The Art of Leisure

I just came across a post in my Facebook feed called The Lost Art of Leisure, which I didn't have time to read but which I have bookmarked for later. I think I know what it says though, and the title struck a chord with me.

Tupperware

Today I went to a Tupperware party, the second one I have been to in my life. The first one was about 15 years ago when, if I remember correctly, I came to my cousin's house, drank some wine and admired some plastic stuff, and didn't buy a thing.

You learn something new every day: refrigerated minced meat edition

I learned a couple of new things today.

Firstly, I learned that I am getting too old and wussy for scary movies.  I nearly had a heart attack throughout almost all of Jurassic World, and actually got quite emotionally terrified when a flock of escaped pterodactyls flew across the island toward the crowds of unsuspecting tourists. (I actually got a lump in my throat, and when the pterodactyls started to swoop I for real started shallow-breathing and almost squeezed out some tears. The children! The children! What would I do if I was herding my kids through a stampeding crowd chased by raptors and pterodactyls?? What would I do, dammit?! The horror, the horror....)

So that was number one. I can obviously no longer go and see scary movies, or even enjoyable adventure movies with predictable character arcs and what I am sure is deeply inaccurate science.

But: despite all that, Jurassic World is actually pretty good and I did (kind of?) enjoy it. I am just an emotional idiot.

The second thing I learned was that managing minced meat can be a whole lot easier than I ever knew. I was making bolognese sauce, and you know how once you've heated the oil and sautéed the onions and garlic, you get the beef mince out of its packet and drop it into the saucepan, and it's basically a big red cold brick that you have to sort of hack away at with your wooden spoon, if you don't want to tear it into chunks with your bare hands first? And it's actually quite hard work chopping it all up and mixing it and turning the pieces until it's all broken down and brown and starting to cook?

Well, it turns out you don't have to do that. Today I dropped my red brick of cold minced beef into my saucepan, then turned away momentarily to read a couple of pages of a book I am reading, then got lost in the book and completely forgot about my saucepan... until a faint cooking smell wafted over, and I hurried over to resume. Voila! My minced beef had all "melted" into the pot, broken down and almost all browned, and only needed a couple of easy stirs to get all mixed in and ready for cooking.

So there you go.

Cute Dino Pics

Mr K's busy day

This happened one day last month.


My husband Y had a very stressful Friday. It ended with an eventful evening for our neighbors, a shock for us, and a very lucky outcome.

Y was busy that day. It was one of the first school days after the holidays, and my first day back at work. Y had to get the kids up and ready and off to school.

The kids were tired because they had been awake till late the night before, due to the heat (see: Melbourne Heatwave of 2014).

After a couple of hot weeks our front lawn was about a foot and a half in length and covered in prickly weeds and dandelions, and Y had promised to mow it.

He was also working that night and had a lot to do to get ready.

At around 1pm he rang me in consternation, asking how you look after newborn baby birds.

While mowing the lawn he had come across two tiny baby birds on the ground, with no nest anywhere in sight nearby. He picked them up and put them in a plastic container. Should he take them to the vet? he wondered.

I had hazy ideas about liquid food in eye-droppers and warm quiet boxes. I knew the neighbors across the road had once cared for a sick bird so I suggested he ask them, but they weren't home. I asked a couple of colleagues who said to ring the local council who would have a local wildlife care number. I looked up the council website and found nothing, so I Googled it.  It turns out, you can indeed take newborn wild birds to a vet, and in fact you definitely should do this if you are not experienced with baby birds, as they are very intensive to care for and obviously very fragile.

I rang our vet and they said they would take them. However - if they were really very little (newborns) they would most likely be put down, as they have to be fed every hour and need experienced care, and they would not survive the time it would take the vet to send them to a carer.

After one final search for the nest, Y had no choice, so he took them to the vet.

That was very very sad.  Knowing Y I know this would have upset him hugely, and of course it added stress and took a bit of time out of the little time he had.

He picked up the kids who were hot and tired and after the initial happiness of coming home and having a snack, quickly set to grizzling and "I'M HUNGRY!" for the rest of the afternoon.

As Y was running around, loading his car and trying to get the kids to hurry and change so he could drive them to Grandma's house and then go to work, they were dragging their feet and complaining they were hungry, so Y put some eggs on the stove to boil, while he got everything done.

At this point the kids (I learned later) were giving him grief, arguing and saying "We're not going to eat the eggs!" and Y was saying "Yes you will!" and still trying to get everyone ready and out the door.

