For quite a long time, being a mother of one child, I believed that there was no difference in how many children to feed, one or more, and the problem was solved by increasing the size of the pan, however, in practice everything turned out differently. Each of my children due to age characteristics, your daily routine, your nutritional needs, as well as “I love” and “I won’t”, between which there are maneuver.

It became necessary for me to maintain a balance between convenience of kitchen life for me, the taste and benefits of dishes for children, as well as a special feeling for each member of my family that you are at home, that such a thing is here food you love, and which is not found anywhere else.

And the very first one was adopted simple principle: Children should eat the same things as adults, and adults should prepare food so that children can eat it too.

Cooking food every day, in small portions, and I spend no more than an hour and a half a day in the kitchen. Almost everything I make is prepared quickly, very fast or by itself. My main helpers in the kitchen are oven and multicooker.

Multicooker helps prepare breakfast porridge in the evening, by the specified time, spending no more than 5 minutes. In addition, it is very convenient to keep porridge warm if all family members have breakfast at different times.

Right after breakfast for all dishes on today's menu I peel and cut vegetables. I put the ones for dinner in an airtight container in the refrigerator. I spend no more than 10 minutes manipulating meat, chicken or fish for the evening and also put the semi-finished product in the refrigerator. I make sure to cook a small pot of soup just for today. Sometimes I make preparations for vegetable salad.

Children are always welcome jelly or compote, in the meantime you can bake some cookies, chocolate cake, or knead pie dough. All my baking recipes With minimum time preparations. A bread machine does a great job of kneading dough, and I like to bake cookies that are baked as one layer and cut into portioned pieces after it cools down. Baking pies, the smell from the kitchen - makes the house lively and cozy, and children really love baking. All these operations take no more than 1 hour.

For afternoon tea I prepare various smoothies and cocktails from cottage cheese for children, natural yogurt, fruit. At the same time it goes into the oven or multicooker. dinner who is preparing for the appointed time without my participation. If the dough has risen in the bread machine, I make one pie on a medium-sized baking sheet and also put it in the oven. In total, this takes me no more than 20-25 minutes. Total I spend no more than 1.5 hours in the kitchen per day.

Unfortunately, we rarely sit down at the table as a family, due to completely different schedules of work, study and other affairs of my household. But when we do find ourselves at the same table, it happens to us very fun and tasty. I have big family , I have someone to try for - and that’s the main thing!

After a working day, few people want to spend a lot of time at the stove. This article will tell you a few simple recipes and tricks with which you will cook delicious dinner for a short time.

Pasta. Majority pasta cook for 10 minutes. Bolognese sauce is also quick to prepare: fry the onion and garlic, add minced meat and fry until golden color. Mix with tomatoes or tomato paste and add oregano or your favorite herb blend. Simmer over low heat for 15-20 minutes and serve with pasta. Bolognese sauce pairs with red wine. Mushrooms go well with this dish. Bell pepper and corn. Prepares even faster cheese sauce for pasta: mix grated cheese with cream, add pieces of bacon or mushrooms. On culinary sites you can easily find many recipes for pasta sauces.

Canned concentrated soups can be the basis for sauces for meat and pasta.

Fast pizza. Fry the onions, garlic and mushrooms, cut the French bread lengthwise and place on top mashed potatoes, water mushroom sauce, sprinkle with grated cheese and heat on the grill or in the microwave.

Omelette. This dish of eggs, milk (or cream) and flour is easy and quick to prepare. The omelette is especially delicious with salad, crispy potatoes or jacket potatoes.

Slow cooker is a device that can be called a dolgovorka or slow cooker in Russian, an analogue of a pot in a Russian oven, where food is cooked for a long time. Using a slow cooker you can get delicious hot lunch in the evening, placing meat and vegetables in it in the morning.

Potato wedges. Instead of frying or boiling potatoes, cut them into wedge-shaped pieces, cook until half cooked for 7-10 minutes, drain, drizzle with olive oil and bake in hot oven 20-30 minutes. This the dish will do for fish, meat and cutlets.

Lung a fish dish. Rub the fish fillet with spices and salt, wrap in foil and bake for 15-20 minutes in a hot oven.

Curry or chili. Adding red pepper to the Bolognese recipe above creates a curry or chili that goes well with rice.

Rice requires constant attention when cooked in a pan. In a special rice cooker or steamer fluffy rice Can be cooked simultaneously with other dishes.

Chicken. Chicken breasts can be pre-marinated in the morning and baked in the oven in the evening. Chicken meat with salad and jacket potatoes is a healthy and nutritious dish.

