If, like me, you’ve spent the winter drooling over all the cookery shows and you’re just dusting off the barbecue now that we’ve got some sunshine, you might want to pop along to the BBC Summer Good Food Show, which also has BBC Gardeners’ World Live running alongside, to get some top chef tips. It’s on in Birmingham from June 16-20 and tickets are under £20 – plus some great offers are running this weekend if you want to book ahead.

You can also get a free ticket courtesy of me, just drop me a comment below and I’ll be giving away 10 pairs only, so get in quick.

You can meet the top TV chefs, MasterChef celebrities and gardening gurus, in one place, all in one day. Plus shop till you drop too.

Watch celebrity chefs cooking summer recipes live in the Summer Kitchen sponsored by Sainsbury’s, including James Martin, the Hairy Bikers and Rachel Allen.

Get top design and planting ideas for your garden in BBC Gardeners’ World Live, and get inspired for alfresco entertaining with friends and family.

Make your way to the outside areas to visit the Grow Your Own Area where you will learn from the experts on how to make the most of whatever space you have to grow your own delicious ingredients!

Don’t forget to visit the brand new MasterChef Experience, sponsored by Miele, where the nation’s favourite TV programme really will be brought to life. Here are just a few things you won’t want to miss!

There are plent of other great things to see and do at the show as well:

Invention Test (Fri-Sun) Show off your own skills to impress MasterChef judges John Torode and Gregg Wallace, competing against 11 other visitors in front of a live audience (£25 per person)

MasterChef Masterclasses (Wed & Thurs) This is an exclusive opportunity to benefit from expert tuition from Monica Galetti, Nadia Sawalha, James Nathan or Thomasina Miers in small group sessions (£15 per person)

Miele Cookalongs Cook alongside and learn from the familiar faces from Good Food magazine in these small group sessions, and enjoy your home-made dish in the dining area afterwards (£15 per person)

Click here to book now or call 0844 581 1341.

Oh and being the kind, caring, football aware female that I am, here’s a great tip; look out for Muddy Boots burgers and Supreme Sausages, South African Biltong and a range of South African wines. Pick up a new BBQ or even invest in a spa! Also, make sure you visit David Domoney’s World Cup Garden for even more ideas of how to enjoy the beautiful game at home this summer.

This is a Digitorial Post from Handpicked Media: BBC Summer Good Food Show

I’m supporting Team Whole Grain as I believe it’s a great campaign to get people to eat a more healthy. You may have read my interviews with Annabel Karmel and Lesley Waters about how to get your kids to eat better grub. Well, now it’s your turn to share your recipes.

For full details, go to the Team Whole Grain website at www.wholegrain.co.uk.

For inspiration, be sure to watch Lesley’s latest recipe suggestions prepared by Zoe Ball and Olympic gold medallist, rower Greg Searle.

And for more about the whole thing, watch the Lesley Waters’ Master Cereal Competition Video – and have you noticed that Zoe nicked Lesley’s cardi for her piece to camera!?!

Summer Kebabs Recipe with Zoe Ball and Lesley Waters

Cheesecake Recipe with Greg Searle and Lesley Waters

The thing that really gets me is that statistics are being darkly manipulated used against Mums to scare them into buying products. Apparently we are being challenged to eat grapefruits rather than greasy fry ups because 88% of family meals consist of takeaways rather than fresh fruit and vegetables.

So how does this 88% calculation stand up to scrutiny? That really is quite shocking isn’t it? But let’s see how that pans out over an average month of family meals;

30 days x 3 meals = 90 meals

Therefore 79 of them would be take aways.
79? How does that work? If the average cost if £15, that means the family food bill would be £1185 per month. You could afford a personal chef for that amount.

I mean, come on, is this your daily routine?