Eventually after much yelling, threatening, pushing and complaining, they all got out and off they went.

With the eggs still boiling on the stove.


Meanwhile, I was having a lovely time at work. We finished at five, and it was just one of those things, there were drinks on and four of us ended up having a really good conversation, so I was there almost an hour later than usual, without really noticing the time.

My mobile was set to silent and I didn't notice three phone calls, until I picked up the messages two hours later at my mother's house.

Two were from a policeman at my house, and one was from the school.

Long story short:

The eggs had boiled dry and started to smoke, setting off the fire alarm.

Our neighbors heard the alarm, came to check and saw smoke, and not having my mobile number or a spare key, had had to call 000.

The police and fire brigade arrived, and had to break the door to get in. They turned off the stove, put the ruined pot on the front porch, and opened every window to get the smoke out. Searching for a mobile phone number, they got mine off the name tag on my daughter's schoolbag.

In a weird co-incidence, they first mis-dialled and rang the mobile number of a parent of one of my daughter's classmates, who then rang the school.

The school tried to reach me, and as I didn't answer the assistant principal drove round to our house to check if everything was alright.

I got the messages at 7.30 and rang back the police, and got the full story. I rang the school and filled them in and thanked them profusely. I asked who the other parent was who had alerted them, and it was someone I don't even know. I asked them to please pass on my thanks as well.

We went home and I thanked our neighbors profusely - not only did they potentially save our house from burning down, they were even apologetic for having to call the fire brigade and getting the door busted.  Are you kidding?? Don't even worry about it!


We did previously have a spare key at the neighbors - until I locked myself out one day and got it back, and just hadn't got round to returning it.

I am going to give the neighbors back a spare key and my mobile number, but I didn't do it straightaway because I didn't want it to look like "Here's our stuff so you can save our bacon next time we stuff up."  Does that sound paranoid?  I was a bit embarrassed though.


But: thank goodness for community. I am so glad - again - that we know our neighbors and are on good terms with them all, but everyone involved was magnificent, and they don't all know us. The other parent who alerted the school, the school itself which went out of its way to check we were ok, the police and fire brigade who went out of their way to minimise damage and did more than they had to to clear the smoke from the house. When we got home two neighbors seperately apologised for not being able to do more. Of course I apologised for the hassle and thanked them so, so much - as far as I'm concerned everyone involved saved our house.


And Mr K?   He had been so stressed out and busy that he never even recalled he had left eggs cooking on the stove. I had to wait up till after midnight till he came home to tell him, so he wouldn't freak out at coming home to a busted front door.

Not our house fortunately.
Photo by OldOldliner via Flickr Creative Commons

Spaghetti with love

When I met Y in Santorini many many years ago, he was working as a cook in a friend's restaurant. He used to make us pizza for lunch with feta, kaseri and cheddar cheese, oregano and spinach. In Thessaloniki he cooked us beautiful stews and soups and made wonderful salads - just as he does now. He always joked (but also meant it) that you had to put love in your cooking.

If I made a new dinner and it didn't turn out well, he would say, You forgot the love!

Tonight I'm making spaghetti bolognese, on request for M. 

We don't eat spag bol very often, because A hates mince meat. In fact she is not keen on red meat at all, and never has been. When we have spaghetti she has hers plain with oil and cheese, and will not even try a mouthful of meat sauce, though every time I give her a bit in a separate bowl and hope that one day she will.

M loves spaghetti bolognaise. 

Lately we've all been sick and M has been hit the hardest, with headaches and sick tummy coming and going. I kept her home one Monday, and then on the Tuesday after I did reading help in her class, I took her home with me again, just an hour into the school day.

We spent the day relaxing and chatting and she watched TV while I got on with some of the household admin that had lapsed while I'd been sick (do not leave an overdue electricity bill unattended for two weeks).

Since then she's been spending a lot of time in the sick bay and I know there's nothing really wrong; she is trying to get the school to call me to come and take her home. Her teacher confronted her gently and so did I, and last night she came clean and hugged me and cried and said she wanted to stay home with me again "just the two of us."

Over recent months A has had some iss-yoos, and we've been working through them and she's going well. But I always knew we ran the danger of neglecting our resilient, capable and confident M. She is so together and independent and mature that this is easily done. I am always mindful of it and I don't think we do neglect her at all - but I think she's been feeling a little squeezed out of the parental energy supply just lately.

Last night she asked me to make spaghetti bolognese, so tonight I am. We'll have it for dinner tomorrow.

