Hi! Welcome to my developing collection of relaxed recipes for family cooking. I really hope you find simple, easy recipes here, along with ideas anyone could adopt to make mealtimes less stressful and more enjoyable.
My name is Skyler, I live in Hampshire in the UK and I love cooking, which is just as well as round our house it can be like feeding the 5,000 sometimes. “Chilled out” is not a word though that you would have associated with my cooking a few years ago. I was the exact opposite, serving up nice meals had become somewhat anxiety-inducing for me. The irony was that one of my early-career jobs was compiling and publishing traditional recipe books. But, I had since married a man with children, and very quickly found that cooking for this new, instant and hungry family was quite a different kettle of fish….
So, this blog is intended to be both my family recipe collection and my experience of putting great food on the table in an enjoyable way for both the cook and the hungry recipients.
Other things about this blog: I have Waitrose tastes and an Asda budget. The more ingredients used, the more expensive and time-consuming the dish will be. So, I tend to limit ingredients, though hopefully not in a gimmicky way. However, when I go looking for “quickie recipes”, far too often you find people raving about using tins of condensed Campbell’s Mushroom Soup for a sauce. Yuk. Never. Not in a million years. So, we don’t do too much processed stuff here.
Having said that, I will use “convenience” but for me, that usually means the product contains a few, simple ingredients–frozen pastry is a good example. The best advice I have ever heard on this is never buy products that contain ingredients that could not conceivably be lurking in your own cupboards. Well, I try.
The other thing I should mention is that the recipes I use, for very boring allergy-related reasons (unless you have an allergy too), are cinnamon-free and chili/paprika-free. That doesn’t stop me though making a purringly-good prawn curry.
