This edition of recent eats feels a bit underwhelming but I really enjoyed all of the home-cooked meals…even if most are in bowls and somewhat repetitive.
I am working really hard to find a better strategy for cooking meals on the nights that Finn is with me. I find that I have these grand plans in my head for what I’m going to cook and what dinner time will look like. Then, the day gets so busy and Finn gets to the point of tired/hungry before I can execute my plans and I end up with more formulaic/short-cut meals for both of us rather than the recipes and “real meals” that I want to cook.
When I do cook the “real meals” it usually pays off. When we eat together, Finn will try things he won’t eat otherwise and he just loves to eat dinner with me. This is a huge focus area for me. I’ll keep you posted on my progress.
Let me just say that it is very weird to go from someone who cooked almost every night and very rarely ate leftovers pre-baby to where I am now as a toddler mom. I have a whole new lens and appreciation for eating and cooking as a mom.
So…here’s what I’ve been eating over the last week.
BREAKFAST
Scrambled eggs and a toasted Dave’s Killer Bread Rockin’ Grains English Muffin. I buttered the English muffin and put cream cheese on it and then ate most of the eggs on top of it. Sumo mandarin on the side.
Pumpkin bread, scrambled eggs and tiny mandarins. Can’t get enough of all things mandarins right now. Keep reading for pumpkin bread details.
LUNCH
Salad with a spinach and arugula blend, Trader Joe’s Melodious Blend, feta, kalamata olives, avocado, pepitas, hearts of palm and caesar dressing.
Another salad with the same greens blend, hearts of palm, a can of Blue Harbor salmon, Trader Joe’s Melodious Blend, pepitas, feta and dried cranberries.
One more salad with the same greens, a pouch of Blue Harbor tuna, hearts of palm, pepitas, dried cranberries, avocado, feta and a homemade honey balsamic dressing.
DINNER
Spaghetti and buttered sourdough. This is one of Finn’s favorite dinners and a fun one for us to eat together. Here is my favorite spaghetti sauce recipe. It freezes beautifully.
I am on a big sautéed green cabbage kick right now. I’ll share my recipe/method soon! This was a bowl with rice topped with melted shredded Mexican blend cheese, roasted chicken sausage, carrots, mushrooms and parsnips, cabbage and hummus.
Pizza night! Frozen spinach and feta pizza from ALDI. I added pepperoni to it.
And served it with steamed green beans. This was an exceptionally good frozen pizza if you can find it at your local ALDI!
Blackened salmon over a quinoa/rice pilaf with steamed broccoli. I had this at the hotel on Friday night when I was traveling for teacher training. It was super salty but otherwise okay.
I made this at 9p on Sunday night when I got home from teacher training. Steamed basmati rice cooked in coconut oil and topped with shredded Mexican blend cheese with a Dr. Praeger’s California Veggie Burger, sautéed spinach, sautéed hearts of palm, half an avocado, hummus and hot sauce. I sliced and sautéed the hearts of palm just long enough to heat them through because I didn’t want them cold on my salad. They were great warm!
ETC.
A friend posted this pumpkin bread recipe from Bon Appetit on Instagram and I was baking it within a few days. It was spicy and delicious and used fresh ginger! I liked it but have MANY ideas for tweaks to make it a little better so I’ll try to give those a test-run soon so that I can share with you.
Teacher training weekend sweet treats. Blackberry cupcake with cream cheese frosting + chocolate cupcake with peanut butter frosting. Love Little Cake!
QUESTIONS
How do you manage working, momming and preparing home-cooked dinners?
Are you pumpkin fall-only, pumpkin if it’s cold/fall/winter or pumpkin all year long?
I am a mom of 3 and have a demanding job in healthcare. Since my kids were born (my oldest is 11 and I have twins that are 7), I have always batched cooked for 2 nights in a row. My kids don’t know any different, so they are used to leftovers! ? I also usually food prep one big thing for breakfast for the week (such as a frittata) and lunch (for example turkey burgers for salads) to make the week easier. It gets repetitive, but I’d rather take the guess work out of the day and spend my time doing other things. Although every time I see your meal posts, I know I would like to branch out more!
