Marika is a friend of mine who lives in London. She lives in a gorgeous home with the most beautiful and well-planned kitchen (I totally copied her kitchen when doing ours up a couple years ago!). She is also one of the best and most devoted mama chefs I know. Every night she serves her family a home-cooked, well-rounded, delicious meal. Majorly impressive! I’m excited to share her dinner story with you…

Sometimes it seems like my whole life is centred around food. Between blogging about my cooking endeavours, feeding family and friends and going out to eat, all I seem to do is cook and eat! It is no surprise therefore that I take my kids and their eating very seriously too! Although my husband and the girls love to bake I am completely in charge of the cooking in my house which makes my life much easier to organise!

I tend to do a lot of the cooking for the week on a Monday. I always spend the day with my mum so she helps me out with the food shopping, the prep and also the clean-up which is amazing and having a day put aside once a week to be with her is a real treat for both of us! We usually make a soup, roast some vegetables, I will have something marinating and I would have usually baked something too. I seem to have a bit of an open door policy at my house and there is a contestant stream of people needing to be fed and knowing that would I like to live that way I built a big kitchen and bought a huge cooker! Often I have all six burners going at once!

Since the girls were tiny I instilled the ‘You get what you get and you do not get upset’ rule in my house and have tried to feed them the same as the grownups! They always have dinner at the table, with proper china, napkins and mini cutlery and I am a stickler for manners and good conversation! It is very important to me that the girls can be taken anywhere and know how to behave and how to eat. My rule has served us well on our many travels when the kids have been presented with all sorts of weird and wonderful things!
During the week the girls are starving by 5:30 which is a bit early for us and although my husband and I sit with them while they eat we usually eat later so they are either eating our dinner the day before or the day after us! Their dishes range from cottage pie to salmon baked in mustard to gorgonzola risotto with a variety of vegetables served on the side. The girls have always get dessert; fruit and yoghurt and three or four times a week something baked at home. Having said all that, I do have a dirty secret which is my freezer! My husband and I go out quite a bit alone and also we occasionally indulge in some seriously spicy food which would be in no way appreciated by my two so I have a well-stocked freezer full of pesto, pasta sauces and even fish fingers!

The weekends however are always a time for us to eat together and more often than not you will find us at our local Chinese having dinner of lunch together! The girls love to try all sorts of things and it thrills me that I have passed on my love of all things culinary onto them!

Here is a recipe for Sweet Pepper Pasta Sauce which is so easy and tasty!

Sweet Pepper Sauce:

• 2 tablespoons of olive oil
• 1/2 a leek, chopped
• 1 red pepper deseeded and chopped
• a small courgette chopped
• 1 tin of tomatoes
• a chopped garlic clove
• 1 tsp of parsley
• 1/2 tsp of dried Italian herbs Fry Leek and pepper for 5 minutes. Add the courgette, tinned tomatoes garlic and dried herbs and simmer for 15 min. Add fresh parsley and serve.