In this post, Kate Griffiths shares tips on how to produce tasty wholesome meals whilst running your own business. This week the focus is on how to produce a roast dinner mid-week without slaving away in the kitchen for hours. She also shows the link between cooking and being a business owner.
There were many thoughts that went into branding my business Whole Self Leadership. One strand is that eating well is a key way to build resilience – vital in business as things do not always turn out as planned. Another is that good food is also an important element of self care, vital for anyone in a leadership role. The challenge today is how to make the time to eat well when you are so busy. If you are a regular reader of this blog you may wonder what this has to do with running your own business so I will weave this in as I go through.
What I love about this time of year is that as it gets colder, it is a good excuse to start cooking more robust meals like stews and roast dinners. Cooking is a great way to be mindful and to create something even when other areas of life are not panning out as you had hoped.
People often ask me about how to eat healthily without spending a huge amount of money. One tip is to reduce the amount of meat you eat. I tend to only buy one joint of meat in any week as quality is more important than quantity. This week I bought ham because I had some duck stock and when I was thinking about how to use it, I got the idea of making a hearty soup to match the weather – pea and ham.
Tonight we ate roast ham – yes on a week night. How so you might ask? Well I let it simmer on the hob with a whole host of yummy things in the water like leek, carrot, onion, coriander balls, pepper corns and bay leaves, whilst I worked away downstairs during the day. I then let the whole thing cool so that I could remove the scum from the top of the pan. Then 45 minutes before we wanted to eat, I removed the excess fat, scored it and slapped on English mustard and treacle having studded the fat with cloves.
One of the great things about having cooked for years is that I have loads of ideas in my head and I am not afraid to experiment. The same is true in business in that the more experience you have, the more creative you get. That said I always look at new recipes, a bit like reading blogs for inspirations, to get new ideas. One of the recipes I had looked at had suggested that you make a very complicated marinade and I thought I have not got time for that; and knew what would work. So I adapted and created my own topping.
Tomorrow I am going to cook the green split peas in the delicious ham stock to give them more flavour so that I have the base for my soup. I will use the excess cheese sauce I have to make a quick supper of macaroni cheese. In business this is similar to using resources cleverly and I think is more effective than reducing head count as a cost cutting measure. For example when you design a workshop for a client, you can take the ideas and rehash as it as an open programme and in that way get more bang for your buck.
So I may have paid double digits for the ham which stated like that sounds pricey but it works out to be very reasonable when you think that I am going to get about 12 portions out of it. First a roast dinner for four and then a soup for eight. I hope this has inspired you to think about what you can cook mid-week and given you ideas to try yourself. As writing about food in this way is new to me, I would love to hear what you think and whether you would like more tips on what to cook for your family that does not take ages and is healthy.
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Following a career in a blue chip company, Kate set up her own business in 2012. She spends a lot of time coaching groups of soulpreneurs who are passionate about what they do and want to find ways to make what they do more profitable.
The focus of Kate’s work is to consult to SMEs what it takes to be entrepreneurial in the new paradigm as more and more people are waking up and realising that much of the old way of working no long works. She is in the process of launching a new project with organisations in the food industry that are seeking to bring new ways of working to that world.