I love the idea of cooking for two nights and I find myself often doing that too. I really like your suggestion of prepping something more special for breakfast/lunch for the week. I think that could really help switch it up!
I love using my slow cooker to batch cook. Curries always tastes better the next day! My daughters are better having a larger meal at lunchtime, less tired and less likely to argue! We then do sandwiches, soups or snacky plates later in the day, and they help make them. They are aged 5 and 7 now and it still works better this way
I really need to use my slow cooker more often. I agree with you on the curries! That is so interesting about your daughters. I feel like Finn’s worst meal of the day is lunch and he even occasionally skips it completely. What kinds of things do you put on your snack plates?
Yummy food!! I have a 5 year old and work outside the home … I’ll usually prepare meals when I have time off and freeze them. Dinners when I am working are frozen meals (equal mix of homemade or store bought), leftovers, soups, take out or really quick stuff like eggs, pasta, snack plates. My daughter usually isn’t hungry at dinner and will eat a bite and beg to leave the table!! I TRY and let her be the boss of her appetite though.
Thanks Andrea! I could do a better job with using the frozen things that I have and freezing more things for easy meals. That’s a great tip. Someone else commented too that her daughters do better eating their big meal at lunch and eat lighter at night. That’s interesting! And yes, I’m also trying to let Finn be the boss of his appetite but making sure that he doesn’t fill up on snacks and actually eats meals is a challenging feat!
It’s SO hard to get dinner on the table every night with young kiddos. I have a 3 and 5 year old and really struggle. It also stinks when you put in the effort to make something and they eat none of it. My kid-feeding style is similar to yours (I think) I always give them something “safe” and just hope they’ll try the rest. I try to just be intuitive about it, some weeks I’m all amped on cooking delicious, creative meals, and other weeks I go super simple. It’s gotten a little easier now that my 5 year old can entertain herself while I cook by coloring or something else. My 3 year old loves to “help” me and stands in her kitchen helper right next to me the whole time. Honestly, helping me cut fruits and vegetables is often the only way she eats them, so whatever works!
Oh, and definitely pumpkin year round!
Haha, yes. I am VERY familiar with the “I don’t like it.” 😉 Yes, that is exactly what I do. I make sure there is one thing on his plate that I know he will eat and hope for the best with the rest of it. It is slowly getting better! I love your thoughts on going with the flow of what you’re feeling with cooking. I am similar! Finn is just now getting into helping me in the kitchen so I need to take advantage of that and maybe make it a fun afternoon or pre-dinner activity occasionally.
Love your salad ideas.
Do you add fruit or sides (like cracker/breads) or do you manage to fill up with those? I don’t do meat, so I usually add extra sides to my salad – making it less healthy. We are big fans of soups here, but unless it’s a really filling one, we can’t just do soup and 2 crackers….
Great question. So I almost always snack on something like chips or crackers while I’m making my salads. I oftentimes add grains like quinoa, rice or that lentil mix you see in this post to bulk up my salads. When I do soup for lunch, I almost always have toast or avocado toast on the side.
hi Jen. I batch cook on the weekends and use my instant pot constantly for soups, beans and grains. We eat alot of leftovers and that is ok! I enjoy pumpkin in my oatmeal all year round! Why not! Stay well!
I actually don’t have an Instant Pot but I’ve heard such great things. I could probably stand to use my slow cooker more often. I do like to cook and food prep on the weekends but find that I’m often out of town on the weekends that I don’t have Finn. I have a whole new appreciation for leftovers since becoming a mom! 🙂
Hi Jen! Have you tried the hearts of palm noodles from Trader Joe’s yet? So much better than spaghetti squash! They hold up like real noodles.
For meals, I use my instapot once or twice a week and try to batch cook the times I do use it. Pumpkin all year around is fine by me! 🙂
No! YUM! Thanks for giving me a head’s up. I can’t wait to check them out. Gosh, I don’t have an Instant Pot but I’m so tempted to get one.
I have a 3 year old, 3 month old & work part time outside the home. Loveeeee my instant pot. I make one ‘one pot’ meal in there per week and that lasts at least 2 nights. I also do frozen meal one night and make a casserole/lasagna that will last two nights. The other 2 nights are take out and leftovers or something REALLY easy like scrambled eggs.
