Let Your Child Care Giver Help You with Meals

Hi everyone!  I hope you all had a lovely holiday this past weekend if you were indeed celebrating.  I had an easier Seder this year because I was a guest , not a hostess. Niiiiiiiiiiice!  Did you get any help?

For those of us who rely on child care or assistance around the house in other ways, I wanted to remind you of my sessions/workshops for babysitter/child care givers.  Sometimes we have a sitter who can cook but sometimes we don’t!  Check it out on my services page and email me if you have an interest: http://takebackthekitchen.com/services/.

For now, we have a special guest who can help share with you how your child care giver can help you get a healthy meal on the table. Welcome Sara Dawkins, a freelance writer who works for a Nanny Agency, NannyPro.com:

How to Overcome the Obstacles of Cooking…with your Nanny!

Cooking is supposed to be one of those innate things that mom’s do, right? All the movies and TV shows personifying moms and the quintessential family settings make it look so easy. The mother effortlessly makes dinner and has it on the table by the time the father gets home from work and everyone sits down to a well-balanced meal and discusses their days with smiling faces. The problem is that this is rarely the case. What the TV shows and movies don’t show you is how busy moms really are – especially if you work 40+ hours a week and rely on a live-in nanny to watch your kids. But sometimes nannies can help out with some of these common cooking obstacles:

“It takes a lot of time”
Making a dinner from scratch is time-consuming, no matter how many times the recipe or cooking show says it will come together in a flash. Chopping up vegetables while simultaneously stirring a pasta sauce, boiling noodles, and baking bread rarely goes smoothly. To get around this ask your nanny if she wouldn’t mind chopping up vegetables and prepping meals ahead of time. That way when you get home from work you just have to throw it all together to cook.

“Once you’ve finished cooking there’s still all that cleaning up to do”
Your live-in nanny will be able to help you clean up the kitchen after dinner, especially if you’re providing her a meal also. Whether she’s eating with the family or going to her own room to eat dinner, if you’re serving her a meal then she’ll probably be more than happy to help with kitchen clean up.

“I don’t know what to make each night”
Enlist outside help. Ask your nanny what some of her favorite meals growing up were and what she loves to prepare now. This can help you figure out new dishes instead of sticking to tried and true standbys that may be getting a little boring their hundredth time around in the dinner rotation. Pick a few different kinds of recipes that way you can choose which meal to make depending on your mood that day.

“I work full time and don’t want to cook at the end of the day”
That is exactly what makes a slow cooker one of the most magical inventions for cooking. Have your nanny throw everything into the crockpot at a certain time during the day, then have her set it, and forget about it. By the time you’re walking through the door at night your house smells fantastic and dinner is already ready to be eaten. Plus there’s minimal clean-up when a slow-cooker is involved. Done and done.

Don’t let some of the common cooking obstacles deter you from getting a great meal on the table each night! Meals don’t have to have a long list of ingredients or be complicated to be delicious, and with a little help your nanny and the rest of the family everything can come together and get put away in no time at all. Keep in mind though if you are going to have your nanny pitch in extra around the house with tasks like cooking then you might want to consider giving her a raise :-).

You can reach Sara at saradawkins61@gmail.com.