‘Morning darling – can you get your school uniform on please.’
‘Yes, Mum, I’m hungry’
‘Don’t worry, the burger van is on it’s way and I’ve got them to do a kebab for your packed lunch.’
‘What’s for dinner tonight Mum? Can we have my favourite?’
‘Oh you mean left overs?’
‘Mmmmm.’
‘Now let’s have a look, we’ve got some pizza crust, some manky cold chips and a few gherkins chucked out of a burger bap. Oh and look, here you go; last week’s special fried rice. That’ll make a great smorgasbord. I tell you what, why don’t you invite some of your friends round and you can sit on the sofa and watch movies and eat finger food.’
‘Great! My school uniform is feeling a bit tight though.’

I doubt it is, but this thoughtless manipulation of figures amounts to a very dim view of Motherhood.

I’m on the frontline of parenting. I’m a Mum who understands the issues around food and nutrition, not a journalist on a deadline who is looking for a headline. Is it lazy PR to send me a press release meant for a print writer or is it failure to understand the mindset of a blogger? Even worse, is it spam?

Why on earth would I write a blog post damning families on such flimsy evidence, just because a press release tells me to do so? And it even mentions lack of fruit in school childrens’ diets to counter balance ‘unhealthy lunches’. That actually has increased my blood pressure just reading it. Where do ‘unhealthy lunches’ come from? Jamie Oliver is mentioned in the press release. Great. Apparently fruit intake has gone up 25% but hell, even that’s not good enough! I’m incensed.

Why has this campaign taken this approach of knocking down any progess and demeaning us Mums (apparently Dads don’t get a pasting because it’s the Mums who are not doing the cooking and feeding of kids properly according to the press release.)

Perhaps digging a little deeper and maybe asking families why they got take aways instead of cooking would be the next logical step in fleshing rather than obesifying (sic) the story out.

So I am not going to write a tabloid style story about ‘Take Away Shame’ and how I managed to swap speed dial for slow cooked gooseberries with liver.

I’m going to cite why people get take aways;

Friday night is fun time?
After a week of hard work, if you haven’t got the energy to go out, a take away of Indian, Thai or Chinese is something to really enjoy, especially if you know your local restaurant. Our fabulous Thai makes a slightly less spicy green chicken curry, which funnily enough has peas, broccoli, cauliflower and red peppers in. Hmmm, where’s the guilt there?

My babysitter can not cook – or if she did, she’d burn the house down…
Well, she makes a mean tuna sandwich but that’s as far as her repertoire goes. So when she does babysit, I’m going out to have a fun evening, so Miniminx can have a little indulgence too and have a pizza and waffles.

Because I can’t make Peking Duck
While I’m a dab hand at most things in the kitchen. I can not for the life of me imagine cooking Crispy Duck from scratch.

And while I’m on the subject, perhaps reading up on the latest news around the 5 a day fruit and veg myth might enlighten PRs as to the topicality and transience of food trends. Science not surveys are very key in nutrition too. Grapefruits for example are utterly jam packed with Vit C and can really help in the uptake of touch nutrients like iron.

Sadly, tucked away at the bottom of the press release are some really interesting food tips; get your children to grow fruit, take kids to Pick Your Own farms. I would love to see more thought go into this issue that has been raised but sadly it’s a missed opportunity. Maybe a guide to the the best PYO places and what’s in season would make me evangelise this story but the facts as they are just don’t do it or even think about it.

Oh, and raspberries? That’s from my PYO trip last Summer, and I still have some home made jam left from them. Grrrrrrrrr.

I’m allowed to kid a little, it’s April Fools day after all. Yet all year round, we are all in danger of taking ourselves a little bit too seriously, and I’ve certainly seen that scene play out in mummy/mommyblogging scene. Expect a sit com, if not a screen play from me very soon.

But for me, the professional working mum that I am, sometimes it’s on the homefront where I fall foul of being a bit too ardent about my deliverables/ROI/metrics/sentiment and general corporate bluff and it’s the stuff that I should leave well alone at the doorstep, if not the dustbin. I worry about productivity and accountablity – just posh terms for getting my daughter on the loo and brushing her teeth before school and managing to get her to do homework in the evening, eat her 5 a day and be a general superstar. But, we need time for fun and laughter too don’t we?

