Becoming a parent changes your life in ways that you can never expect. Most fundamentally, it transforms one’s attitude to cooking. One minute, you’re cutting out recipes from magazines, browsing the deli shelves for za’atar and spending all Sunday marinating both your meat and yourself in burgundy. The next, you’re forcing organic puréed broccoli through a baby’s clenched gums at hourly intervals — or feeling guilty because you’ve resorted, yet again, to pasta and pesto because you’re too tired to think of anything else, and anyway that’s all the little darling will consent to eat.
“It was a terrible shock when an occasional leisure activity turned into something I had to do four times a day,” agrees food blogger and cookery writer Claire McDonald, mother of Rufus, 7, and Bruno, 5. “I thought, ‘Oh my God, this is what mothers do, and this is going to carry on for a very long time’.”
The cookery books she read were of little help. “The ones aimed at feeding kids were particularly irritating. Some of them were so sanctimonious, written as though it’s a parent’s full-time job to create food for children. We all know how important it is for kids to eat properly, so it is a priority — but it’s not your only priority. You have a job, earning money to buy the food, and when you’re cooking the food, you’re cooking it for you and your family, not just for the children.”
So Claire decided to set up a blog, Crumbs, with her sister Lucy, on which she listed the recipes for every quick and nutritious meal that met with family approval.
“It was an attempt to write something for people like us that we didn’t think was out there,” explains Lucy. “There’s a massive disconnect between celebrity cookbooks and what happens in the lives of most British people.”
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Four years after they started the blog, these slacker cooks have become the culinary stars of their own YouTube channel, with 22,000 subscribers from across the world. Many are working mothers like themselves, others range from students to octogenarians, all drawn by the sisters’ appealing personalities and quick, unpretentious, family-friendly recipes.
Now the Crumbs Family Cookbook has arrived, to spread the same relaxed, guilt-free message. It contains 150 simple recipes (some taking less than five minutes from start to finish), made with as few ingredients as possible. (Some recipes even include the “nubbins of cheese” and yellowing bunches of herbs that lurk reproachfully at the back of most family fridges.) When the book drops through my letterbox, I am staring in despair at a veg drawer which appears to be filled exclusively with ageing carrots and wondering if the children can be persuaded to eat them in soup. Instead, I find a recipe for carrot fritters, and within ten minutes, the children are shrieking with delight at the sight of “pancakes” for lunch, while I find myself as full of amazed gratitude as they are with carrot.
The next day, I meet the sisters in a bar in central London. Claire, 41, has rushed here from her job nearby at a contract publishing firm, where she is employed to come up with content ideas for Tesco’s magazine and websites. Lucy, 40, who works as a freelance journalist and broadcaster, struggles in on her leopard-print kitten heels from Chiswick, where she lives with her husband, the LBC presenter James O’Brien, and their daughters Elizabeth, 8, and Sophia, 6. Both lead the frenetic, compromise-filled life of most working mothers and, refreshingly, they see no need to embroider prosaic reality. These are no domestic goddesses; nor do they aspire to be. “Everyone does pasta and pesto, everyone does fish fingers. And hummus, and breadsticks,” says Lucy, reassuringly. “There’s a place in everyone’s diet for that. Though sometimes it’s nice to have a bit of a change. The secret is as much about good shopping as good cooking — knowing about where you can cheat and where you can’t. There are loads of short cuts you can take.”
The McDonalds recommend, for instance, using quick-cook pasta because it shaves five minutes off the cooking time. “Frozen, ready-chopped onion is a complete revelation, because any dish that has an onion in it takes an extra ten minutes if you have to peel it and dice it,” says Claire. “And if you want to go one step further, there are easy fried tinned onions, slow fried in olive oil, with no additives. For a mid-week spag bol, they’re brilliant,” enthuses Lucy.
They set their faces resolutely against child-friendly food: you won’t find broccoli “trees” or faces adorning their food. “We’re really against that. We give a two-breadstick salute to smiley-face pizzas,” declares Claire. “It’s food, not a toy. You have to eat to live, and I’m not making it more pretty for you.” So the only creative artwork their recipes demand from the harassed cook in this book is in the creation of a couple of birthday cakes (and not all that much there either.) “It was Bruno’s birthday yesterday and I made him the chocolate cake and just stuck a Hulk figurine on the top,” Claire says, showing me a photo of the green plastic superhero lying glumly on a bed of raspberries. “I just can’t be arsed to make something I’m not going to eat. My children eat what I eat — obviously not spinach, that’s never going to happen.”
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That also means that the recipes contain salt and sugar, both bugbears for the angst-ridden new parent. “But if you want children to eat vegetables, you have to season them or they won’t taste nice,” coaxes Claire. “And it’s always going to be less than you’d get in a processed meal.”
Although both sisters are personally keen on ethical eating and proper sourcing of their meat, they don’t bang the organic drum in their book. “No one wants to be preached to,” says Claire. “I really hate it when I open a recipe book and it specifies organic potatoes in the ingredients. That’s up to me to decide.”
The McDonalds grew up in Twickenham in a resolutely un-foodie household. “We were brought up on salad cream and sandwich spread and Peperamis,” says Claire. “Our mother was a working mum and a single parent, so she had constraints on her time.” As teenagers, the sisters enjoyed cooking together for fun, but Claire’s culinary education came largely courtesy of this newspaper, where she worked for over a decade and edited the food section. Lucy says she started enjoying food in her twenties, having been a vegetarian for years.
Although their food channel is yet to make money, they are convinced it will do so eventually. “It’s about creating a brand and an identity that is very niche and not really covered at the moment on YouTube,” Claire explains. They film their show in Lucy’s kitchen, and it is as unpretentious as the cookery book: when the sisters aren’t interrupting each other, they joke and bicker; Claire breaks Lucy’s cooking equipment, and Lucy’s signature pink birthday castle cake collapsed on film.
“It was a disaster,” she laughs. “I had to cut up a shop-bought Madeira cake and stuff it in and completely fudge it. But we said, if this happens to your child’s birthday cake six hours before their party, this is what you do. And it turned out to be a massive hit on YouTube.” It seems a dash of realism may be the must-have ingredient in modern cooking.