potatoes.

This is currently what is in our fridge, i.e. very little.
My mother is not great at shopping. It's always been a little bit of an ordeal for her. For as long as I can remember, Saturday morning has been shopping time. Originally  this was because she was at work during the week. However, now she has retired, she has become one of those irritating old people who do their shopping on a Saturday morning when all the busy working people are trying to do theirs. In her novel, Heartburn, Nora Ephron discusses her mother's shopping habits: "[Mother] would get into her 1947 Studebaker and set off for a day in the aisles." (23). In a similar manner, my mother, my nan and myself would get in our car and head off for a morning (which usually went into the afternoon) at Marks and Spencer. We would head to the wonderful place that is Lakeside to find our nearest one. We would leave before it opened and often be waiting at the door, eager to start our shopping. The morning would begin pleasantly, we would get a coffee and a teacake for breakfast. However, things would soon turn sour. The first issue: trolleys. Marks and Spencer are so fastidious about their trolleys (this is not just a trolley, this is an M&S trolley) you have to pay a pound to get one. Being the disorganised person I am, actually having a pound coin is usually an issue for me, but this was not the problem my mother encountered. She had her pound, did her shopping but then, after loading the car, she could not retrieve her pound. This irked my mother somewhat and the customer service department at Marks and Sparks received a weekly ear-hole-bashing from my mum who was too exasperated from the rest of the shopping experience to return to the store to get her money back. Eventually, customer services became so sick of my mother's persistent phonecalls they suggested we just go and ask for a trolley without the coin. Simple. However, the huge queue at the customer service desk usually added an extra 20 minutes to the shopping experience, transferring the trolley exasperation to the start of the trip.
After the initial stressful experience with the trolley, the actual shopping could commence. I would accompany my nan and help her do her shopping (which involved spending hours looking at cheese and flowers only for her to buy exactly the same twenty four products each week). In hindsight, I think nan would have been fine and I should have accompanied mum.
In this video, Mum discusses her shopping techniques, favourite supermarkets and worries about being sued for bad mouthing Iceland (Iceland, if you're reading, don't sue my mother please.)

Theme weeks were a common thing while Mum was at work. As discussed in the video, there was the week of potatoes (parmentier potatoes, new potatoes, regular potatoes, two pots of ready done mash, chips, rosemary potatoes and potato gratin in case you were wondering if there even were eight different types of potatoes available to purchase). Then there was yoghurt week. Twenty nine yoghurts for three people. And I don't even really like yoghurts. Mum thinks that now she has retired, this sort of thing no longer happens. However, I looked in our other fridge and discovered thirteen yoghurts and seven different types of cheese.

And a LOT of vegetables.

Oh, and some mouldy ones.

Why we have so much cheese is anyone's guess. Someone probably said they liked cheese about three years ago and mum has been buying it ever since. If ever we tell my mother we liked something or commented that a meal was nice, we will then be fed that for the rest of our lives or until we tell her otherwise. If we like something, it doesn't quite mean we want to eat it every day for the rest of time. Ephron explores this issue in Heartburn: "[Mother] developed passionate and brief attachments to new products. One month she fell in love with instant minced onions. Another month it was Pepperidge Farm raspberry turnovers." (23). The abundance of yoghurts in our fridge is an example of this. 
However, this is exacerbated by the offers available in supermarkets.  Muller Light were on special in Waitrose, and the Greek style ones (as mum explain in the video) are very cheap in Iceland. Mum is a sucker for an offer. Even if it means we end up with 29 yoghurts and eight types of potatoes. 
Walking through Marks and Spencer, I am bombarded by red signs offering various deals across their food ranges. So I started to think, was Mum really to blame for her terrible shopping habits? Or was it Marks and Spencer and their abundance of red stickers? As Mum explained in the video, I am "not good" at shopping because I do not tend to become suckered into these offers whereas Mum will buy three times the amount she needs because it has a red sticker. (I will confess, today I was suckered in. In our local M&S you have to pay £1 for the car park but can reclaim it if you spend £5 in store. I had spent £4.64, just buying what I needed. But because I wanted the £1 back, I bought a bag of sweets for 75p, taking me over the £5. The sweets I purchased I did not need, nor do I even like, but I felt I had to spend over the £5 because I wanted my £1 back. Which I proceeded to waste on the sweets. Vicious cycle really.) I asked a couple of other people if they were swayed by offers in supermarkets and the majority of them said yes because it seems like such a bargain at the time. Yes, until you end up with eight packets of potatoes. Then it's not such a great idea.



