📝 Emma “Useful” Sheppard 📖 Profile picture
Founder of the #MTPTproject, Coach, (forever at ❤️) former English Teacher and LP, Mother, Brit in 🇫🇷 , bassoonist, swimmer, #TFambassador, lover of #LitDrive

Aug 25, 2019, 19 tweets

A thread for any small child parents but particularly teachers who live in half termly cycles, want their children to eat healthily but have massive imposter syndrome around all the domestic goddess stuff (like me) #MTPTproject

Tip 1: study M&S’s “taste bud” range, or equivalent high class organic ethical healthy brand. Produce yourself for cheaper and with less plastic.

Freeze at least one meal per week of each half term, in glass containers. Then you can take it straight out of the freezer and blast it in the microwave/ oven without plastic-anxiety or the need to think ahead at 6:45am.

Expose marketable vegetables like “happeas” and “sweetie corn” that you can sell to your kids at 6:30pm. HIDE other vegetables like carrot, sweet potato and parsnip in mashed potato. Pick your battles with veg. Outsmart them.

Freeze mash separately. Then you can plonk it on/ beside other stuff.

Every day is Christmas: add nutmeg to stuff. Sauces, mashed potato, stews. It makes it taste nicer. Kids like nutmeg. It’s the real reason they like Christmas.

Make a list like this and tape it somewhere. Add to it whenever you have a mealtime success/ leftovers/ moment of genius.

Commit to an afternoon of batch cooking in the holidays. God it kills me to accept that this is what my once-exciting life is reduced to but I’ll deal with that crisis once a half term rather than every week night as I scrape rejected food off the floor. The indignity.

Excellent thought inspired by @meh50187: fraternise with the nursery chef and find out their nursery favourites. If chef can make it for 50 kids and it’s purée-able for the baby’s room, it must be simple and freezable.

Taping a picture of @saysmiss’s face next to this list will complete your shrine to organisational goddess and encourage you to ask, every day: “what would Kat do?” Luckily, she’s already written a blog about it (because she’s that organised) saysmiss.wordpress.com/2019/08/09/sti…

Avoid losing your shit when this happens and it’s 33°+ because you’re spending your afternoon next to an oven. Remember that you went to Bali once when you were young and exciting and did yoga. Draw on the zen of your 26yo self.

Call things by their “proper” names so your French husband doesn’t realise you’re feeding les enfants cheddar on Hovis when he’s not around with his Michelin star rating instruction manual 🇫🇷 🍽

(There is highly pulverised courgette in here - or at least there would have been if I’d been organised enough to think of this earlier this morning but see the first tweet of this thread 🤷🏻‍♀️).

Do all of this whilst one child is transfixed by a yoghurt pot filled with animals and the other is napping with a sieve. Alternatively, when someone else has taken them to IKEA because they don’t know any better and you are evil and didn’t advise against it.

Remember Bali. Remember Bali. Remember Bali. Inhale. Exhale.

Add a bag of this to your grocery shopping. Sprinkle cheese on everything and use words like “meaty” and “cheesy” and “gooey” to make stuff sound more appealing.

Listen to an audiobook/ podcast/ @BBCRadio4/ a symphony whilst you’re doing this so your mind can wander in a happy place rather than fixate on domestic drudgery if, like me, the angel in the house and all that jazz is not really your thing.

Ask important freezer capacity questions like “wtf do you intend on doing with your octopus, cherie?” BEFORE cooking 5 containers’ worth of toddler food.

Pretty sure this just means “pasta with oil” 🤷🏻‍♀️ 🇮🇹 🍝

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