So I had a lightbulb moment after spending last Sunday forcing my daughter to cook having a lovely bonding session with my beautiful girl over a cooking a marble chocolate and vanilla cake. Why not cover it in glitter and stars and make it really glam? Ooh, and this could prove some kind of weird abstract point too couldn’t it?

This cake will actually make your kids sh*t glitter – but it comes at a price.

You have to bake it! And then even worse, decorate it. Thanks to Annabel Karmel for the recipe. (We made her chicken escalope and now she’s known as Kannibal Armel in our kitchen, I’m so, so, sorry but it worked at the time.)

If you think I’m nuts enough to check on whether this works, you shouldn’t be reading this!

If letting children loose in the kitchen is your idea of a nightmare, you need to think again. Helping them to make dishes for themselves is a great way to spend time together and makes mealtime much more interesting. It’s also a really important life skill and I’m always grateful to my Mother for teaching me the basics of cooking (even though I can never look a rock bun in the face again!).

One of the great people I met at the team wholegrain event was Lesley Waters. I spent a bit of time with her talking about cooking and nutrition.

Lesley is a TV regular and I was keen to find out from her what are the 10 dishes I should be teaching my daughter to cook from scratch.

What I love about Lesley’s practical tips is her enthusiasm and also that the dishes are relevant. We talked about my daugther’s likes and dislikes and Lesley was full of brilliant advice. She’s keen to encourage children to get involved in cooking and eating healthily.

So over to Lesley for her make cooking fun advice.

1. Pizza
Home made pizza is a great one because they love making it and you can make a wholegrain base and add various toppings. I can vouch for this – it’s a brilliant idea because it keeps kids entertained and they love adding the toppings and shaping the dough.

2. Bread
Make bread from scratch – that’s a lot of fun for children and they can really get their hands in dough. If you have a breadmaker like we do, there’s still a great sense of anticipation as the machine does it’s job. We add seeds, olives and herbs to the bread to make it more unusual.

3. Soup
Home made soup is a really good one to try and you can add lots of vegetables. We make one with chicken stock and noodles and add cubes of chicken and carrot and finely sliced baby courgettes and miniscule garlic. I’m going to let Miniminx loose in the kitchen to create her own though.

4. Risotto
Risotto is very easy and you can add lovely vegetables like butternut squash; we add peas.

5. Pancakes and Popovers
Eggs are a problem food in our house – boiled eggs are dissembled but not eaten, omelettes and Spanish tortilla snubbed so I have to sneak them in some other way. Lesley says make batter and then use it for savoury pancakes and batter pudding which you can fill with fruit or something savoury.

6. Fruit
Smoothies are another great way to top up fruit intake and if you’re having problems with getting kids to eat their five a day with anything resembling enthusiasm, kebabs are great fun – load them up with fruit and dip chocolate sauce

7. Fajitas
Children love fajitas because they can add their own fillings and roll them up. Using chicken you can add a veg sauce or a healthy hoummous to go alongside chopped up carrots and peppers and grated cheese.

8. Pasta
It’s quick and simple to make pasta and you can also teach children to make a bolognese sauce to go with it. We’ve tried to make pasta from scratch at home and it ended up as a modern art project, it tasted unreal but we still laugh about it. I think we’ll try again though.

9. Meat
Burgers and meatballs are good for children to make and if they don’t like the texture of minced meat there are ways to make it smoother and more palatable– add grated carrot, breadcrumbs and egg and roast in the oven

10. Cous cous
Lesley says that kids love cous cous and bulgur wheat because of the element of surprise and discovery when adding hot water to the grains. You can get your kids to chop up tomatoes and cucumber and herbs to add to the mix and you have helped them make a nutritious side dish.