Red stickers are EVERYWHERE. 
Before I'd even got through the main door I was greeted by this plethora of offers:

Just past the door and I can only assume that M&S in Upminster had had the grape delivery for the entire south east and needed to shift them with the help of their handy red stickers:

The main offer this week, however, was their Dine in for £10. Their website offers a lovely 'menu' in an attempt to entice customers.

The use of this menu format gives part of the 'restaurant experience' missing from eating at home. Speaking to the lady on the till, she told me that Dine in for £10 is extremely successful and it gets customers in the store, prompting them to then buy more things (enter red stickers).
The appetising pictures of the foods and wide selection offered, as well as the extraordinary cheap price tag of £10 tempt customers into the store. Naturally, we bought one.

I looked at some of the offers in store and found this:

The sticker says "Buy one get one half price," yet the label says "2 for £6." Marks and Spencer are clearly getting so carried away with their red stickers, they have lost track of their own offers!

As you can see, the offers are everywhere. There is no escaping them. These marketing tactics convince gullible people like my mother that yes, she really DOES need six cartons of orange juice and thirty two yoghurts because it's just such a good offer. 
I feel like I've become side tracked on this blog, ranting about red stickers and what not. Apologies to those of you who made it this far if I bored you. Pop to M&S and reward yourself with something, chances are it'll be on offer.

frankfurter.

This week, I thought I would look at the way we shop for food. Mainly because my mother is terrible at it so I thought that might be amusing.

Mrs Beeton (yes, her again) highlights the importance of sourcing your food properly and gives direction for selecting the choicest of meats, fish and vegetables as the start of each of her chapters. In the section of "Household Management" entitled "The Mistress," Beeton states that "In marketing, that the best articles are the cheapest, may be laid down as a rule; and it is desirable, unless an experienced and confidential housekeeper be kept, that the mistress should herself purchase all provisions and stores needed for the house. If the mistress be a young wife, and not accustomed to order 'things for the house,' a little practice and experience will soon teach her who are the best tradespeople to deal with, and what are the best provisions to buy. Under each particular head of FISH, MEAT, POULTRY, GAME, &c., will be described the proper means of ascertaining the quality of these comestibles."

For my family, Mrs Beeton unfortunately got it wrong. It was not desirable for the mistress of our household to purchase all provisions as she had no clue what to buy. I will explore the way my mother shops nowadays in my next blog (I am sure you're all on the edge of your seats), but this week I will go back and see how she remembers shopping as a child in the 1950's and whether it is really my nan who should shoulder the blame for me having to suffer with "Yoghurt week" (more of this in my next blog, see, you're getting more and more eager to read it).

Mum dressed more sensibly for this week's video.

She also removed the tea bag from the used tea bag tray by the kettle just in case anyone zoomed in on the video and judged her for the "mess" in her kitchen before she would let me start.

Yes, you did hear right. She doesn't think 10 frankfurters in one sitting is a lot. And yes, I witnessed her enjoy a frankfurter with a cappuccino. That's not even the worst combination she has concocted. 

She forgot to add how upset she was when it closed. 

Although most people don't tend to focus their shopping memories on free frankfurters, Mum does raise the point that people used to have to visit several different stores, or at least several counters in order to collect the food they needed. While watching The Mary Berry Story this evening, she alluded to this notion, stating that she used to "buy olive oil from the chemist." Mum was brought up in the 1950's, when Britain's food industry was returning to normal after rationing in the war. A quick Google search of "food shopping 1950s" produced a few educational videos, giving guides to 50's housewives on how to complete their weekly shop. 

my50syear.blogspot.co.uk is a blog in which an American woman relives food shopping in the 1950's.

