Don't make a meal of work -life balance...
A New Year, a new resolve.
To stop relying on ready-meals, roll your sleeves up and get cooking.
This week, thousands will have taken just such a pledge.
But not Sheffield businesswoman and mother of five Ruth Adams.
While many a parent beats themselves up about not giving the family dinners lovingly prepared with their own hands, Ruth is resolutely bucking the trend.
Her freezer is stacked wall-to-wall with frozen ready-meals. She cheats every single day of the week... and she feels not one twinge of guilt.
Says the Aston lifecoach and trainer: "I know most people's New Year pledges will be to do the exact opposite of what I do, but I don't care. I've found a way that works for us."
RUTH'S STORY
It begins with Phil Vickery on This Morning, then it's Master Chef, Jamie's 30 minute meals, Come Dine With Me, Meals in Moments, Jimmy's Food Factory, Nigel Slater's Simple Suppers, Nigella's Kitchen, River Cottage Every Day, Saturday Kitchen Live...
We are inundated with cookery programmes. Cookery books always feature in the Top 10 non-fiction book list. There has never been so much help and information to encourage us to cook from scratch.
I know about having five portions of fruit and vegetables a day and the health benefits of cooking fresh food, yet I am deliberately ignoring it.
Why? Because I have never enjoyed cooking. It has always been a time consuming chore. I did it through gritted teeth because I wanted to eat healthily and to pass the importance of this on to my kids. And because I really believed it was a way of proving to myself, my family and anyone else who was watching that I was Supermum.
I dare not calculate how many of my 57 years have been spent shopping, preparing and cooking meals for the family, (then clearing up all the mess afterwards) while juggling full-time work, five children, fostering, caring for elderly parents, voluntary work and 'life'.
Then one day, a few years ago, everything changed. I had begun my own self-discovery and life-coaching business, In Your Element (www.in-your-element.co.uk), and realised that for much of the time, I wasn't in mine. What a hypocrite! Things needed to change in a number of areas of my life."
"I found an online 'home cooked' food website and I was hooked. Five minutes choosing the dishes you want, click a button and within a day or two, delicious frozen meals arrive on the doorstep, just as you'd make yourself. They are healthy, low in fat and salt.
Every month I order around 100-worth and I supermarket-shop for the other bits and pieces we need. It does cost more than cooking from scratch, but I don't think the meals are expensive when I take into account the time I save on shopping, preparation and clearing up.
Now all I have to do is remember to take the food out of the freezer in the morning, so that within minutes of arriving home we have a delicious, healthy meal which only needs a few veg added – frozen of course!
My most recent 'discovery' is Aunt Bessie's Mashed Carrot and Swede – try it!
I now happily invite friends over for food rather than dread these social occasions. I slip the frozen meal into a ceramic dish and guests always comment on my ability to produce such amazing home-cooked food despite being out at work all day. Often I just smile sweetly and accept the compliments. But when I do confess, people are amazed at the quality of what they're eating.
For 34 years I had cooked for between 12 and 25 people on Christmas Day, smiling through the parsnips, stuffing and steamed pudding, waiting on everyone like some sort of unpaid servant.
"Not any more. We go away and eat out or I cater with my freezer-ful of ready-meals. I fed 16 on Christmas Eve and Boxing Day this year without breaking a sweat.
"I don't miss cooking - I still bake potatoes, steam vegetables and make the occasional Pavlova - which I consider to be cooking.
There seems to be an unwritten perception that we should all enjoy providing nutritious meals for our nearest and dearest. I don't see why people should be made to feel guilty if they don't. Let's concentrate on the things we enjoy and are good at and leave the experts to the rest."
The quick and easy route
Ruth discovered online ready meals suppliers Cook, which since its launch in 1997 has been challenging the perception of frozen food and the freezer as an ice-bound wasteland inhabited by cheap pizzas, oven chips, peas and long-forgotten leftovers.
Its meals, all made by hand at the Cook Kitchen in Kent, range from pies and casseroles to specials like Haunch of Venison with Crushed Celeriac and Roasted Confit of Duck with a Juniper Berry Sauce
There are 42 branded stores and 250 concessions in farm shops and supermarkets. Annual sales last year were 20m.
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Saturday 26 May 2012
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