You won't usually catch me cooking the night before Y's day off. His days off are my days off housework and cooking, yay!

But tonight I am cooking the best goddamn spaghetti bolognese I can make. I am cooking it slowly from fresh whole ingredients and minding it well as it simmers and reduces to just the right consistency and rich tomatoey goodness.

And it is FULL of love.

Toffee Apple Fail, Puppet Pass

Toffee Apples.
Challenge accepted.

First batch of toffee - fail.

Second batch of toffee - fail.

Aaaargh!

No toffee apples, kids. Sorry.

 * * *

This turned out better:

M. wanted to make puppets, which we ran out of time for on her last Sunday Fun Day. As chief Good Drawer in residence, A. offered to draw the puppet characters, and we each chose a character and cut it out. M. chose 'The Princess and the Frog.'

Once we cut them out, we used sticky tape to stick them to straws.

The puppet show itself was over in two minutes, and no doubt these will never be played with again. They're pretty cute though.

And that was pretty much our Sunday.

What did you get up to?

Best Porridge Ever

This is how I make porridge. 

It is the Best Porridge Ever. 

You will never eat better porridge than this.

Ingredients:

1 cup traditional oats
1 and a bit cups water
1 and a bit cups milk
one apple
handful of sultanas
brown sugar
nutmeg
cinnamon



Method:

Put the oats, water and milk in the saucepan. It works best if you have a heavy-bottomed saucepan, so you can cook it slowly over low heat.  (When I say slowly, it still only takes about ten minutes. No need for quick oats).

Peel and grate an apple; add the grated apple to the saucepan.

Chuck in a handful of sultanas, unless you have kids who get mad when you include sultanas, in which case only include this step about a quarter of the time, when you really want sultanas.

Add a sprinkle each of cinnamon and nutmeg.

Stir with a wooden spoon over a low heat, until porridge is cooked, thickish and bubbly. This should take a few minutes, but not too fast - enough time to cook the apple and nicely absorb most of the liquid but still leave the porridge a good, liquidy consistency.

(I trust you have separate wooden spoons in your drawer for sweet and for savoury? You should. Do NOT use the same wooden spoon you have used to stir spaghetti sauce or curry).


Pour the porridge into bowls, add a splash of cold milk and a sprinkle of brown sugar to each bowl,and eat.

At our house the dog gets to lick the kids' bowls afterwards. 

There's never anything left to lick in mine.

With thanks to my long-lost university friend Katherine, who taught me how to add apple and cinnamon to porridge. I bought that pretty blue and white bowl then. I was in my second year of uni and living in a uni flat with Katherine and two others. It was decreed that we each needed a lovely bowl for our porridge.

My Former Life and My Current Life: Greek Avgolemono Soup

Back in 1994 I was 24 and working as a cook in a restaurant on Santorini, in Greece. I am not a chef or even a cook, and this was not work I enjoyed on the whole. Restaurant kitchens are hard work - I cannot watch Masterchef as I find it too stressful!

But this man made this job as enjoyable as it could possibly be. I was very lucky to get a job working with Mike Roussos. Mike had lived in Chicago for 20 years and had just relocated his family back to Greece. He was finding it a little difficult to adjust, being on the one hand used to the amenities of the US and on the other finding the Greece of his youth had disappeared.

Mike is a wonderful guy and he taught me everything he did in the kitchen. He was very generous with his time and knowledge and we worked well together, as it was just the two of us in the large kitchen of probably the most popular tourist restaurant on the island at that time.

Me and Mike on a rare break

Mike Roussos in the kitchen

I kept an exercise book of recipes Mike taught me, and as I was trying to learn Greek some are in bits of earnest, erroneous Greek or use Greek words or brand names for ingredients I wasn't sure of. It's not only a great souvenir but a truly useful cookbook - I use these recipes often.

My cookbook with Mike's recipes

My favourite of all is avgolemono - Egg and Lemon Soup.
It is absolutely delicious - imagine chicken soup with a zesty tang and that's what it is.

I don't believe Mike would mind me sharing this recipe.


Mike Roussos' Egg and Lemon Soup


Boil a chicken in water until very well done. Remove meat, discard bones and waste.
To the water add salt, pepper and white arborio rice (about a cup), and simmer to cook the rice; once rice has cooked turn off heat and let the stock cool a bit as you do the next part.
Squeeze juice from some lemons - at least 4.
In a bowl whisk 7 egg whites until frothy, gradually adding half the lemon juice.
Add the yolks, whisk well and add more lemon juice to taste. Test it by dipping in a finger - it should taste quite lemony, so quite a bit of juice is needed.


