Batch cooking, fussy-eaters: Neven Maguire and other chefs share tips for home cooking

Ever wondered what professional chefs feed their family? Caroline Hennessy was eager to find out.

Professional chefs share their home cooking tips

After carefully cooking and composing meals in a highly pressurised restaurant environment every day, what do chefs cook at home? Are they like the rest of us, scrambling for inspiration when 5pm inevitably rolls around? Or do they present their families with beautiful plates of delicious food? Of course, in that scenario, there’s no child turning their nose up at noodles/gnocchi/potatoes or whatever happens to be that week’s bête noire.

With young children, both Neven Maguire and Kwanghi Chan prioritise the importance of sitting down and eating together. Every family has to figure out a balance between after-school activities and dinner time but, as Maguire says, “it’s about the company and the chat.” 

As Eunice Power and Karen Austin’s children are grown up now, they have years of experience with feeding families and the perspective to see what works. There’s no one size fits all solution to midweek meals but these four chefs have tips, tricks and recipes that will help to make the daily routine that bit easier.

Neven Maguire

Neven Maguire is a fan of batch cooking 

Neven Maguire is literally the man that wrote the book. His best-selling Midweek Meals, a collection of unfussy ideas to feed your family, was published in 2020 while we were all stuck at home and looking for inspiration. Inspired by the feedback that he received, his latest book is More Midweek Meals, which was published last year. 

Maguire juggles his McNean House & Restaurant and the on-site cookery school with regular cookery demonstrations, radio and television appearances. His Friday morning appearances on Marty Whelan’s Lyric FM show are always a hoot and he has just been freewheeling the highways and byways of Ireland on Neven’s Greenway Food Trails.

Maguire is still usually the one to cook at home, he says, although he does share dinner duties with his wife Amelda who, he notes, “doesn’t realise how good a cook she is.” Family mealtime is important for his family of four - Maguire and Amelda have 13-year-old twins, Connor and Lucia - as it’s an opportunity to be together before he goes back to work. 

“It’s a time to chat about the day,” says Maguire. “It might be only twenty minutes but well all enjoy sitting down together and talking. No on is on the phone and there isn’t a TV. The children are finished school and I am often straight down to the restaurant after so I enjoy the family catch up time. It’s about the company and the chat.”

While the menu at McNean House might include quail ballotine and pea velouté, that’s not what makes it on the table at home. To keep things simple, Maguire does a lot of batch cooking and likes to keep it interesting by having some variety, “but without getting too complicated. We do stews, lots of fish - hake is a favourite - things like Cajun chicken melt, lots of mince dishes. It’s all good wholesome Irish food.” 

These are the kind of dishes that will be familiar to anyone who has a copy of any of Maguire’s popular cookbooks on the shelf: his trademark is simple, flavoursome recipes that work well. Nothing is too difficult for any member of the family to try. 

“These are recipes that children can help with,” says Maguire. “It’s not hard to have a dozen or so meals that everyone likes.”

• Midweek Meals and More Midweek Meals by Neven Maguire are published by Gill. See nevenmaguire.com

Eunice Power

Eunice Power says after 25 years, she is still the main cook in her house

Dungarvan-based Eunice Power is a woman who wears many hats. She launched Eunice Power Catering in 2001, using the best of seasonal and local produce to cater for weddings, family and corporate events all around Ireland. Her Dungarvan takeaway And Chips focuses on high quality, sustainable fast and affordable food and was recently named Irish Takeaway of the Year 2023. She’s equally at home cooking an enormous paella at Electric Picnic to feed the masses in the Theatre of Food as she is putting an aubergine parmigiana together on RTÉ’s Today show.

Mother of three grown-up sons, Power is also the festival director of the West Waterford Festival of Food, which will take place from 14 to 16 April. That doesn’t mean that she gets to duck out of midweek meals though. 

“Sadly for me, it appears after 25 years I am still the main cook in the house. Where have I gone wrong!” Power asks. “I suspect it’s all my own fault as I tend to prefer to do it myself rather than look at the chaos created when the children cook.” 

With just herself, her husband Edmund and one of her sons at home during the week, Power points out that “dinner isn’t the production it once was.” That said, she does note that “planning makes family meals much easier, even if it’s just having the basic store cupboard ingredients to hand - tinned tomatoes, pasta, rice and beans.” 

When she is trying to decide what’s for dinner, it has to be “about speed of delivery – I am nearly always up against it with time! I tend to cook either really slow or super-fast dishes. Really slow being a casserole that I start in the morning and pop in the slow cooker or bottom of the aga. Fast is generally pan-fried or baked fish.” 

Power finds inspiration from many different sources “be it a new combination of flavours, the introduction of a new ingredient or perhaps just looking at ingredients in a different way. I am excited by food and flavours and love to see ingredients coming into season each year, I welcome them like old friends". 

