Tip of the Week #03

Tip of the Week

Here’s where I tell you some of my best tips, hacks, and shortcuts for making feeding your busy family easier and less stressful. I’ll share tips about cooking, lunch packing, cleaning, and more. Sometimes these are longer and more in-depth, sometimes they are just quick little time saving tips and shortcuts. I hope you enjoy!

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This week’s tip:

This week I thought I’d talk about birthday cake, and how as busy moms haven’t we got enough going on without pressuring ourselves to feel like we have to make a homemade cake? Not everything has to be homemade perfect.

Just buy the grocery store cake.

I promise you the kids will love it just as much.

I have been a fan of grocery store bakery cakes for years. We’ve been lucky to have a few great grocery stores near where we’ve lived and they always have great bakeries. The secret is to not order the sheet cakes out of the book with the cute kid designs and that awful greasy frosting - but to special order their fancier cakes. You know the ones they have in the case that always look amazing, with whipped cream or fruit fillings, or chocolate ganache frostings. I think most people don’t realize that you can special order and customize these fancy ones and not just the sheet cakes. Ordering a fancier cake from the grocery store gets you a really good freshly made cake for a lot less than a specialty bakery.

One of my all time favorite grocery store bakery birthday cakes. Isn't is gorgeous? 

This is our current favorite grocery store cake - our local store calls this Chocolate Decadence and it is a dark chocolate cake with a chocolate mousse filling and a hard chocolate shell. It's amazing. 

But what about homemade cake?

If you want to bake a homemade cake, I’ll tell you my favorite recipe, and it’s not from a cookbook or a food blog.

My favorite recipe for the best homemade chocolate cake and icing I’ve ever made is the recipe straight off the Hershey’s Special Dark cocoa powder container. This cake is amazing I am telling you. I follow it pretty closely except I like to substitute a cup of coffee for the water (decaf for kids). Even if you don’t like coffee, just trust me on this one. Coffee amplifies chocolate flavor, but it’s not enough that you will taste coffee at all. I always keep some instant coffee in my pantry for just this reason. Here is a link to my favorite espresso powder, or you can try this one if you need decaf.

Have a Question?

Ask me anything. Do you need lunch packing advice or meal planning suggestions? Or do you have other food or family management related questions? My goal is to be your resource for tips and advice - from a mom who has been there, and done that.

Reply to this email, post a comment, or hit me up on social media, and your question could be featured in next week’s newsletter.

Don’t forget to follow along on Instagram, Facebook, and Threads for daily tips and inspiration.

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Wishing you an easy week ahead!

– Lisa

Tip of the week #02

Tip of the Week:

This weeks tip seems like an obvious one at first, so let’s unpack this because there’s so much more to it than you might think.

Always Double The Recipe.

I know, doesn’t sound like much of a tip, right? But I’m a busy mom, and any time I can take a shortcut that saves me time in the kitchen, I’m definitely going to do it. Cooking extra is one of those shortcuts, and for me it is the foundation of a lot of good things.

First, I think leftovers are what makes the world go ‘round.

We often eat leftovers for breakfast and lunch, I love having healthy homemade foods in the fridge that my family just needs to heat up. Some of my kids prefer having warmed up leftovers for breakfast instead of more traditional breakfast foods. My husband works from home, and I’m still here homeschooling one kid, so it’s really nice to not have to make lunch every day. And we do a clean-out-the-fridge leftover night once a week. It gives me a night off from cooking.

Second, some of our favorite home cooked meals take a bit of mess and time to make.

But it’s not twice as messy or twice as time consuming to make twice as much. So double that recipe. Make enough meatballs for two dinners and stick half in the freezer. Prep an extra bag of marinated chicken. Make an extra meatloaf. Cut up extra meat for that sheet pan dinner. Freeze all these things and so many more.

Future you will be so happy to already have some prepped meals in the freezer during those weeks when the family schedule gets out of control, If you prep extra at the same time that you’re cooking that dinner then you can fill your freezer one meal at a time without having to spend a whole weekend afternoon on meal prep.

Third, making extra is one of my keys to lunch packing success.

When I say double the recipe, I’m not just talking about dinner. I’m talking about everything.

If you’ve browsed my lunches you’ll see that a lot of them are based on homemade items - I pack muffins, pancakes, pasta, meatballs, quesadillas, pizza, even cheeseburgers, and so much more. All of these things can be made ahead of time and stored in the fridge or freezer.

Lunch packing is quick and easy if you have healthy homemade items ready to just grab and go. I even pack just straight up dinner leftovers directly into lunch containers instead of putting them away in bigger storage containers. I make several dozen muffins at a time, mountains of pancakes and waffles. I make extra sandwiches if I’m making them for lunch at home, also extra quesadillas.

Especially as kids get older, having a stack of pre-made sandwiches in the fridge is great. Now that I’ve got a mix of kids at school and at home, when I’m making a sandwich for my homeschooler I always make a few extra for my high schoolers for lunch the next day.

Fourth - Cooking extra of popular kids foods is really helpful if you have a picky eater. I talk more about this in my post about meal planning with a picky eater, so you’ll definitely want to click on over to read that post.

You will never regret having extra sandwiches in the fridge, especially if you have teenagers. 

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Have a Question?

Ask me anything. Do you need lunch packing advice or meal planning suggestions? Or do you have other food or family management related questions? My goal is to be your resource for tips and advice - from a mom who has been there, and done that.

Reply to this email, post a comment, or hit me up on social media, and your question could be featured in next week’s newsletter.

Don’t forget to follow along on Instagram, Facebook, and Threads for daily tips and inspiration.

➡️ Follow Me on Instagram | ➡️ Follow Me on Facebook | ➡️ Follow Me on Threads

Wishing you a delicious and stress-free week ahead!

– Lisa