52 Cookbook Challenge, Week 4: Annabel Karmel's Family Meal Planner

Annabel Karmel: annoyingly perky

This book was a gift from a well-meaning friend with older children.  It was very thoughtful of her (and also no doubt served to clear some space on her shelves, relieving her of a book that I doubt she will have used in about ten years!) and I didn't wish to appear ungrateful.  I was also pretty new to feeding Baby Bird and had heard so much about the guru of UK babyfood.  "Everybody" swore by her.

All I can say is, I can only imagine that those who swear by her don't eat her food themselves.  I'm not in the least bit in love with her recipes.  I started off with the Complete Baby & Toddler Meal Planner and made a quite a few of those recipes in the early days.  Some were ok, others were pretty bland but, hey, I thought babyfood was meant to taste that way.  Then I did a bit more reading, and a bit more thinking.  I did a bit more experimenting and found some far tastier recipes that followed the more conventional approach to babyfood, but I also embraced baby-led weaning.  I have to say, since then, I haven't looked back.  Life is much easier now I cook one meal for all of us and Baby Bird is proving adventurous in her eating at the moment.  I think I've said before that she tends to only eat quite small quantities of food, but she seems enthusiastic about trying new things and will generally take at least a mouthful before dismissing a meal.  It also turns out that she enjoys far stronger flavours than I expected.  I'm now firmly of the view that children prefer bland food because that is what we feed them as babies.  We condition them to eat food that tastes like wallpaper paste, then they hit 4 or 5 and we suddenly decide they can eat what we eat and wonder why they balk at the overwhelming array of strong flavour on offer.  I'm realistic enough to realise that an adventurous eater now may not be an adventurous eater in a few months or years time, but I do hope that by at least giving her a chance to try things now, it will sow the seeds for a broader palate in later life.

The more I cooked for my daughter, and the more I discovered what she was capable of enjoying, the more I realised why I had been so uninspired by those early Annabel Karmel recipes.  Everything is so bland.  It's like eating watercolour paintings of family favourites, rather than the family favourites themselves.  I'm sure there are plenty of people who will disagree with me (if you do, please tell me all about it, I'd love to hear), but I'm going to come out and say it: I don't care for her recipes.  While Popeye Pasta continues to be popular and Annabel certainly gives you the bones of a great cheese sauce, I haven't returned to her books other than to glance through the lists of foods that can be introduced at different stages and, occasionally, when I'm struggling for ways to introduce meat to my small person's diet.  In fact, now I come to think about it, I haven't even stuck to her Popeye Pasta recipe (I do a hearty cheese sauce and then stir loads of frozen spinach into it and season with pepper and nutmeg and sometimes some garlic powder).  Still, I knew I was going to have to use some of my less popular books at some point (that will teach me for hoarding things I don't like and never use) and I figured I may as well get one out of the way early on.  No sense using all the good books now and being left with the run into Christmas being the boring, the unloved and the unlovely.

 I, too, am entertained that our meal matched
our tablecloth this perfectly!

So, trying to keep an open mind, I pulled down Annabel's Family Meal Planner.  It is freezing cold today and I wanted a quick, simple soup to serve for lunch with some Red Leicester and Onion rolls that I had picked up in Sainsbury's.  I also wanted to squeeze in one last challenge recipe before the end of January, to make up for last week having passed me by before I even realised what had happened.  So what if technically I missed last week completely - if I do two books this week, one in January and one in February, I think we can call it good.  After all, it's my challenge and I can fudge the rules a bit around the edges if I want to.  The lentil soup looked promising: Baby Bird is a fan of lentils, Lovely Lentils was one of the few meals that we both enjoyed, and I had everything I needed hanging about in the fridge and pantry.  Score!


Hmm.  Maybe not.  While you certainly have the bare bones of a good lentil soup here, the addition of parsley doesn't really cut it for me.  I think lentils needs bit more oomph.  The flavours were clean and fresh, which I enjoyed, but there was nothing particularly memorable about this soup.  It perhaps needs a touch of fennel to really play up the freshness, or a touch of spice to play up the earthy lentils, or perhaps the addition of a handful or two of green lentils for added depth and texture.  I'm tempted to melt some cheese into it next time, as it definitely tasted best when we dunked the cheesy rolls.  I'll give it one last skim in the morning, but I'm planning to send this book to the charity shop I think.  Someone else may love, I never will.