"My favorite food writer is Diana Henry, her recipes are delicious, inspirational, and utterly reliable. I love Lilly Higgins on Instagram – great flavours and ingenious shortcuts.”

• The 14th West Waterford Festival of Food is taking place from 14 to 16 April. For more details of what will be taking place see westwaterfordfestivaloffood.com
• Eunice Power Catering is at eunicepower.com

Kwanghi Chan

Kwanghi Chan is the author of Wok, the first Irish-Chinese cookbook to be published 

Kwanghi Chan, the chef-owner of Bites by Kwanghi, was born in Hong Kong and grew up in Buncrana, Co Donegal. He learned to cook in his family’s Chinese restaurant, subsequently embarking on a diverse career in food that has included being the head chef in a Michelin-stared kitchen, operating his own food truck and setting up the ChanChan street food sauces and seasonings company. He is the author of Wok, the first Irish-Chinese cookbook to be published and Chan makes regular appearances on Virgin Media One’s The Six O’Clock Show.

With everything that he has going on, it’s no surprise to discover that meal times in his house vary. Chan and his wife, Michelle, have two children, nine-year-old Lily and Alex, who is three. 

“Michelle cooks and organises dinners for our children after school. We tend to cook together in the evenings, and the kids would also eat again a small amount as a tea-time snack before bed.” He finds that staggering meal times takes a lot of pressure off. 

“The kids eat stews, casseroles and pasta dinners after school,” Chan says, “so there is no pressure for them to eat as much in the evening. It takes the stress away, we can focus more on chatting about our day and just enjoy whatever we eat.” 

That said, even chefs’ children have their likes and dislikes: Chan’s daughter is not a fan of cheese so “sometimes there might be drama if she spots [it] on her plate.” He keeps midweek meals interesting by using different flavours. “We might be using the same ingredients but mixing around with flavours helps it to feel different,” Chan says. 

Like most parents, he acknowledges that it’s difficult to create amazing meals when you’re under time pressure and recommends “keeping it quick, healthy and, most importantly, including lots of flavour”.

Although Chan says that he doesn’t turn to books for ideas, he says that his wife is “a huge fan of Karen Coakley [@KenmareFoodie on Instagram] and likes to follow some of Karen’s tips and recipes when cooking family meals”. His own Wok is full of quick, flavoursome ideas for family-friendly options using basic Irish ingredients: think Cantonese-style sweet and sour chicken, beef with green peppers and black bean sauce, and prawn and chorizo fried rice.

• Wok by Kwanghi Chan (€15) is published by Blasta Books. More information, along with lots of useful videos for mid-week inspiration is available on Chan’s website kwanghi.com

Karen Austin

Karen Austin may have retired from her role as the chef and co-owner of popular Clonakilty food emporium Lettercollum Kitchen Project, but she’s still working with vegetables from the walled gardens of Lettercollum House that have always inspired her. As a vegetarian for more than 40 years, apart from “the odd bit of fish and chorizo,” Austin knows how to make the most of Irish-grown produce by using ingredients discovered on her travels around the world. 

She has written two well-received cookbooks The Lettercollum Cookbook (Onstream) and Food For Today (Impress Printing Works), which focus on the easy, delicious and healthy food that LKP was always known for. Now she teaches weekly Saturday cooking classes, sharing the skills and recipes that she has honed over a lifetime of cooking, and also facilitates overseas culinary adventures: there’s a trip to the Greek island of Syros coming up in June.

Austin, who has three grown-up children with her partner and fellow chef, Con McLoughlin, clearly remembers the difficulties of managing work and feeding the family. 

When the children were young, the couple were also running an acclaimed restaurant at Lettercollum House. “It was chaotic!," she says. "Whichever of us wasn’t on duty would be cooking [for the children] or if both of us were working, it was the babysitter cooking.” 

In 2004, they left the restaurant to open LKP and life got slightly easier, Austin remembers. “When we moved onto the shop and our children became teenagers the dinners became much healthier and very social affairs.” Meals also came with rules: the person who cooks doesn’t have to wash up, which seems to have been a good incentive for all three children learning to cook.

“What makes family mealtimes work for me is a kind of one-size-fits-all dish, with add in and outs,” says Austin, “so that everyone has something they enjoy.” 

For anyone suffering through the picky eating stage, she has encouragement: “as our children grew up, their appetites overcame their fussiness and it became simpler.”

Austin and her family mainly eat vegetarian food “and our menus begin with what’s in the garden and pantry, which keeps it creative.” 

She’s an avid cookbook reader, with a particular love for books from London restaurants River Café, Moro, Quaglinos and Ottolenghi, along with New Zealand food writer Emma Galloway of My Darling Lemon Thyme. 

The cooking shoe is on the other foot now: two of her three grown-up children, with their own families, have “returned to Lettercollum and have their own homes so we also get invited next door for dinners!”

• Find Austin’s cookbooks, more information on her cooking classes and her Greek culinary adventure at lettercollum.ie