It is tough NOW. So how are we coping

elizabunny

rosieben & ceridwen -thanks for your help. It seems I was getting it all wrong and should have left the Mayo on for at least 15 minutes and maybe popped a shower cap on as well -just me being my usual impatient self and expecting miracles after 2 minutes. Also rosie I will take a look at that link you posted

D&DD -your discription of the egg rinse made me giggle -sounds just like the sort of thing I would do:rotfl:

pawpurrs -fingers crossed for your DH

MindaJ

mumoftwo wrote: »

Please, please could I have a recipe for those, saw them in Starbucks for £1.65 each and would love to make them myself. We love chocolate orange anything in this house.. thank you so much

I'm not the OP, but I reckon if you made a basic choc muffin recipe and added a pulped orange to the mix you'd have something along those lines. :cool:

Kerfuffle

Hi MindaJ,

Hello and welcome :j

I thought I'd be the first to thank you in your very first post, yeeeey.:T

You deserve it being up at 5.05am :eek:

Toodles.

MindaJ

Hee! I'm in Australia, so it's actually 3pm here. (although I have been up since 5, so I'll accept the thanks anyway. And thanks for the welcome!)

rosieben

we have a couple of chocolate muffin recipes on the Grocery challenge recipe list - here and here

the recipe list is updated regularly and can always be found on the front page of each GC, it's worth a check out.

mummysaver

Pawpurrs - good luck to your DH, will keep everything except my eyes crossed xx

Mumof2 - just use a normal muffin mix, I do it by guesswork but any recipe will be fine, I replace some of the flour with a heaped tablespoon of cocoa powder, and add a teaspoon of orange extract (about 80 or 90p in Mr T's) and about half a bar of value plain choc roughly chopped into smallish chunks. To make sure your muffins stay soft and moist you just need to make sure you take them out of oven before they are really springy to the touch, so not quite as long as you would leave fairy cakes or a sponge. Oh and using real butter does make a difference to the richness of the taste.

Asda currently have their value butter at 47p - not sure how long this is for though.

mummysaver

furndire wrote: »

mummysaver wrote: »

it did make me wonder how many other people there are like her, spending huge amounts on food simply because they don't have the skills to cook from scratch or use everything or use cheaper alternatives. quote]

I know what you mean

This seemed to be the nub of Jamie Olivers campaign to "pass it on". I bet you'll feel really chuffed when you have helped

I do feel pleased to have helped, it's really satisfying to see that she knows she can do it and no magic is involved!

We went whoopsie hunting yesterday and did most of her week's shopping for next week! She was amazed at the amount you can save, and how easy it is to grab stuff for meals - tackling proper meal planning later on today! Yesterday we made eggy bread for brekkie, pork rolls for lunch (used a v cheap pork hock) and rolls were hm, D&DD's iced buns (yet more converts!), twinks hobnobs, pineapple upside down cake, chicken new yorker, roast potatoes, and we put beef casserole in the sc for tonight's dinner, and made the dough for pizzas for lunch today!

Looking at the list it looks like a huge amount of stuff! But I guess it's just stuff that you do automatically when everyone's off school and work normally, it's just writing it all down makes it seem like a lot!

I also introduced her to value stuff - she expected it to taste different or weird! Well tomatoes are tomatoes once they're in a recipe!

The supermarkets must make so much money from people like my friend, who could easily cook and save a fortune if only they knew how.

cw18

What scares me most about some people's inability to cook is that my DD and elder DS (now 25 and very nearly 20) both did cookery to GCSE -- yet neither of them has a clue how to adapt recipes, and I often get DD asking me how to make something she's not had in a long time "because she doesn't know how to make it and it's not in a book". During their GCSEs (different schools and 5 years apart) we had countless apple crumbles come home, but I can't remember a single other dish they made

I admit that I have to shoulder some of the blame for this, but it was soooo much easier to do the cooking on my own when they were little -- I worked outside the home full-time and had to run the house as well (DH would look after the children, wash the pots and mow the lawns/trim the hedges, but just about everything else was left to me), so being in the kitchen was something I did as quickly as possible, whilst also being a chance to grab a bit of time alone (also used to catch up with the post while things simmered).

I am now looking at the diet my GDs get fed at home, and wondering if my three really ate as much junk/convenience food as they do --- my instincts say not, but unless they learn to cook properly I dread to think what sort of diet the next generation will survive on :eek:

pawpurrs

Thanks for all the well wishes.

Charis

For anyone in need of a little humour, I stumbled across an old thread on MSE this morning and had the best laugh I've had for ages. I was actually looking for a thread on 'Most Comfortable Pillow' but the advanced search engine on MSE is a modern miracle and among the results it brought me 'Women Without Class' (maybe there is a link, for some people anyway :rotfl:)

I have only read the first five posts on page 1 and the last five posts on page 4 but they were enough to make me laugh out loud. I love the excerpt from the domestic science manual. Hard to believe that in its day it was deadly serious.