Here is the tricky bit. While whisking, spoon 4 or 5 ladles of broth (without any rice) and pour slowly into the egg and lemon mixture. Take your time doing this, as this will prevent the soup curdling. It is easier with two people.  When the broth and egg and lemon are mixed, slowly pour the whole of the egg and lemon mix into the pot of broth.


Test again and add lemon to taste. If the soup is too eggy or thick, thin with water. 


Add the meat before serving.



Mike, wherever you are - and I hope you're well - thank you.

Kali orexi  (bon appetit)!

Egg and Lemon Soup

My Favorite Recipe Books

I once read that the average recipe book is used for two recipes. I think that's right.
When I read that I took a good look through the shelf of recipe books I had collected over the years and gave away all the ones that I did not use, or that I only used for one recipe (I copied the recipe first).

The others I have kept, and it is now a small but honest collection.

Here are the recipe books I use the most:


Tana Ramsay's Family Kitchen
If you ignore the kind of annoying perfect-family pictures throughout, the recipes are fantastic. Good wholesome family food with lots of stews, pies, soups, sandwiches and sweets.

buy

You also have to ignore the title of the chapter "Cooking From the Cupboard" which is supposedly about using ingredients already in your pantry, because the Ramsay family clearly have a very different pantry to mine. Theirs is apparently always stocked with things like creme fraiche, pancetta, and fresh flat leaf parsley (rather than, say, tinned tomatoes, Worcestershire sauce and a packet of spaghetti).

My favourite recipes:

• tinned sardines with avocado on toast
• stew
• fish pie

Healthy Cooking: a Commonsense Guide

buy

A brilliant reference containing loads of information on nutrition plus kilojoule, carb, fat and fibre count tables. It also has general cooking tips and how-to guides at the start of each chapter.
Many recipes are classic favorites modified to be less fattening or more healthy (you can always modify them back!).

My favorite recipes:

• roasting - introductory section with lots of tips and info
• wholemeal banana bread
• fudge brownies

Elliniki Kouzina (Greek Cooking)
This is a book produced in Greece and available at all good tourist shops in the Greek Islands.  I bought it because I was learning Greek as well as to have a reference for Greek dishes. I still use it a lot.

My favorite recipes:

• stuffed green peppers and tomatoes
• stuffed zucchini with white sauce

My Greek Recipe Journal
For one eventful summer in my twenties, I worked as a cook in a restaurant in Santorini. I was lucky enough to work with a man named Mike Roussos who was not only a wonderful guy but a really good cook. He had lived for the past 20 years in Chicago and had just returned to Greece with his American family, and was adjusting to life back in his homeland. He taught me loads of dishes, including some clever shortcuts for cooking dishes in bulk and fast.
I kept this journal throughout, in a tatty exercise book spattered with oils and sauces, which I still use all the time.

My favorite recipes (thank you Mike!):

• Avgolemono (chicken egg and lemon soup)
• tomato keftedes (tomato, cheese and zucchini pancakes)
• Madeira cake
• spaghetti carbonara 
• spetsofai (spicy sausage casserole)
• moussaka

My Recipe Book
My own collection of hand-written recipes which I started in my early teens and finished in my early twenties when I first moved out of home and started cooking for real.
It has all the best of my mum's cooking, many of which are the same recipes still passed between women which turn up under different women's names in the "reader recipe" sections in women's magazines (and which probably ultimately came from some early Women's Weekly feature or the old PWMU cookbook).
It has recipes which are solidly of the 1970s like chop suey and "curry" (lamb, sultanas and curry powder). It has recipes from the years we lived in the US when I was a kid, like Club 21 Chicken Hash, Kathryn Hepburn's Brownies, Hamburger Helper, Pumpkin Pie and Pecan Pie. And it has recipes I got from flatmates and friends in my uni days, which evoke great memories of cooking back when cooking was new and fun.


My favorite recipes:

• honey orange chicken
• curry chicken 
• Club 21 Chicken Hash
• tuna casserole (with potato chips)
• chocolate fruit slice
• Devil's Chocolate Cake
• Flat Five Mince and Chickpea Curry
• Kate's apple crumble
• Jacob's sweet and sour pork
• Anatoly's chicken

Busy Woman's Quick and Easy Recipes: Make 'em Happy, Fix it Fast!

buy

I bought this recently at the supermarket. It has approximately one million and sixty chicken recipes, most of which use some dodgy but convenient base like French Onion Soup Mix, apricot jam or mayonnaise. All the recipes are indeed very quick and very easy. Some of them sound too weird to try (Cola Chicken), but I have had a few successes.