Jacket potatoes can be the main or second course. Cheese, mayonnaise, beans, curry, chili, bacon, mushrooms, shrimp, Bolognese sauce, cottage cheese and olives can be used as a side dish for baked or boiled potatoes.

Pork cutlets are quick and easy to grill or bake. Original taste it will work if you grease the cutlets with the mixture orange jam And soy sauce and bake in the oven.

Large portions. Chili and other sauces can be prepared in large quantities at once and stored in the refrigerator.

Prepared meals such as salads, pizza and vegetable mixtures, will significantly reduce the time you spend in the kitchen.

Rating. Make a list quick recipes and after preparing dishes, evaluate them. In a few weeks you will collect a large number of favorite recipes that you can always rely on. Experiment with new recipes when you have free time.

Known rules
You need to buy groceries in shopping centers for a week at once. Make a list of products, follow it clearly and without concessions. With two trips to the store on Sundays, you can easily determine what is usually included in the weekly diet. This way, you can avoid temptations and not buy delicacies that neither your wallet nor your stomach needs. You need to go to the store with a certain amount.

Now about the meat
Women are used to shopping in stores because they are busy. ready-made semi-finished products. Store-bought semi-finished products contain a lot of flavorings, preservatives, and vegetable proteins, and high-quality semi-finished products are very expensive. Don’t be surprised, but it will be cheaper to buy fresh meat in a trusted store or market, spend 30 minutes of your time on a weekend, and make it from cooked meat. homemade minced meat meatballs, cabbage rolls, cutlets, dumplings and fill the freezer with them. Enough for the next month. And if to minced meat add the same amount minced chicken, then this will make the minced meat tastier and more tender and will make it cheaper.

Chicken
For our convenience, stores sell chicken breasts, legs, thighs and drumsticks separately. Brought it from the store and onto the frying pan. And you go and buy several broiler chickens and whole chickens at the nearest supermarket and cut them yourself at home. Then approximately 20% of the cost will remain in your wallet. Don't forget, before you throw them in the freezer, sort and put the already cut up chicken into bags. Label each bag with what's in the bag and the date on the bag will tell you when to cook the chicken. Very tasty baked chicken thighs and wings and fillets go into main courses, drumsticks go into soup, and chicken backs, unnecessary and bony, will make a rich and flavorful chicken broth.

Soups
It is not necessary to cook soup from a whole piece of meat; let's remember how grandmothers prepared soups. Let's buy pork or beef bones and add boiled chicken meat to the broth we have prepared. The soup will be rich and will not be inferior in taste meat broth. The same method can be applied to stewed cabbage, potatoes, pilaf. If to chicken fillet Add to small quantity lamb, beef or pork, this will improve the taste of the prepared dish. It will turn out as if a dish was prepared from one kilogram of pure meat.

Fish
It is cheaper than meat, of course, if it is not trout, salmon or salmon. And it will bring considerable benefits to the body in the form minerals and squirrel. From white inexpensive fish - hake, haddock, pollock, cod, you can cook fish cutlets And fish fingers. Don't bypass pink salmon; it will replace expensive Norwegian salmon steaks. Preserves, which are bought to save time and convenience, can be made yourself without much difficulty from mackerel or herring, having previously purchased frozen fresh fish.

As a side dish for homemade cutlets, in addition to the common potatoes and pasta, you can serve legumes or cereals. For variety, you can prepare a side dish of vegetables. Cabbage in all its forms goes wonderfully with meat. All vegetables are bought in season. It is profitable to buy beets, onions, and potatoes at the markets in the fall. You can stock up on these vegetables for the whole year. From radishes, carrots, beets, cabbage you can prepare unusual and gourmet salads, they will stand on festive table a real decoration. And how many vitamins do they contain?

During the season you need to buy fruits and berries; during their ripening period they contain more vitamins. In summer and autumn, you can make jam from the berries, then you won’t have to spend money on imported confitures and jams. Some berries can be frozen in the refrigerator. You can cook jelly and compotes from them, which will enrich your diet with vitamins. Frozen berries are good to put in sweet pastries. Pie with raspberries or cherries will bring the whole family together for evening tea. These few principles of conduct household and grocery shopping will bring significant savings to your family budget.

Naturally, every family has its own customs, tastes, and everyone acts as they see fit. But some of these tips, which are not invented, but tested on ourselves, may be useful to someone.

I do not understand why children must unconditionally love everything that will be theirs offered for lunch or dinner. We forgive an adult if he does not eat oysters, or salted watermelons, or almond cakes. No matter how hard I try to convince children that broccoli is incredibly healthy and zucchini is amazingly tasty, they won’t believe it. It is better to take a wait-and-see attitude: do not impose or press. This usually works - sooner or later priorities change, the range of tastes expands, and the hated broccoli becomes a favorite side dish, and zucchini pancakes become a wonderful afternoon snack.

