Posts tagged under Meals. Show all posts.
Back in my pre-kid days, when most of my meals were eaten in hotels, airports and client cafeterias, I didn’t have to worry about getting dinner on the table every night. That allowed me to devote all my cooking efforts to planning lovely dinner parties for our friends, on the weekends when I was home. A week or two before a dinner was planned, I would take my favourite cookbooks to bed with me and idly flip through them picking and choosing perfect combinations of dishes (with no ingredient repeats) to make for our friends. It was my hobby and a great way to relax.
Fast-forward to today and our three-soccer-practice, four-ballet-class weeks, getting dinner on the table is a seven-night a week affair and needs to be done as efficiently as possible—no relaxing allowed. But my current obsession with sodium means that I really try to stay away from prepared foods and store-bought frozen foods…which means even more cooking. So I am finding that having a copy of The Good Food Book for Families by Brenda Bradshaw and Cheryl Mutch, MD in my kitchen is like having my own nutrition consultant and executive chef all rolled into one. The cookbook is full of delicious recipes for breakfast, lunch, dinners, snacks and desserts, and also includes menu planning tools and a host of nutritional tips and help on interpreting Canada’s Food Guide for family eating. All the basics are covered (meatball, tuna melts and more) but the recipes I like the most are for the little things like make-your-own ice cream and peanut butter hummus. Off to make dinner now!
As I wrote here a few weeks ago, my family has a new Sunday night dinner tradition where the kids take turns choosing the menu and then helping me with the meal prep. Bit by bit, they are picking up some kitchen skills and I have learned a little bit about cooking with kids too—there are some safety issues to be aware of and then there are some ‘patience and enthusiasm’ issues. But it’s definitely an investment in their (our) future so I am trying my best to impart in them some good cooking knowledge.
On the safety front, there is a lot to learn about food contamination, fire hazards and knives, and it can be a bit overwhelming. So I’ve started with a few key safety lessons:
As to keeping them enthusiastic, I’ve found a few key principles go a long way:
What have been your lessons learned from cooking with your kids?
I don’t have kids of my own, but when my nieces stay with me on weeknights I always make an effort to get them involved with making lunches for school.
We recently made ‘green eggs and ham sandwiches’ and it was a huge hit! A combination of boiled eggs and avocados gives the eggs a creamy kick (plus it’s healthier than mayo) and the girls loved mashing them up and following the recipe. Check it out here: http://missavacado.com/avocado-recipes/
So true! We can always learn more from our kids than we think!
Each week, I have a date with my best friend. Her name is Meal Planning, and we meet once a week, typically on a Sunday afternoon, over a cup of tea and stack of cookbooks. We discuss different recipes, assess the calendar for the week to come and talk about how we’re going to feed my family for the next five to seven days. For the last eight years, Meal Planning has helped me save time, fed my family healthier dinners, and reduced my food costs. We all need a friend like her in our corner, don’t you think?
In case you couldn’t tell, I am an avid meal planner. I love the act of putting together a week’s worth of meals. I often feel a little lost when I wake up on a Monday morning without a plan in place. Periodically, I fall off the meal planning wagon, and when I do, our grocery bills are higher, my fridge isn’t as full, and some days I find myself staring into space wondering what the heck I’m going to feed my family for dinner that night.
Here are a few of my favourite tips for effective meal planning:
Are you a meal planner? If so, how do you go about planning your weekly meals?
I would love to meal plan but find the process overwhelming. I am a career mom of three with we find myself scrambling or picking up take out. Surely meal planning would help us save time, money and eat healthier. Please send suggestions to help get me started!
I like to use the Well-fed Homestead’s meal planning. For $20, I get 3 months worth of healthy grain-free meal plans and grocery lists. Each week she sends the new meal plan to my email inbox and voila… all I have to do grocery shop!
A few years ago, while in the throes of my seasonally hectic day-job, a friend called and offered to make dinner for my family so I wouldn’t have to worry about getting something healthy and delicious on the table mid-week. I gratefully accepted and four days later, a cheesy chicken parmigiana arrived at my doorstep, complete with a side dish of pasta and a crisp green salad. What a treat it was to sit down to a tasty homemade meal that I didn’t have to cook.
Fast forward three months, to her similarly busy work time, and I happily returned the favour by dropping off a vat of beef bourguignon to her family. She was ever so grateful, and to be honest I quite enjoyed cooking for her family. It was easy as I simply doubled what I was making for my family and dropped it off to her home with any required cooking instructions.
We carried on with this meal swap over the course of a few months, with no particular guidelines to follow. We ate what we were given. Some meals were bigger than others but all of them were hearty and appreciated.
I love the idea of families swapping meals with like-minded families. What a great way to expose our kids to the food philosophy of others, while trying new meals and flavours we might not otherwise try ourselves.
Would you ever consider a dinner co-op? Wouldn’t it be fun to have dinner co-ops popping up all over the place?
Last week, my family ate like the French for five days. We used the rules laid out in Karen Le Billon’s new book French Kids Eat Everything and combined them with my own personal experiences of living in the south of France, to come up with some guidelines for the what, when and how much we should consume.
I’m happy to report that we fared quite well, and only two complaints arose during the five-day trial. The first was from my husband, Rob. He confessed to feeling hungry every single night of this experiment, and found he was always craving a snack around 10 pm. To be perfectly honest, I don’t think that’s any different from any other night, but I believe he was more aware of it because he didn’t have the option of getting something to eat (one of Karen’s rules is ‘no snacking’—she believes it’s okay to feel hungry sometimes).
The second complaint came from the kids, and was related to… snacking! While they wanted to eat a little more frequently than I would let them, by the fourth day they stopped asking for something before bed, which ultimately felt like a really good thing.
Here’s a brief breakdown of what we ate last week:
Breakfast: This was the same every day. Warm baguettes (fortunately we live around the corner from a patisserie) topped with creamy butter, local honey and/or Nutella.
Lunch: This was the hardest meal to make, mostly because I was packing lunches for everyone. I included roast chicken, vegetables, leftover soups/stews, fresh fruit, cheeses, cured meats, dips, and crackers in the lunch boxes (Rob brown bags his lunch, too).
Snack (Gouter): This is an important part of the French diet and we indulged in this mini-meal every day. No one complained about the slices of cake, chocolate croissants and homemade cookies eaten after school.
Dinner: This was easy and often very simple. I made vegetable soups and served them yogurt, cheese and meats. Other dinners were made up of stew, lentils and sausages, roasted vegetables, and omelettes.
A few of Karen’s other rules include:
Could you eat this way for a week? A month? Do you agree with Karen’s rules?
Hi Karen! I love a late dinner, and so does my husband, but hockey season typically doesn’t allow for that. We can be gone from the house from 5:30 - 8:30 or 9:00 depending on the location of the games, etc. On weekends we always eat around 6:30 or 7:00, but my boys are older now and aren’t going to bed quite so early, so the late dinners are easy to do. I agree about the snacking though…the later the dinner the easier it is to eliminate the bedtime snack!
I have very little children and love *most* of what this book has to say. (despite the sweeping generalizations which are…annoying…). The late dinner time does not work for my family as both kids would be asleep by the time she suggested serving dinner…
However, I think the very basic idea of not depriving of sweets/carbs but rather serving them in smaller amounts and earlier in the day is key for kids and adults.
Comments
I love this book too! A great addition to any family kitchen I think.