Although both of these guides are American, many British cookbooks alluded to the importance of being a thrifty shopper. Dusting off our old yet untouched cookery books, I discovered St Michael's Cookery Library book of "Family Meals" by Elizabeth Seldon. Seldon states that "by planning a week's menus in advance your shopping expeditions can be reduced as well as the time you spend in your kitchen." Seldon goes on to state that "as we spend a quarter to a third of our income on food, it is well worth using time planning meals and shopping economically."

Over the decades, the way we shop for food has drastically changed. Many high streets are without local butchers and fishmongers as supermarkets exploded on to the scene offering everything that a housewife could possibly need, pre-packaged for her convenience. So perhaps it is not my mother or my nan who I need to blame for the random shopping my mother produced, but the supermarkets themselves. Had she had to queue at each counter, she would perhaps not have requested 29 yoghurts in one go (that's right. Twenty nine yoghurts in one shopping trip. I was going to save that gem for next week but as you got to the end, consider it a treat).

Ps, basil's not doing so well.

I think he needs to go to herb hospital.

basil.

Yesterday, I came home and found this in the kitchen.

(it’s basil)

For most of you, that is probably not a particularly odd thing to find in a kitchen. However, in my kitchen, its probably about as peculiar as buying a beefburger and finding it's actually made of horse...oh wait...scratch that. I asked my mother if she knew what she’d bought and she proudly told me it was basil. I then asked if she intended to cook with it and if so, what was she planning on rustling up(at this point our fridge contained cheese, some out of date ham, milk and several jars of pickle, so what she thought basil would add to that concoction I have no idea). “No…,” she said sadly. “I just thought it would make the kitchen smell nice.” Well. You can’t fault her practicality I suppose.

Herbs seem to play a huge part in cooking. Well, in most cooking, not so much the cooking that happens in my house. I have vivid memories of watching Jamie Oliver in his early days of The Naked Chef pulling herbs from his window ledge herb garden. Although I couldn't find that clip, he has since created a nice little film on herbs:

Jamie Oliver is enthusiastic about pretty much everything, but he seems to really love those herbs. He describes basil as "the most incredible herb." My mum described basil as "smelly." Not quite the same enthusiasm there. In fact, Jamie seems to neglect the "smelly" properties of basil and focuses on the more practical aspects such as the fact that "It makes you salivate more and it helps digestion" and that it's "delicate to eat." He informs us that rosemary is an anti-depressant and herbs have been used for thousands of years to kill bacteria showing us the versatility of herbs, and he enthuses about how easy it is to grow a herb garden. Elizabeth Gaskell's "Cranford" shows the healing properties Jamie talks about. After her sister dies, Miss Jessie is given "a basin of delicately-made arrowroot" to calm her down.

Although Jamie is probably addressing adults, there are lots of websites and videos promoting making a herb garden as something fun to do with children. A quick search on youtube threw up a video from a user called 2kidscooking. Once you get over the fact that they insist on calling them "urbs" instead of herbs, the kids and their mum actually give some very detailed instructions on making a herb garden. 

The kids seem really excited to plant their herb garden and although this family clearly do this kind of thing a lot, it does make it seem like an easy and fun way for a family to bond over food.
Another website ( Ready for Ten ) states that "Children and herbs go together like strawberries and cream." All these enthusiastic phrases and comparisons and videos of happy children really promote the idea of using herbs to bond with your kids.

There's even an old television show from Michael Bond called The Herbs.

My favourite character is Constable Knapweed.
According to the reliable source that is Wikipedia, "Each character was the personification of an herb. It is said that Bond used quotes from Nicholas Culpeper's 17th Century book, Culpeper's Complete Herbal, to find the herbs whose botanical traits he could best reflect in the individual characters." Although the show doesn't really educate you about herbs, it probably got children interested in herbs and was something they could watch with their parents. Even if they didn't learn anything, the stories are nice and there are some good songs, so at the very least households across the nation would be full of children singing about herbs.