Big family and small portions

Mothers of many children have to deal with one stereotype: a bucketful of food prepared for the week - an image that is fixed in the minds of the majority. This ever-boiling pot of the day before yesterday's borscht could have become my nightmare if I didn't have a sense of humor. In fact, everything is different. I cook in small batches and solve problems as they arise. I’ll say right away: all this is possible only because I don’t buy groceries myself. This task lies with the head of the family, and he copes with it brilliantly.

In practice it looks like this. I rarely make such substantial dishes as solyanka or jellied meat. Almost everything I make comes together quickly, very quickly, or on its own. For this there is Appliances: blender, mixer, sensitive and obedient oven. You can bake a good piece of food in it, for example. pork ham. I spend no more than 10 minutes manipulating the meat: salt, season with paprika, garlic, thyme and bay leaf, wrap tightly in a double layer baking paper and place in the oven preheated to 150°C.

You don’t need to do anything else - after 3.5 hours a signal will sound that the wonderful boiled pork is ready. Once cooled, you can cut it thin slices and use for breakfast sandwiches. You can also bake a whole chicken, take it apart into small pieces and use it in a salad with couscous, raisins and pistachios, stuff it into pancakes or hide it in rolls. thin pita bread, spread with cream cheese, along with vegetables and finely chopped herbs.

What else can you do in advance?

What can be done in advance is, of course, better done in advance. For example, fillet a turkey and put it in the refrigerator in an airtight container. Or prepare minced meat for hamburgers, meatballs or cutlets. Remove from freezer fish and defrost correctly, without haste, on the bottom shelf of the refrigerator. Be sure to cook soup or, more precisely, two soups, no more than 1.5-2 liters each. This is not at all because I am so kind, but simply so that the “refuseniks” still eat: if not cream of champignon soup, then lentil, if not minestrone, then pumpkin.

Children are always happy with jelly or compote. It’s also better to prepare them in the morning, so that by lunchtime they “ got there" In between, you can bake muffins, a chocolate cake or a little bit of cookies - just one baking sheet. After all, it is possible that someone will want something sweet or need consolation: childhood life is not an easy thing. All these operations take no more than one and a half to two hours, so there is a lot of free time left before the active actions caused by the children returning home begin.

How to diversify standards

There is no need to reach the point of fanaticism. It's funny to cook a separate handful of rice for everyone. But make it from pre-cooked rice individual puzzle- it's exciting.

• Puzzle No. 1: vegetables ( for example, red bell pepper, petiole celery, carrots, garlic, spinach, champignons), sliced ​​and quickly fried in a wok on olive oil, + rice - for two vegetarians. 15 minutes!
• Puzzle No. 2: cut into narrow strips chicken breast+ vegetables, also quickly fried in a wok, + rice.
• Puzzle No. 3: shrimp, same wok, drop sesame oil, lemon, garlic + rice.

Same with pasta. Cook a pack of penne, spaghetti or fusilli for 15 minutes, then pasta with mussels, with tomato sauce, with bacon and cheese and cream sauce, with tuna. Each option takes another 10 minutes - you don’t even have time to get tired.

Afternoon snack and dinner

Perfect for a snack between lunch and dinner Ossetian pies, khachapuri, pizza or kulebyaka with fish, spinach, mushrooms and rice. If after lunch I bet yeast dough, it is just reaching condition by this time. I knead the dough from two kilograms of flour and immediately put half of it in the refrigerator in a tightly closed bag. There it approaches very slowly, without having time to peroxidize, and to next day acquires a different taste and structure.

From such " slow» dough can be baked breadsticks, sprinkled with seeds and oatmeal, deep-fry potato pies or roll them thinly into round shape for pizza, top tightly, like tiles, cover with apple slices, sprinkle with almonds and powdered sugar or water maple syrup. At an oven temperature of 200 °C, the cake is baked in 15-20 minutes. For greater effect, it’s a good idea to turn on the oven in grill mode for a couple of minutes - then an appetizing crust will appear along the edges of the apple slices.

Having dinner children always with an enviable appetite - will never refuse scrambled eggs or an omelet, pasta salad and roasted vegetables or cottage cheese casserole With canned pineapples, raisins or peaches.

Most likely, my tactics are flawed. We rarely sit down at the table with the whole family. In my defense, I can say one thing: in our village house there is a specially ordered table that seats everyone. And it can be very fun and delicious.

And the kitchen is our island. An island of trust, secrets, conversations, decision making. I love it and we never get bored.

