Did you know that it’s Chinese New Year on Sunday? I didn’t until I googled it just now, but then I am a little lacking in culture sometimes. Never mind, I realised just in time to cook up something delicious! Any excuse for a prawn cracker.

Actually, prawn crackers hold a bit of a special place in my heart. When I was at secondary school, my best (and basically only) friend was Chinese, and her parents owned a takeaway. Quite often I’d go round there after school and help fill bags with prawn crackers. Their house, which joined on to the takeaway, was always full of wonderful cooking smells and boxes of onions in towers against the walls. View Post

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A recent study by Flora Cuisine has revealed that over a third of mums in the UK are preparing up to three meals each evening in order to satisfy the individual preferences of children and partners.

Three meals!? I find cooking one meal tedious enough, but three? Crazy times.

I’m pretty sure my Gran didn’t used to cook three separate meals every mealtime. My mum just got fried eggs and chips and was grateful. So what’s going on here? Are we raising a generation of fussy eaters, or of parents too frazzled and disenchanted to argue?

Now I’ll admit that sometimes I will ‘tweak’ a dinner to make sure there is at least one type of vegetable that Belle will eat, but that’s just a case of a few extra peas here, and the removal from her plate of anything courgette based, it’s not that I’m cooking entirely different dishes. Who are these women with all this time on their hands?

"peas"

Eat your peas or you don’t get pudding

The survey also showed that us mums are rather lacking in imagination, or possibly motivation, with 72% of us just cooking the same meals over and over again. Oh the joys of parenting! Around two-thirds of us apparently own recipe books we don’t use because the ingredients are too expensive and the recipes too long and complicated. Makes sense to me. I only buy them for the pictures.

So what can we do about this? Well, there’s the ‘shut up, eat it and be grateful’ school of thought of course – that saves on the cooking time but increases the risk of whingeing – or you could argue that it’s good to provide kids with choice, and to give them food they enjoy. Flora are taking a different approach. They’re putting together a recipe book full of cheap and quick meal ideas from real mums. Post your recipe on their facebook page and you could even win a prize! Fish fingers and baked beans anyone?

What do you think? Are we just spoiling our kids and creating extra work for ourselves or is it important to cater for everyone’s tastes?

 

Photo credit – mschmidt62

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