Clearly, herbs are a good food for parents to use to entertain children, from cooking with them to making your own herb garden to singing songs about them.

In the words of Jamie Oliver, "herbs are where it's at." Unfortunately not in my house. For now, that sad little basil plant that sits on the window ledge is the closest we will come to having a herb garden.

jelly.

I asked my mum if we had ever cooked anything together. After an extended period of silence, she decided we must have cooked something. After failing to come up with anything, I left her with a glum look on her face. A few minutes later I hear her yell "JELLY! WE HAVE MADE JELLY TOGETHER!" Erm Mum, I hate to break it to you but that's not cooking. That's opening a packet and boiling a kettle, to which she replied, "Yes. And that's cooking! And we did it together!" This is what I'm up against. 

My mother does not cook. Well, she claims she cooks but she is yet to find anyone who will agree with her that stabbing an M&S ready meal and putting it in the microwave constitutes cooking. 

It has been like this for as long as I can remember. 

In July she retired from a "full time professional career" (her words, not mine. She was a teacher, this was her excuse for not cooking) and she has vowed to cook once a month. July and August were her summer holidays so they couldn't count, and September was her birthday and retirement month, so no cooking there either. But from October, she has remained true to her word and has cooked a meal once a month. She has bought many foods she has never bought before including a leek, garlic and herbs, (two out of those three never to be bought again due to the godawful smell they left in the house). 

I asked her what her favourite meal to cook was and this was her response:

(please forgive the outfit she is wearing, it was bought as a joke but sadly she actually likes it and insists on wearing it around the house as her "Lucy Couture" tracksuit). (Also note we haven't used Lucy Couture as an ironic name, she genuinely thinks that's what Juicy Couture is called).

Perusing the internet, I found countless sites for "family cooking" or "cooking with mother." There's even a band called Limmie & the Family Cooking. Personalities such as Martha Stewart and Jane Asher have promoted family cooking in countless books and television shows. 

I remembered Jacquline Wilson books having scenes of mothers and daughters cooking together. I found that in "Sleep-Overs," the protagonist, Daisy, cooks her birthday cake with her mum: 

"Mum let me stir the mixture and spoon it out into the cake tin. She let me scrape the mixing bowl with the spoon (and then my finger and then my tongue!). We made white chocolate crunch biscuits while the cake was cooling and then we did the decorating."

From this extract it is clear that for Daisy, cooking with her mum is a privilege, something that is probably felt by many children. Daisy's mother has let her into her kitchen, the magical place where Daisy feels lucky to be helping. 

Sadly, my mum's kitchen is not like that. We did not bake my birthday cakes together. In fact, I baked mine by myself.

  

My 10th birthday. It was supposed to be a dinosaur from a kids cookery book. I thought it was a pretty good effort.

Lots of Jaqueline Wilson's stories have children cooking by themselves, standing in for their mothers. Elsa in "The Bed and Breakfast Star" is a prime example.

"Mum was asleep and Mack was out...I hunted round the room for food and found some stale sliced bread and a pot of raspberry jam...I made a clown jam sandwich for Hank. I made a teddy jam sandwich for Pippa and Baby Pillow. And I made a great red movie-star lip jam sandwich for me."

Wilson explores the problems of children having to cook for themselves when their mothers are incapable due to hangovers or staying with boyfriends. My mother was not incapable, she just really hated cooking. 

Don't get me wrong, I never went hungry. In fact, if anything I ate a bit too much (potentially daily after school trips to the sweet shop followed by an apple coated in sugar and a warm milk with sugar were to blame?). But clearly, from the amount of literature out there about family cooking and mothers cooking with their children, I can't help but wonder, did I miss out?

After showing this to my mum, she felt guilty, so we're going to make another jelly together tomorrow.