it and begging for brownie points, but I share this so that you know the phenomenon of Competitive Healthiness exists, and you don’t panic when everyone else seems to eat better food than your family does. They do—but only when it shows.
Cathy, mother of Jonathan, eight, and Millie, four:
I used to buy lots more processed and frozen food than I do now—going to other people’s houses and seeing what they fed their kids made me think I should be a bit healthier, and I was embarrassed if I had sudden visitors for tea and they said they weren’t allowed to eat such-and-such. Now we have frozen meals once a month, and I have also stopped buying fizzy drinks. I just hadn’t realised how much junk we consumed until I noticed what other kids said when they came to ours for dinner!
Given the massive effect food has on your family’s health, this heaps a large portion of responsibility onto your already aching shoulders. Don’t be swayed by anyone else’s bad habits or Pringles tendencies: if you don’t want them in your house, you keep them out! For all you know you’ll start a trend: 2007, the year the chicken nugget died.
Storing It All: Tips for keeping food fresh and organised
Filling your pantry with food is easy; knowing what to do with it once you’ve moved it from shop to bag to house is another matter.
We are constantly bombarded with information about food: what’s in it, where it was made, who made it, how it is packaged, how it made its way to the shop, how we should cook it, how long we should keep it and even how we should eat the damned stuff! Leave us alone—it’s just grub and we’re hungry! The result is that we look at it suspiciously, wondering what evils lie beneath the packaging, and whether we shouldn’t just chuck it away and go for some beans on toast instead (again).
By following some very basic guidelines and using your own head to work out what works and what doesn’t you will save yourself a lot of money, waste a lot less food and have to go shopping a lot less often—hurrah! Below are some suggestions; add your own to this list and pick up tips wherever you go:
Perfect food. The fashion for consuming ‘perfect’ food, where anything short of ‘regulation’ is rejected in favour of something more perfect, uniform, unnatural and characterless seems to be on its way out. There is now a movement towards going back to eating food just as nature intended it, marks, bumps, knobbles and all. This is great news. If kids get used to you saying ‘Uugh!’ every time you see a tiny brown bit on a banana they will do the same. Cut it off, eat the rest, show them that food doesn’t need to be perfect in order to be healthy and delicious and stop being so fussy!
Best before…I’m going to be a little careful here, as I don’t want anyone to get food poisoning, but manufacturers are very keen to avoid being sued by customers who get stomach problems that might possibly be the result of eating slightly mouldy or less-than-absolutely-fresh food. Consequently they put ‘Best Before’ dates on their packaging that always err massively on the side of caution. Use your brain and nose, consider whether you think the hummus really is off, or whether it still has another day or two in it, and make up your own mind.
It’s just a bit of mould! Some mould is bad for you, and is best not consumed. But a tiny bit of blue on the side of some cheese, or a piece of slightly ‘off’ melon will almost certainly not kill you; in fact, it’s probably good for you, as our digestive system needs some mouldy action every now and again to stay alert. It’s not quite the same as drinking a Yakult, but it’s not going to do you any harm. Throwing food away the minute it goes beyond picture-perfect is wasteful and stupid.
Plastic fantastic—not. Any fresh fruit or veg that is packaged in a plastic bag should be taken out as soon as you get home: it can’t ‘breathe’ in there and will go off very fast. Transfer to bowls, paper bags or storage boxes and you should get an extra day or two out of them.
Rotten apples. The people who package supermarket fruit or veg, like cherry tomatoes, nectarines and so on, into those plastic boxes have the nasty habit of sticking a rotten one right in the middle. My theory is that this is to make the whole lot go off faster so that you have to come back and buy more. If you buy fruit like this then take it all out when you get home and check for rogues—take them out asap or it’ll spread like wildfire.
Wet or dry? Biscuits should be stored in an airtight container in a cupboard—not in the breadbin. Bread and cakes are slightly moist and this spreads to the biscuits and makes them soft and yucky.
Open tins. When you open a tin, don’t leave the leftovers in it. Decant them into a clean container—something to do with the metal oxidising and it being bad for you…anyway, it’s not pleasant so don’t do it.
Fridge or not? Fruit should never be eaten straight out of the fridge: it needs to warm up a little to be really tasty. Ripe tomatoes, strawberries, melon and so on can be stored in a fridge if you want to keep them for longer, but take them out twenty minutes before you want to eat them. Vegetables also store longer in a fridge.
Ripen at home. Most supermarket fruit is unripe. Let’s not even go into the madness of all of this, but if you must buy your fruit there then you’ll need some ripening techniques: bananas really do ripen faster in a brown paper bag, and avocados can be speeded up by putting them in there with the bananas. Store unripe soft fruit like melons, mangoes and peaches in front of a window and turn every day until ripe. Leave vine tomatoes on their vines until you eat them—I’m sure it makes them taste better.
Keep things separate. Get a simple, safe fridge-storage system in place: yoghurts, butter, cheese etc. at the top, cooked meats and leftovers in the middle, and raw meat at the bottom. You don’t want raw meat juices dripping onto your cheese…
Box it in. Chucking food in a fridge willy-nilly is much quicker at the time, but it causes chaos later on. Get some containers for different foodstuffs and you’ll find it much easier to get to what you want: a box for cheeses, one for cooked meats, another for condiments and so on.
Start at the front. Put all the food you have just bought at the back and shuffle the older stuff forward. That way you avoid the Granny Situation of finding tins and biscuits at the back of the cupboard, which went off in 1978.
Buzz off! In the summer, fruit flies and ants can become a real nuisance, making the smartest of kitchens look like a buginfested jungle. Keep fruit covered with pretty cloths, cover your compost pot at all times and empty it regularly.
OK, that’ll do for now—it’s a good start and you will find your own clever techniques as you go along. I’m getting really peckish now, so let’s take some supplies and go into the room where we can actually start to prepare
