All is Well: Family favourites

With six people in our family, it is hard finding meals and snacks that everyone loves. I try not to pander to all the individual likes and dislikes of each of my daughters. I certainly don't go down the path of making different meals for everyone in the family. The girls all have to eat just a small amount of whatever is dished up for dinner, even if they don't like it, but it is so much more enjoyable when everyone loves the meal. I am pleased to note that as the girls get older, they are becoming slightly more adventurous with food, but sadly anything with spice, heat or too much flavour (ie, all the things Geoff and I like) are not high on the list of favourites yet! (We're looking forward to the day when we can all sit down and enjoy a good Thai feast - doesn't have to be for a while, because there aren't any Thai restaurants in Wellington anyway!)

The girls favourite dinners are home made sausage rolls, wraps, nachos, spaghetti, BBQ and pizza. Bit boring really. We've been using the slow cooker a lot lately - Geoff joined a facebook slow-cooker group and found hundreds of recipes. We tried the potato and leek soup on the weekend and loved it (well, most of us anyway!)

As far as snacks go, Banana Choc-Chip Muffins are an absolute winner in our house. The recipe is one Mum gave me in a little hand-written recipe folder when I got married. I make them all the time and freeze them for school morning teas. I can whip up a batch quickly on my own, but if the girls are home they are all keen to help, (so a quick Saturday morning task takes ever so much longer).

My oven has been broken for the past few weeks. (I had dinner in the oven, and opened the door to put our dinner plates in to warm them up when the door actually fell off. I was left holding six plates in one hand and the hot oven door in the other!) It took a while for us to find someone who would come out to Wellington to fix the oven. We have replaced the oven at our past two homes, and we didn't feel like spending a fortune doing the same here. So thankfully a man was found willing to drive 'all the way to Wellington' (from Dubbo it is only half an hour), and now, $350 later, our oven is fixed. Yay!