Feeding the Family

Feeding baby brother his homemade (and imaginary) soup

A few weeks (months?) ago I posted about cooking, and shared my grand plans for cooking all our meals and sharing recipes here.  So far, I've been doing a pretty good job of putting real meals on the table (complete with vegetables and fruit) almost every evening since I've been back at work.  It's not been exactly as I pictured, though, as I have less time on the weekends and the evenings than I anticipated.  Zachary is at a stage where he needs a lot of attention, and so I can't do much of anything that takes a lot of time except when he's napping.  It's been especially rough the past few weeks, as he's only happy in his jumper or his high chair for a few minutes before he needs to be picked up.

Before going back to work I spent a few hours going through recipes on Pinterest, and created a couple of food boards: "Weekend Dinners," "Weeknight Dinners" and "Veggies."  What I didn't take into account with the meals I marked as weeknight dinners was the needy baby.  And the fact that my cooking skills are still evolving, and so the prep work often takes me 2-3 times longer than the recipe or I anticipate.  

As a result, most of my weeknight dinners aren't too inspired.  We have a few fast and easy meals which require no real recipe we do fairly regularly: tortellini, hot dogs on Friday nights (Finn decided he doesn't like pizza...which is just crazy and hopefully temporary), burritos, omelets and grits, rotisserie chicken with crock pot baked sweet potatoes, turkey meatballs (from Costco or Trader Joe's) with pasta are the most frequent. Amazingly Finn loves salad, so many nights our veggies are just what I can throw together in a salad.  Nothing fancy, but it works.

But I am slowly finding (or rediscovering) some truly fast meals that are home cooked and easy enough for me to do in the short amount of time I have when I get home, so those are the recipes I'm going to share here.  Not that I'm looking to become a food blogger, but feeding my kids healthy meals while making dinner family time and exposing them to lots of different flavors is an integral part of my life as a single mom.

Aside from easy meals like the ones I've mentioned above, freeze ahead meals are also wonderful.  When Jennie was here we made and froze a lot of foods, but I'm just now getting around to using them.  I'm not exactly sure what I was waiting on, but my plan now is to have a frozen meal at least once if not twice a week. I've put a dry erase board on the freezer with a list of all the meals inside of it, which I think will make it much easier to add one or two to my meal plan for the week.  It does take some work to get these meals done on the weekend, though.  Yesterday afternoon I made Pioneer Woman's lasagna roll ups - I started when Z went down for a nap, but unfortunately his nap wasn't very long, so I was only halfway through when he woke up.  As a result, I did half the work while holding him, and when I couldn't hold him he was in the bouncy seat, jumper or high chair with variable a lot of fussing and crying in between.  But I now realize if I'd planned better I could have made the sauce and filling while he was napping earlier in the day, and then put it all together with the noodles during his late afternoon nap.  So next time that's what I'll do.  But it will be a while before there's a next time, as this one recipe made enough for dinner tonight, lunch Monday and dinners for the two of us for 7 more nights.  I put the containers in the fridge before dinner and then wrapped them up for freezing after both kids were in bed.  Finn did help a little - he stirred the filling and the sauce both, and then took great pride in pronouncing the roll ups "DEElicious!"  (I will share that the recipe is a little misleading, as it listed the 16oz of mozzarella cheese in the filling list, when it's actually all supposed to be used as topping, so I put almost 16oz of mozzarella cheese in the filling, and then topped them with just a sprinkling of cheese.  It was the best cooking mistake I've ever made.  I'll never make filling for lasagna or manicotti any other way again...not that I've actually ever made it before.)

My kitchen after finishing the cooking

I loved the suggestions on my last cooking post, including the suggestion to check out the blog Dinner a Love Story.  I've only made one recipe from them so far (Lazy Bolognese - which I see now I pinned to my weeknight dinner board - silly, silly me) but I've really enjoyed reading the blog and feeling inspired to continue my feeble culinary efforts.

Cooking at Home

Helping prepare dinner (using his play hammer to crush crackers)

Eating healthier and spending more time with my boys are two things I can't stop thinking about as I prepare to rejoin the real world and go back to work in 4 short weeks.

There's not a lot I can do to spend more time at home, but I have made one small step - in July I'll start seeing patients 20 minutes earlier in the morning and finish 20 minutes later in the afternoon (I did this once already last year, so this will put me leaving work 40 minutes earlier than I did a year ago, which translates into getting home 50 minutes earlier, as I'll miss the worst of rush hour traffic). Next year, when I quit pumping, I'm thinking about shortening my lunch time as well, so I can leave even earlier.
Getting home earlier will make it possible for us to eat dinner together as a family.  But I don't want to wait for July to be able to do that.  And when July gets here, I don't want to spend all my time in the kitchen every evening, and I really don't want to do carry out or prepackaged foods every night, either.

So I've started working on my cooking skills.  While Jennie has been here, we've cooked most nights, trying out new recipes and freezing quite a few meals, as well.  Not all of them are the healthiest, but they're good and made with fresh ingredients, so they've got to be healthier than what I've been doing in the past. Over the past few years, I've become convinced that portion sizes play a huge role in how healthy something is, and that a high fat main dish can be made much healthier by serving a smaller portion with a lot of fruits and veggies on the side. That's always the hardest for me - making sure I get my fruits and veggies.  In a typical day my son will eat more fruits and veggies than I eat in an entire week.  (And after reading this recent study that suggests a diet high in fruits and vegetables decreases your risk dying, I'm even more motivated to work on this!)

Finn absolutely adores cooking. He loves to help whenever he can, and then when we eat the finished product, he likes to say something like, "This is really tasty. Who made this? Mommy and I did!" He's such a great eater (most of the time) and already recognizes things like garlic and onions and freshly grated parmesan cheese, so I'd like to encourage his love of food and cooking by involving him in making meals as much as possible, too.  My mom is a great cook, but never liked having us in the kitchen, so my sister and I never really learned anything about cooking from her at all. I do understand why she never had us join her.  It is distracting, and sometimes frustrating, to have a toddler working in the kitchen with me, but seeing the joy he gets out of it makes it worth it for me. And I think he's more likely to try new foods if he was involved in cooking them.

We need to work on hand cleanliness while cooking

I don't really know what I'm doing in the kitchen most of the time, but I'm learning.  And I've decided that there are three different types of meals I'm looking to learn to cook: 1) fast and easy weeknight dinners, 2) crock pot meals to make during the week, and 3) more complicated recipes to make on the weekend that will give me at least a night's leftovers or make enough to freeze.

The only fast and easy meals I can think of now involve using already prepared ingredients (like make your own pizza with store bought pizza dough), but I figure if I do something like that just once a week, then I should be able to come up with some good choices for other nights of the week.  And I've found what may be a great recipe for shredded chicken that will allow me to freeze chicken for use in recipes during the week, cutting down the prep time significantly.

It's unlikely that this blog would ever become a cooking blog, but I'm thinking of sharing some of my recipe finds here, including how I involved my boys in the cooking.  And I'd really love if you'd share some of your go-to meals in the comments or on your own blogs, whichever category they might fall into (though quick weeknight meal ideas would be especially welcome!)