No crockery (no washing up) meals

Want to reduce your dirty dishes / washing up?

Why not buy yourself a bunch of spinach / Swiss chard. If you don't grow your own, it normally comes wilted 😂

Stand the ends in a bit of water (100ml of water) and the leaves will perk up.

Then you can use them as a plate - as they do in other parts of the world. Just place a cheap 1 ply serviette or brown paper bag under the leaf to keep the table below clean. Doing this over the weekend will make it fun for kids too.

When you've finished eating, immediately cook the spinach/ Swiss chard leaves - food traces and all - and make creamed spinach for the next night.

(Spinach /swiss chard only requires a minute amount of water to cook it - and you literally only cook it until the leaves have wilted and are a dark, glossy green colour before squeezing out the moisture and chopping it and adding to a nutmeg sprinkled bechamel sauce.)

This principle can also be applied to other things too: fruit salad served in 1/2 an orange, grapefruit or paw-paw, serve mince inside 1/2 a squash or butternut, etc.

This will make the current / ongoing "difficult", out-of-the-ordinary, possibly upsetting, time for kids more fun - and light hearted too.

And - as they have to wash their hands before meals, let them eat with their fingers... 😉 (save the "before" hand washing water to reuse after dinner to get any food scraps off those sticky fingers and then use the 1 ply serviette as a towel to dry their fingers. The serviette can then be buried in the garden / added to the compost heap or used to wipe out the pot which cooked the spinach.)