This is by no means a definitive list but it’s a great starting point and should help to inspire a little, if not a lot. In fact, Miniminx and I did make salmon fishcakes from scratch the other night and I found the whole experience quite uplifting. She sliced the garlic and lemon for the salmon which we baked and then she mashed the salmon. We made mashed potato using a potato ricer which she loved and then proceeded to make shapes out of them – she also liked tasting the mash and fish during the preparation which in it’s own way meant she was feeding herself. They tasted really good.

Frazzled and bombarded by daily media outcries about obese Britain, us Mums can’t do right for doing wrong it seems. So it’s fair to say my enthusiasm towards nutrition had fizzled out slightly. I know the basic rules and I cook all the time but I’d got stuck in the routine diet rut.

But that’s been reignited by my daughter’s 10th birthday and concern that from 10 years onwards, a lot of things are going to change and how should I best feed and prepare her for this?

So it was very timely that I was invited to the Team Wholegrain morning. It’s a totally refreshing mindset too – I’m sick and tired of the robotic 5-a-day mantra which we have thrown at us daily and I’m really glad to see that wholegrains are getting a look in too.

more here

Yes, that’s me with Annabel and like A Modern Mother, I’m a giant in comparison, but her expertise in child nutrition towers over mine and I was in awe of her. I had bought a couple of her books when Miniminx was younger and I’m delighted that she takes the preteen age group seriously too.

Annabel Karmel Tips on Food and Cooking for and with 10 year olds

1. Annabel’s top secret is that well fed kids will always want to come home – her own children are living proof, they all come home for great food and they’re 18-21!

2. If you want your children to grow up with the ability to cook proper food for themselves you have to teach them. Getting children in the kitchen is not just about making cupcakes – make sure you teach them to make useful nutritious things like scrambled eggs says Annabel.

3. Having problems with making healthy salads work for your child? Annabel says make a dressing and use it as a dip to get them eat the salad – they will love it.

4. Don’t ban food, make healthy food so tasty that they want to eat it. If they’re full up on healthy food, they won’t ask for junk.

5. Don’t make a big issue if they’re feeling fussy – wait till they’re hungry. It’s much easier to feed a child with an appetite.

6. When they come home from school and they’re really hungry at this age, give them something healthy; fruit and or veg and dips. If you give them a healthy plate of snacks, they’ll eat it.

7. In a nice way quietly control them and get friends over who like healthy food so they’ll eat it with their peers, they won’t even notice they’re doing it and they’ll want to fit in with everyone else.

8. Once in a while it helps to get someone else to feed them to avoid the pressure of nagging about what to eat. And they might try something different.

9. You can have healthy junk food – instead of buying it though, it’s much better to make your own chicken nuggets or pizzas and the kids can help too. You can make great use of wholegrains here too.

10. And finally on fruit, I feel vindicated! If your child like mine runs a mile from fruit, Annabel suggests making fruit purees by blending fruit and freezing it into icepops. I’ve been doing this for years so I’m glad to know that it’s a good tip!

Thanks for the organisers for inviting me and the very lovely goody bag, I also have some more interviews to share from the day which I’ll be posting over the next few days…

Piddle.

The thought of making a mad dash to grab a new one left me on the verge of passing out. I’ve spent the last month trying to perfect the recipe for my gorgeous breakfast treats. But there’s pain, and there’s PAIN.

I am still suffering from a 1,000 yard dash in very high heels down the Kings Road two nights ago.  My feet are in ribbons. If that wasn’t bad enough, after a full day in the office in four inch heels yesterday, I went to meet my very fast-on-her-feet sister for dinner and a movie last night. I must have walked two miles from the station to restaurant to cinema to car park, and the soles of my feet were screaming.   And so was I inside.

Today I have found solace in my Minnetonka moccasin boots, call me Pocahontas, I don’t care, comfort is what I’m craving.

So back to the checkout.

