It’s a Breeze to Cook for Bree

Note: Here in this post, the term ‘cooking’ means cooking a meal from scratch and it is an activity more complicated than heating up leftover soup or making a Vegemite Sandwich.

I don’t really enjoy cooking but I do prefer doing it on colder days rather than in the middle of Summer. Cooking for my charges is part of my work requirement as a nanny. So, there really is no way of avoiding this chore at work. I do however make it an important point to mention during job interviews that I do not specifically cook for the rest of the family. Some people expect nannies to whip up a proper 3 course dinner for the parents, but I don’t do that. They don’t have to hire me if they are not happy about this.

At Bree’s home, I now pre-cook at least a couple of her dinners each week. When Bree was younger, her mum cooked almost all of her dinners because she wanted me to keep an eye on the little one. Now that Bree is more mature, her mum is beginning to relax. I do most of the cooking when Bree is napping. Most of the meals that I do cook for her are quite easy to make. Her mum picked them not just for our convenience but also because they are suitable for freezing. Soups like Chicken Minestrone, pasta sauces like the good old Bolognaise Sauce and things like meatballs or rissoles are all examples of food that can be divided into smaller portions for freezing. Frozen or refrigerated home cooked meals make it easy for Bree’s parents at dinner time. Since Bree started to spend the time after nap at Stella’s home, I no longer serve her dinner each night. My cooking must be pretty good because little pots of frozen meals happen to go missing quite often. I might need to set a giant mouse trap to catch the two big mice. LOL. It is actually quite funny to witness one of them thanking me after owning up to it.

I have been blessed with many good eaters throughout my career as a nanny. Bree is one of the very good eaters. This means that she is willing to try anything you set in front of her. She may not eat everything on her plate but she will at least try something new without any protest. When she was down with an ear infection recently, she was off food for a while and when she was on the mend, she wanted only porridge with a drizzle of honey. We (her parents and I) also noticed that if Bree had been in the company of her dotting grandma Ettie, she would have a sudden increase of cravings for all things sweet. Among my charges from the past who happened to be good eaters, a few of them have parents who encouraged them to regularly enjoy (more like abuse) junk food simply because they live in an era of abundance. Bree’s mum does allow her daughter to enjoy a bit of junk food every now and then, and she is a tad less strict as she used to sound like in the past.