My favorite recipes:

• honey baked chicken
• chicken quesadillas
• deluxe dinner nachos

Australian Women's Weekly Fresh Food for Babies and Toddlers

buy

Brilliant during the transition to solids and toddler finger food. Still my go-to for simple plain foods friendly to fussy taste buds

My favorite recipes:

• custard
• mini beef rissoles
• broccoli and cheese frittata
• honey and soy drumsticks
• basic birthday cake recipe

What are your favorite recipe books?

The Secret to Good Cooking

I have spent the last few years experimenting with dinners. From experimental gourmet meals for grown-ups to different kinds of mash for toddlers, to family meals: quick & easy, slow-cooked, recipes from different countries, low-fat healthy meals, recipes torn from the pages of women's magazines, recipes scrawled down watching episodes of Nigella, Jamie, Gordon Ramsay and others, recipes from my mother's collection from the 1970s and 80s, recipes from my own first cookbooks bought in the 80s and recipes from flatmates in my university days.  I have made up my own recipes and adapted others, to make them fit what small children will eat, make them healthier or yummier, or suit what I had in my cupboard at the time. I have made meals from pre-made sauces and bases and added a pinch of this or that or tossed in a handful of greens so I could feel like I cooked.

And from this wealth of variously loving, despairing, fun, boring and desperate experience, I have found the secret to delicious, successful family meals. Meals that the whole family will eat.

I don't mean to imply that everyone eats and loves my food every night - far from it!

Also, I don't cook every night. We have a baked beans or scrambled eggs night and a "picnic dinner" night every week, and we get take-out sometimes.


But for successful cooked meals I now know what works, and it is this:

Method:

• taking time (enough time - but not hours)
• taking care
• being relaxed (music helps)

Ingredients:
One or more of the following, in very generous quantities:

• salt
• oil
• butter 
• cream

!!!

Cooking: do you love it or loathe it?

What works for you?

Creamy Honey Mustard Chicken. Serve with greens and rice.
Bribe children with a small dessert to eat some greens. Yes,
I know you're not meant to do this. Don't care.

Dinner - Now!

When you work full-time, you are often not picking up your baby/toddler/child from daycare/after-school-care until late. And when you get home, you need to have dinner ready. And I mean as soon as you get home.
Here is the scene. You leave work at 5pm (to the envious glances of colleagues who have no idea what you are about to face). You bolt for the car/train and make the dash to the daycare centre/school, knowing you have to be there by six. Every minute you linger at your desk to finish an email, every missed traffic light, every late train, sets your heart racing and your mind stressing.
Against the odds, you arrive on time. You park the car and race inside, to your little one(s), which is a great moment - they smile, yell "Mummy!", run to your arms, and show you what they've been doing. You hug and kiss them, marvel at their achievements, catch up on their feed/sleep status with the carers, sign them out, grab their stuff and you all head to the car.
From that moment, the nice bit is over.
Assuming there are no dramas getting the kids into the car (big assumption - but let's move on), the drive home quickly turns into a battleground. The kids will start off happy but within five minutes it starts - "I'm hungry!" - "I need to do wee!" - "Stop it", "You stop it", "Mu-u-u-m!".
I chose a daycare centre close to home rather than close to work, and I am glad I did - that evening drive home is just awful. I love it now that school is only a five minute drive from home, and am thankful we went with our local school every night I make that drive (which is only two nights a week, but that is so enough).
When you get home, you need to get the kids out of the car, and into the house.
This is your only goal, though the need to move quickly onto dinner-homework-bath-bed is tapping at your skull like a woodpecker. "Come on, out of the car, come on, inside please, come on, come on, come on," you parrot endlessly while the kids fight, slump in their seats "I'm tired..." or fight over who is going in the front door first.
When they're babies you might have one fall asleep, or both crying by the time you get home.

So you get them in the door, and it's after six. They're hungry, they're tired, they're grumpy, and they have no tolerance for waiting fifteen or twenty minutes while you cook something from scratch.
You need to feed them ASAP or lose them to sleep, tears, your temptation to turn on the TV for them, or they start playing with toys and you can't get them to the dinner table.

