No kale smoothies for this family

Gwyneth's friends say that she worked very hard at maintaining the marriage, and was willing to forgive his rumoured infidelity.

Gwyneth's friends say that she worked very hard at maintaining the marriage, and was willing to forgive his rumoured infidelity.

Published Mar 28, 2013

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London - Before I had children, the kitchen was a mystery to me. I was revered among my friends as the woman who’d set fire to a frozen chicken leg during her one attempt to eat in. But back then culinary incompetence was a badge of honour among career women.

We’d all been programmed to reject domesticity in favour of ambition, which meant we were as useless as Bridget Jones when it came to feeding ourselves. My day used to start with tea and toast and unless I was working late, or out, it ended with tea and toast. In between I ate Mr Kipling lemon slices.

When I left one job for a busier role, my colleagues got me a month’s supply of chicken-flavoured pot noodles knowing I’d never have time to buy lunch.

Now I can serve up six different homemade meals in one sitting. I can cobble together a decent lasagne. And once I cooked an apple pie. Obviously, I’m not Jamie Oliver (or even Jools) - there’s no way I could bake a lemon meringue, for example - but no one will starve or get rickets on my watch.

My adventures in parenting have brought me a new skill - cooking. I can’t truthfully say it’s my favourite thing ever (I’m not swooning with Nigella levels of ecstasy every time I see a fennel).

I am still a short-tempered, short woman harbouring a low-level fury with all mechanical gadgets, but through cooking I know I have something that for a few brief moments makes all of my family of six happy. Which makes me happy. So I cook a lot.

The family dinner is, according to the bulk of research I choose to believe, a barometer of wellbeing. The family that eats together, stays together.

No one gets an eating disorder, everyone learns how to use cutlery and it’s unlikely your offspring will end up on the News At Ten being escorted into a police van with a bag over his head.

Or so the research into family routines seems to imply. So thank the Lord I saw the light, popped on an apron and found out that Le Creuset is a make of saucepan, not a resort where billionaires go to find wives.

All well and good. Or is it? Because now I am confused. And it’s all Gwyneth Paltrow’s fault. Apparently, while I may earn brownie points for cooking, I lose them again for cooking the wrong thing.

Mine may grow into normal well-balanced children because we eat together, but they’ll be dead by 40 because we eat the wrong thing together.

In an interview publicising her new cookery book, Paltrow says she’s banned carbohydrates like white bread, pasta and rice at home.

Now GP is obviously more clued up on nutrition than I am and she makes sensible points about how bad excessive carbs are for small bodies, but it’s thrown me. In the words of my ten-year-old: “What do they eat?” You have to imagine this reaction bellowed at twice the volume of a normal earthling and with an expression of such incredulity I may as well have said: “We’re selling the TV and going to live on a farm in the Hebrides where Haribo is banned.”

Following all the discussion around GP’s anti-carb manifesto, the “what to eat when” experts weighed in with their ever more conflicting opinions.

It is difficult to know who is right and who is wrong?

How do you get four children aged nearly two to ten to embrace a more veggie-filled diet? What fresh hell would it be at home if you removed pasta (I certainly wouldn’t want to be there the day Mr Candy told them about that).

And the other problem is my mental ability to see a clear culinary path is muddled with working mom guilt.

Who wants to be the mom who comes home and demands we all have a kale smoothie for tea?

The debate this week on what children should eat has added another worry to the already over-long worry list.

And it makes me wonder if all we’ve achieved by making time for family dinner is teaching the toddler to say cheers.

For me, cooking at home has been a slow-burning maternal love story. It’s more than just serving tea because it’s a beacon of quality time spent together. A sign all is well with us. Now it seems I’ve even got that wrong. - Daily Mail

* Lorraine Candy is editor-in-chief of Elle magazine.

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