In bleeding heart style, I meekly held up the offending sugar bag to show the lovely man on the check out that it had sprung a miniscule but meaningful leak.

‘I’m sorry,’ I choked the words out. ‘But there’s a hole in the bag, I am not going to take it’

‘You can change it you know.’
I yawned (how embrassing at 6.45pm) and rather comically raised my tired and deflated eyebrows (yes I can, no botox). Please ring the bell and ask some wonderful person to save my feet and get it for me, I was thinking.  He opened his mouth as if to say the magic words, but…out came
‘Yes, you can’
My eyes narrowed. I did not need a Barack Obama-ism to spur me on to do another marathon around our supersized not so super market.
‘I’m. Too. Tired.’ I gasped.

But after two days back at work and a marathon shop, that’s the easy bit out of the way. My Easter holidays are just beginning. I’ve got to head to North, South, East and West London, there’s an Easter Egg Hunt to prepare, a massive Sunday feast to produce and packing for a holiday and that’s all before the back to school mayhem, and then work. Compared to what’s coming, this was a bloody picnic!

Honestly, I’m really looking forward to it all. But there always needs to be a Plan B. At times like these, my hero Pedro Almodovar springs to mind. I’m a real fan of his early movies and especially this Gazpacho recipe. It’s an evil twin to my Bloody Mary Mix which I’ll begin marinading tomorrow for Sunday.

Ladies and gents, if your Easter Sunday gets too much don’t worry. When everyone hits the chocolate high from too many eggs, you may start to feel the exasperation of being chained to the kitchen and that irksome feeling when the champagne runs dry. Fear not, just remember this clip from Women on the Verge of A Nervous Breakdown. It’s an all time family favourite among the women in my family. Give them a bowl of this special gazpacho and I guarantee you’ll have a peaceful day and no arguments over what crap to watch on telly.

So, how do I get myself noticed? I think I found the answer. I’ve spent the last five hours creating a Social Media Curriculum Vitae – SMCV, you heard it here first! Yes, I’m excited, I’m packaged in 2.0 wrapping.

So while I’ve bought craft packs, glitter, glue, sequins and festive postage stamps for sending out Christmas cards, I realised, the only way to get myself heard in that hideous old fashion CV format is to link, link, link away.  So yes, linkedin, youtube, blinxx and every other place possible is now connected to little old me. I think I’ll leave out facebook at this point in time.

It took over an hour to post my CV on a corporate application, but when I finally managed it and the little appeared, it was an Aha! Eureka! moment. So there you have it, I answered my own question, well not quite, as always, a chance meeting made me think about it. It was all triggered by a very nice breakfast at my favourite pre-9am haunt Highroad House – while my wheat free toast, bacon, tomatoes and eggs did not quite make the grade – they all appeared on large plates separately so I looked like the biggest fatso in W4 – the company was what counted and the conversation. We were talking about how to put the world to rights, and work and lovely people and new media and the light bulb about the SMCV came on after a couple more coffees

So this Christmas is what I’m calling the CreditGrunch – while I waited for my guest, I was horrified to read a feature in The Sun about cures from the kitchen, ranging from Rosemary for PMT and chicken soup for colds – it really is a war effort – I’m the first to use almond oil on my skin or salt in the bath but I’m that kind of person – I don’t think Page 3 readers are! As the day wore on, I must have heard news round ups counting around 100,000 job losses today, and closer to home, the contractors I have been working with were all fired this morning with instructions to clear off and out tomorrow. Everyone is so miserable and the Grinch is very hard at work stealing Christmas this year. They’ve been Grunched…

But not everyone is sad, Miniminx had the Christmas Carol concert today, and not a dry eye in the house – tears of absolute joy and such wonder these cute bundles of innocence are so full of hope. Let’s hope we grown ups get a grip, I want Miniminx to have a glittering future and do something normal like be a vet(?!) and not even dream of being a WAG.