So what are some really really quick ideas for dinner? Try these:

• scrambled eggs
• baked beans on toast
• macaroni cheese (yes, the one in the box)
• picnic on the table: pull out what you have in the fridge and put it on plates on the table for all to share: boiled eggs, left over rice or spaghetti/spirals cooked the evening before, slices of ham and cheese, cut up fruit, yoghurt, etc. Works well as little kids don't even like their food very hot - lukewarm is best (and easy)
• fish fingers and vegetables (cut up two veg and chuck in microwave/steamer while the fish fingers cook, so you don't have to wait for water to boil)
• half an avocado and a spoon, and some toast
• we always have a tub of tzatziki in the fridge and put it out with bread - the kids love it
• chicken tenderloins cook really fast - couple of minutes either side in a pan with a splash of hoi sin and soy, or butter and honey, and serve with rice and/or veg.
• (On the weekend when you have more time you can coat chicken tenderloins with egg and breadcumbs and make 'chicken nuggets')
• my kids love spiral pasta - on its own as a side dish. They're not big on potatoes, but we serve rice or spirals with dinner often.
• fried rice is fast - if you have cooked rice in the fridge. Chuck in some frozen mixed veg or if you only have fresh pick two veg and chop up a handful. Fry up 1-2 eggs, add the rice and veg and a splash of hoi sin and soy sauce, five minutes in the pan and it's ready
• in summer time, barbecues are great. We ate a lot of grilled/barbecued meat with rice and carrot and broccoli. Requires designated barbecue operator to be home at same time as parent bringing home the kids

In the evening after the kids are in bed, you ideally cook the next day's dinner, so it is in the fridge and ready to heat up when you get in the next night. If you are super organised you could freeze stuff like spag bol or stews. But this is not sustainable every day, you will sometimes (often) be too tired, or you won't have ingredients, or whatever. When my kids were toddlers they liked cooked carrots and broccoli so we often had par-boiled carrots and boiled eggs cold in the fridge. We did more than the occasional dinner of carrots, broccoli, eggs, bread and tzatziki.

You don't need to plate up meat and three veg, or produce a bowl of something made from all the food groups.

Especially when kids are at daycare, they get a cooked meal at lunchtime, and food throughout the day. My kids sometimes had a peanut butter sandwich for dinner. Sometimes they got spag bol or risotto I had cooked the night before. At least one day a week they got scrambled eggs and toast, and one day was baked beans on toast. The other 2-3 days we did the 'picnic' meal of boiled eggs/carrots/whatever from the fridge.

I also took advantage of the toddler years when my kids didn't mind eating the same thing for dinner two or three days in a row (no longer the case, alas).

I noticed evenings went a lot better once I took the pressure off myself to produce a "dinner" and just focused on easy fast and basic food.

Kids love simple food. So do mums.

The Working Through It Spag Bol

I was very impressed with myself today so have decided to share with the lucky internet my delicious recipe for a sort of spaghetti bolognaise, invented and ingested today.
Inspiration: We are only a couple of days back from a short break away, and there is not a lot of fresh veg in the fridge, but there were 2 tomatoes and an eggplant sitting there which were about to turn.

I made this this afternoon while working from home and it passed all my just-invented busy-working-mum tests: it used enough fresh ingredients to make me feel virtuous, used all ready-at-hand ingredients to make me feel economical and clever, was easy to make, incorporated a good serve of veg, and was liked by 3 out of 4 family members - that's good enough for me!

Ingredients:

• olive oil
• 400g lean mince
• one eggplant, diced
• 2 very ripe tomatoes
• bottle of commercial bolognaise sauce or other variety (mine was Dolmio Red Wine pasta sauce) (and cut me some slack on the sauce, I'm busy)
• one celery stick, chopped (I buy celery and cut up each stick and put them in ziplock bags and keep them frozen for soups and sauces - so in my case this is one bag of frozen celery pieces)
• one packet of frozen spinach
• one sachet, or about 2 tablespoons, tomato paste
• squirt of tomato ketchup (if needed)

Method:

1. Heat the oil in a heavy pot over medium heat
2. Add the mince and brown it
3. Add the eggpant, celery, spinach and pasta sauce; mix so the frozen vegs are in the middle of the pot covered with sauce. Turn down heat to low, cover and simmer for 40mins plus, checking and mixing occasionally to make sure the mixture doesn't reduce too far.
4. When the sauce and veg are well cooked, mix in the tomato paste and leave on low heat uncovered while spaghetti is cooking.
5. Cook and drain spaghetti, mix in with meat sauce in the pot, and taste.
6. If a little extra flavour is needed, or if kids need enticement to try it, then at the table add a squirt of tomato ketchup.

Delicioso!