If you approach the issue of nutrition rationally and wisely, you can save significantly while having the most varied and nutritious food. daily menu. How? Now I will tell you, based on the experience of my family and numerous relatives.

To begin with, of course, I will list the immutable and well-known rules, but I cannot help but mention them. The very first thing - buying groceries in large shopping centers for a week at once. You would probably leave about 10% of their cost as a plus by going for bread and butter to the store closest to your home. The second rule to follow is making a list of products. With a couple of trips to the store on Sundays, you can easily determine what is included in your weekly diet. And you need to follow this list clearly and without concessions. This will allow you to avoid temptations in the form of delicacies that neither your stomach nor your wallet need. And it is advisable to go to the store only with a certain amount.

Well and following rules concern precisely the diet itself. Let's talk first about meat. We are all used to buying ready-made semi-finished products due to our busy lives. But cheap semi-finished products contain a lot of vegetable proteins, preservatives and flavors, while high-quality ones are very expensive. You will be surprised, but it will be cheaper to buy the freshest meat on the market or in a trusted store and, after spending an hour and a half on a weekend, make your own dumplings, cutlets, cabbage rolls and meatballs from home-cooked minced meat and fill the freezer with them. There will probably be enough for the next month. By the way, if you take the meat in half with chicken, this will not only make the minced meat cheaper, but will also make it even more tender and tastier.

I’ll tell you a little about: for our convenience, they are now on sale chicken drumsticks and thighs, legs and breasts separately. I brought it home from the store and straight into the frying pan. Well, if you buy several whole chickens or broiler chickens in the supermarket and cut them up at home yourself, then about 20% of their individual cost will probably remain in your wallet. Before throwing it into the freezer, do not forget to sort and put the cut poultry into bags. The labels on them won’t hurt at all: the date of packaging will tell you how soon the product needs to be prepared, and the inscription about the contents of the package without defrosting will tell you what’s inside. Wings and thighs are very tasty when baked, drumsticks go well in soup, and fillets go well in main courses. And from bony and seemingly unnecessary chicken backs, a very aromatic and rich chicken broth is obtained.

Soups It’s not at all necessary to cook from a whole piece of meat: let’s remember grandma’s cooking methods and buy beef or pork bones, and add cooked chicken meat to the already prepared broth. It is not inferior in taste and richness to meat broth. The same method can be used when preparing pilaf, stewed potatoes or cabbage. Pork, beef or lamb, added in small quantities to chicken fillet, will greatly improve the taste of the prepared dish. Believe me, it will taste as if you had prepared a dish from a kilogram of the purest meat.

Don't forget about fish. It is much cheaper than meat, of course, if it is not salmon, salmon or trout. And it will bring no less benefits to your body in the form of protein and minerals. From inexpensive white fish (cod, pollock, haddock and hake) you can prepare minced meat, from which, in turn, you can make fish sticks and fish cutlets. Don't discount pink salmon - it can easily replace the widely advertised and very expensive Norwegian salmon steaks. Instead of ready-made preserves, which we also mainly buy because of convenience and saving time, lightly salted herring or you can easily make mackerel yourself by buying fresh frozen fish.

In addition to the common pasta and potatoes, homemade cutlets can be served with cereals or legumes. For variety, prepare a side dish of vegetables. Cabbage in all forms goes very well with meat (stewed, fresh in salad, pickled), caviar from eggplant, zucchini or beets. By the way, it is advisable to buy all vegetables in season. It is very profitable to purchase potatoes, onions, carrots and beets in the fall at bazaars and agricultural fairs, where a kilogram of vegetables costs literally a few rubles. You can stock them up for the whole year. Of the most regular cabbage, beets, carrots and radishes in winter you can prepare very delicious and unusual salads, which will be a hit on the holiday table. And how many vitamins they contain!

The seasonal purchase rule also applies to berries and fruits. It is very profitable to buy fruits during their ripening period, and they contain much more vitamins than greenhouse strawberries and apples or other imported from distant countries exotic fruits. In summer and autumn from fresh berries you can make jam (believe me, anyone can do this, even not very experienced housewife), so as not to spend money on imported jams and confitures later. Also, do not forget to freeze the collected or purchased berries for a while. In winter, it’s great to make compotes and jelly from them, which will enrich a diet poor in vitamins. Also, well-frozen berries go into sweet baked goods. Pie with cherries or raspberries will certainly bring the whole family together for evening tea!

These are just a few of the principles of grocery shopping and housekeeping that bring significant savings to the family budget. Of course, every family has its own tastes, its own rules, and everyone acts in the way that is convenient for him. But I think that some of the above tips, not invented by me, but tested on myself, will be useful to someone.