Food Stuff

This is the post I was hesitant to publish, because it's just a nerdy post about me getting excited about food related organization. Ridiculous, I know. But, hey, I wrote it, I might as well use it...

For the past several years, my kids have gotten to pick one of a handful of fairly healthy, pretty easy options for breakfast. However, I was getting more and more annoyed with often making four different breakfasts in the morning and having kids hem and haw forever while trying to decide what to pick. So, right before school started, I announced a new breakfast policy. We were picking seven breakfast options, assigning them a day of the week, and that's what all three of the kids would be having. Joey handled the transition extremely well because I let him assign which day they would have each meal. He loved having control of that and didn't even complain about the change. Hannah is pretty sweet in general, so I knew she would be fine with it. For some reason though, I didn't even think about how Ellie would react. The answer? Not well. She FLIPPED OUT the first morning when she found out she didn't get to pick her breakfast. COMPLETELY LOST IT. The funny thing is that after the first day she was completely on board with our new system. So, here's our list for the week:

Monday-Apple with peanut butter or cinnamon
Tuesday-Peanut butter or butter toast
Wednesday-Tortilla day (cheese or peanut butter roll up)
Thursday-Smoothies (we might have to change this one come winter)
Friday-Oatmeal
Saturday-Waffles, Pancakes or French Toast
Sunday-Special toast (toast with jelly or honey)

Now that breakfast was taken care of, I decided to tackle packing school lunches. I really dread packing lunches in the morning, but it's been so much easier now that I got more organized. I made a list of four different categories and all the options within those categories. Now I just make sure I pack one from each category and I'm good to go. It was a simple change (and really not blog worthy), but for some reason it's made packing lunches so much easier and mindless for me. I also feel good knowing their lunches are fairly balanced:

Once my morning routine was improved, I then turned my attention to dinner. In general, my goal for dinner is to have a main dish, a vegetable and a salad. It's ridiculous how often I fail at that easy standard. Usually I can just get it together enough to have serve a vegetable or a salad. Just recently I've discovered a few simple things that have really helped me meet this goal pretty much every night. First of all, I found this pretty picture on Pinterest:

Picture courtesy of Simple Vegan Blog

I don't follow the recipe on that blog at all, but it looked like such a good mix to grill. Now, every Wednesday after I go shopping for all my produce, I cut all these veggies up and put them in a big bowl in the fridge. Then, throughout the week, I just grab some of the mix, toss it with a little coconut oil, sprinkle it with this delicious Creole seasonings (pictured below), and grill it in my grill basket. 

My new strategy for making sure I have a salad for dinner is so basic and obvious that it doesn't actually qualify as a "strategy." I just always make sure I have lettuce washed, dried and chopped in tupperware in the fridge. It makes throwing a salad together much less daunting for some reason. I also have been doing a better job at actually meal planning for salads and not just main dishes.

Oh, and our favorite salad recently? I use this dressing (with or without grilled chicken) with this salad with...wait for it...Fritos!!! Andy gets so happy when that is our dinner for the night! YUM!

I'm really excited about all these new food systems I have in place, and I hope I can keep them up. Sometimes I'm great at things for a while, and then I lose my momentum. (Just ask me about my daily cleaning schedule!)

So, there you have it, the most ridiculously boring blog post ever. :-)