We love to eat in this house! We also have some family members who are particular about what they like to eat😕. This calls for creativity and an acceptance that someone will be unhappy with my offering most nights, but I try to remember that you can’t please all the people all the time.
I thought I’d share one of our favourite dishes that goes down well with pretty much everyone. I probably make it most weeks as it is quite simple, fairly healthy and the complaints are minimal!
We tend to cook from scratch (with the help of a few select premade ingredients)most of the time because it is cheaper, the portions can be as large as you want and it is healthier. So this meal, which is my version of chicken pie, is a home cooked feast that fills us all up.
This is an approximate recipe, but then I tend to cook by eye, please ask any questions if this doesn’t make sense.
1 whole chicken, roasted and picked (this is Matthew’s favourite job)
Make I litre white sauce in a large saucepan, I eyeball the quantities (google will be more precise)
Add one Knorr chicken stock pot and stir until dissolved
Then in goes half a bag of frozen sweetcorn to the sauce
Add the picked chicken
Heat it aIl up leave that on a low heat while I roll out a pack of puff pastry
Then I put the pie filling in a dish and top it with the pastry
I brush milk on top and then cook it at 200 C for about 30 minutes, until it is golden brown.
We serve it with homemade sauté potatoes and a medley of vegetables. Family favourites are broccoli, carrots and sugar snap peas.
I don’t really buy sugary treats for the children (although Phil sometimes sneaks them in the trolley!), but they are allowed to bake homemade treats, which doesn’t reduce the sugar content of their diet by much, but it does increase their baking skills 😉. Without exception our children are very motivated to bake and have all learnt to bake at a very early age. There is quite a lot of competition in our house when it comes to baking, it sometimes feels like Bake Off in our kitchen.
In the past few weeks we have had 4 birthdays and a school bake off, for which they have baked multiple cakes. Here are some of their favourite cakes.
We always eat around the table and then once a day we do Bible time together. We know that food is essential for our physical strength, but that God’s Word is essential for our Spiritual strength. We don’t want to leave the table hungry in any way. We use a book called Old Story New https://www.thegoodbook.co.uk/old-story-new or its companion book https://www.thegoodbook.co.uk/long-story-short. It takes about a year and a half to go through each book, which includes a Bible reading and questions for each day. All the children join in and answer questions. It is very Gospel focused and we love it. We then pray round the table from oldest to youngest. We also give thanks before each meal and each child takes it in turn daily to lead us.
What do you like to cook? We are always looking for new ideas, I would love to hear some of your suggestions.
Jenny C says:
We do a very similar pie, although in our house it’s to use up the leftovers of a roast chicken. Our sauce is made from chicken stock and a tin of condensed chicken soup. We add chopped up ham and leek. Our children don’t like leek so they pick it out. (They don’t like sweetcorn either!)
Vicki says:
Jenny, thank you for commenting, it’s good to have you here. Your pie sounds yummy! I love to add leeks to ours, or mushrooms, sometimes I make 2 pies, one for the fussies (as in the recipe above) and one for the rest of us with extra flavouring, like chives and mustard, and extra veg. I did laugh when you mentioned your children pick out the leeks, it’s good to know it’s not just mine that can be fussy. I also find tinned soup very useful too, I add to tomato soup to a pats bake dish which goes down well. I will try them on condensed chicken soup in a sauce, it sounds like it would save me time on the busier days. Lovely to hear from you, blessings, Vicki
Janet O'Neill says:
What talented bakers you all are!
Vicki says:
Thank you Janet, you’re always so encouraging. I hope you are having a good day.
Elizabeth Ford says:
So lovely to link with like minded people !
One of the dishes that involves the kids is a cobbler . You can use anything. I do it with mince added onion , carrot , peas and some tinned tomato’s or maybe passatta throw in a stock cube then once that’s cooked maybe an hour then mix some cheese scones with can involve little hands ! Lay them all over the top of your casserole dish and bake in a hot oven for 1/2 hour .
Vicki says:
That sounds yummy and it’s great to get the children involved. I made a new mince dish tonight, it was a winner with some of the children, but I had a few rebels on my hands! Lovely to hear from you, thank you for visiting the blog. Blessings, Vicki
Marie says:
That is an amazing selection of cakes made in such a short space of time! How did you manage to eat them all!
Vicki says:
Marie, that’s a great question. There was a lot of cake. We did give some away to friends, to cheer them up, but there was a fair amount of cake eaten here for a few days, about 1 large piece each a day. There is about 1 cake still left (when you add up the left overs) which I might freeze. It definitely helped cheer us all up during this lockdown 🙂.