full of fancy ingredients, save that for when you do have dinner parties, you just need to get some basic bung it together cooking going on. The kind that requires little thought and virtually no effort.

Maybe readers could give an example of their midweek no time to cook meals, maybe we could draw up a basic meal plan for you for a week including lunches, taking into account your rowing and other commitments....

Yours, with only a small hint of dearie me,

Ruth