Mum and businesswoman Danielle Coolbear Jenkins has found herself low on income lately, but not on inventive ideas for feeding her family. She tells Polly Wenlock how, with a full house, her weekly shop demands both discipline and imagination.
We have quite a full household: Me (Danielle), 43, my husband Alister, 51. And then we have Guin, 9, Libby, 12, Lucas, 14, Alex, 16, and James, 17. We also have two dogs and three cats. My husband works in retail and I’m a contractor but haven’t had any work for quite some time. We live in Whitby, and shop at Porirua PAK'nSAVE.
I shop every Tuesday night, and I always buy just enough for seven days so the fridge looks very bare by the end of the week. I always buy the same basics.
My husband and I alternate who cooks each night. Tuesday night is burger night and the kids are in charge of cooking this.
We’re pretty much an ingredient-only household [as opposed to buying pre-prepared foods]. I buy things that can be used in a large variety of ways. For meat it’s mince mainly, also bacon bits, some chicken breast, occasionally chicken drumsticks. Once a week we’ll have a pork roast on Saturday night.
It feels like I’m going back to the pre-war Depression-style cooking my grandma did: meat-and-three-veg kind of simple food. We do use a lot of herbs and spices – probably more than my grandmother would have.
I shop alone so there’s no sway from the kids in terms of what i’m buying. I consciously use a smaller trolley to restrict myself. Filling up a big trolley you could spend $1000 easily. Usually, my budget is around $250. Last year I was spending $200 but prices have gone up. And little extra things (like my daughter needing ingredients to do baking for a shared lunch) will raise the cost to closer to $280.
A few years ago, we did a healthy eating study and briefly had a My Food Bag subscription. That experience inspired my three-part meal philosophy, where you have a protein, a vegetable and a carbohydrate and you can use whatever flavouring to make different-style foods – Italian, Greek, Thai. My husband was born in Malaysia, so he likes that. You could cook the same three foods a million different ways; in my shop I get cream which I can use in mashed potatoes, carbonara and stroganoff. We don’t buy oven chips when a bag of potatoes can be mashed, baked, wedges, gratin, fried. Strawberry jam is used for sandwiches, baking and sweetening a plain yogurt.
I have to restrict what's in the house to the seven days' worth because they [the kids] will just eat it all. I buy one bottle of milk at a time for the same reason, if we had more, it’d just disappear. In our house baking doesn’t make it past the day it’s made.
I always buy eight loaves of bread because I have three teenage boys. We go through about three kilos of peanut butter a week.
It's almost easier buying for seven than one because you’re buying in bulk. When my eldest moves out of home he’ll know how to meal prep for seven at once and only have to cook four times a month!
We have very, very little waste, and our fridge looks borderline empty come Thursday despite having shopped Tuesday.
I'm an only child with five children – it’s quite a change for me, teaching them to do everything for themselves.
I’m quite proud to say my kids have learnt to be very self-sufficient. The other night we went out for our wedding anniversary and left the kids to make their own dinners – the 16-year-old made everyone pancakes with ingredients from the cupboard.
Our kids are making their own school lunches by the age of four. Our youngest has been making a convenient tuna pasta bake since she was seven. My nine-year-old makes an amazing muffin recipe which substitutes oil for of butter. If the kids want a snack or a treat, they also have to cook that for themselves – my 12-year-old does French toast with cinnamon sugar sometimes.
I’ve worked in two New Worlds in my time, so I’ve seen how things work. It’s ridiculous that things that are coming from the same factory are just being sold for more at different spots. Swapping to PAK'nSAVE was big for me because it meant saving over $50 a shop.
My reward for doing a shop is buying a block of chocolate, but only if it’s under $5.
I like fancy food as much as the next person, but over-the-top foods are so normalised now! I find the trend of these blow-out-Pinterest-style-full-house-decorated birthday parties weird. Having a meal that you like, a cake, and spending time with your family can be enough and I think we’ve forgotten this. My kid this year wanted coleslaw, so we bought her a bag of coleslaw! For my daughter’s last birthday, I made Toad-in-the-Hole! For Matariki I’ve done hāngī in the oven with liquid smoke, chicken drumsticks and veggies covered in cabbage leaves and tinfoil. We fancy up the staples we already have.
I say to my kids: No need to buy fancy labels when it’ll all be flushed down the toilet at the end of the day.
I encourage people to use their imaginations and lower their expectations on how fancy their food is going to be. A lot of people think they have to follow recipes all the time and things just go to waste.
If you would like to partake in our Receipt Reveal series, please email receiptreveal@tvnz.co.nz and tell us where in New Zealand you live and how many live in your household.
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