There’s no doubt food has the power to underpin family life. When I was 15 my mum died and I had an overriding sense of needing to keep our little household going. For the first few months I used to stop at the shops on my way home from school, buy the week’s shopping, then spend all day Saturday batch cooking casseroles to freeze, ready to keep me, my father and my 11-year-old brother in meals for the week. I think we all got to the point where we couldn’t face another beef stew – or, worse, some kind of 1970s concoction I used to make with tinned pilchards (easy on the purse but a challenge to the taste buds!). Now, looking back, I can’t believe I was that organised – far more so than I am now. Yet it instilled in me a sense that life is a whole lot calmer if you plan ahead, cook big, comforting batches of things and stick neatly labelled boxes in the freezer.
Our midweek feature on p81 focuses on exactly that. Cook once, eat twice. How appealing. Especially on warm days when you want to be out in the garden rather than inside cooking. Yet we still want to eat well, don’t we? I hope this issue enables you to find more time and do just that.