My three year old tends to eat a lot in the morning. He’ll have a big breakfast, a large mid morning snack and a sizable lunch and then eats practically nothing Between nap and bedtime. I have gotten so tired of plating a whole dinner for him only for it to be thrown away, that I just stopped completely and only offer dinner if he asks.
If he’s really hungry before bed, I offer cucumbers/carrots/sliced apples. Sometimes he eats it and sometimes he doesn’t.
I feel like every kid I know has one meal that they essentially don’t eat.
This is a very belated sad face to hear that you and Finn had COVID. How awful!! And a huge congrats on your new business – so exciting!!! You must be so proud!!
My kids are 15 and 12 so while they used to be picky, they now eat ANYTHING and a lot of it. I recently made a huge batch of Bon Appetit’s turkey and white bean chile and they are happy to eat that all week. Plus tons of snacks like beef jerky and cliff bars and apples and peanut butter. When they were little, I spent WAY too much time worrying about how much they ate. Looking back, they were both very healthy and ate when hungry. That meant some days they ate nothing and other days they ate non-stop.
I love these posts, because you show eating in such a real and relatable way!
The ONLY way I am able to cook dinner stress free is by prepping earlier in the day. I almost always chop veggies, prep meat, and get ready any sauces I need in the morning or nap time. I am so stressed when I have to cook dinner from start to finish at dinner time.
One thing that isn’t food related but may help – it’s feels a bit judgmental to yourself and others to use language like “real” meals that imply that there’s something fake or unreal about just getting food on the table as a parent because you’re busy. It reads (perhaps unintentionally) like anything less than a scratch creative meal isn’t up to standard, which any parent will tell you is not reasonable if you have a job and a life outside the home. Maybe I’m just frank now on child three, but the point is to get square meals that are aligned with the food guidelines for kids and adults on the table, not to have meals be instagram or passion related. We only have so many hours in the day and choosing to invest them elsewhere is ok.
I don’t have kids (only fur babies) BUT my boyfriend’s current project has him waking up at 3am. My workday starts at 9am and in order to enjoy dinner/some quality time together before he has to go to bed, dinner has to come together quickly currently. Some things that are helping are trying to make a soup over the weekend that can be eaten for lunches throughout the week. (There are a lot of crockpot soup recipes out there!) and planning our dinners for the week ahead of time. We find ourselves not always sticking to what we thought we would eat on a given night based on what we are craving, but at least we have ideas to pull from for the week. We are cooking as much as we can over the weekend to heat up leftovers on weeknights, but I understand that doesn’t work well with traveling. Maybe if there is a day during the week you could carve out time for extra cooking, it would work the same way. It seriously is hard to have scheduling challenges to work around even when you love cooking!
Current faves are kebobs grilled in advance on the George Foreman grill to eat in Greek inspired salad/rice bowls, and a Mexican inspired dinner always seems to last us for multiple nights. 2020 also brought back English muffin pizzas for us. Hadn’t eaten those much since I was a kid, but they are so fun/comforting when in need of a quick dinner.
This looks like a lot more variety than we usually get at my house! We usually eat the same thing at least two or three nights in a row. Sometimes this works to my advantage, as it gives my 2 year old a chance to “get used to” a new food over a few days…sometimes it really doesn’t, and he hates it from day one and never changes his mind.
In addition to making a lot of stew-based meals, we also do a lot of sheet pan meals, which I find are easier to scale up or customize (eg add extra veggies), and typically pretty fast!
Usually when I see your meal posts, I start to think about getting an air fryer. We live in a small apartment with a relatively small kitchen, so I am hesitant to add more to the counter – but you seem to get a lot of mileage out of yours!
All so so yummy! Always love to see your food and wish I could have some too! Lol. Would love to hear your cabbage method. I love love love roasted/sauteed slaw mix or chopped cabbage!
Love how many replies this post got!!
I work out of the house and am a single mom. What I do that works for me is prep a week of lunches (4-5 meals worth) and have those for the work week. For dinner I try to rotate so our dinners usually go something like this: warm or cold sandwiches, pasta, soup, skillet, pasta, sheet pan, breakfast, etc. I try to switch up the type of food plated and use similar ingredients. I always have Annies Mac on standby for those nights when I have to forgo plans.