Notes from the kitchen table: no. 06
Hi there,
Everyone who is going back to school is back now, right?
This is when it gets crazy for a lot of us. I have three in school now, and one still homeschooling. We’ve started having a family meeting once a week just to review the calendar, because it has exploded. With school events, scout activities, social activities, our calendar is suddenly full, and we even make an effort to not sign up for a lot of stuff.
Do you do family meetings? I would love to hear about those, or other strategies that work for organizing your busy family.
Are you getting fall weather yet? Here in the Sierra foothills we are definitely still having summer, and still loving it. I love every season here, but it seems like whatever season we are in becomes my current favorite. I love the warm days and clear nights, the swimming pool weather, the garden at its peak.
My homeschooler and I are working on getting back into our homeschool schedule and we’ve started planning weekly field trips. Planning is so much easier with just one. Last week we visited the California State Railroad Museum in Sacramento - it’s one of our favorite spots, so well done with so much interesting history.
Once nice thing about having three back in school is that I have time again finally to get back to this blogging thing, and I am really enjoying the process of bringing this old blog back to life for you. I’ve been working hard lately refreshing things, updating old posts, and getting some new content up there.
Ok, so what’s in this week’s issue:
First up this week is a simple tip that applies to both family dinner and lunch packing, plus my thoughts on a common a reader question about a challenge that so many parents face, a fun lunch idea, a few blog posts and social media highlights, and as always our weekly meal plans.
Make sure you don’t miss a weekly update - click here to subscribe to my substack and you’ll get these updates in your inbox. The archive of all my weekly updates and past meal plans will always be available on the blog as well.
Let’s dig in!
Tip of the Week:
This weeks tip is a short one at first, so let’s unpack this because there’s so much more to it.
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 and what keeps the trains running on time. 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. Keep reading below for more thoughts about that.
You will never regret having extra sandwiches in the fridge, especially if you have teenagers.
Featured Blog Posts:
Several posts I want to share with you this week!
In keeping with the leftovers and cooking extra theme above - here’s a popular post on my blog featuring a school lunch made of dinner leftovers. I show you in this post how easy it can be to pack a lunch while you’re cleaning up from dinner. Check it out ➡️ Easy Leftovers for Lunch
I promised last week that I would share my tips and ideas for after school snacks. I’ve got a long blog post with loads of snack ideas that I’ve just refreshed and updated for you. Check that one out here ➡️ Quick and Easy After School Snack Ideas
Last week in my social media highlights section I mentioned a thread where I asked for suggestions for meals using ground beef and got lots of great ideas. I compiled all those ideas into a blog post with links to loads of recipes. There are so many good ideas here, you’ll definitely want to bookmark this to refer to when you are meal planning. ➡️ Read the blog post
I also told you about the thread where I asked about favorite cookbooks - and I’ve got those books now all listed in one blog post and I also created an amazon list with all the books, so you can go right now and add them all to your wish list. ➡️ Read the post, or shop the Amazon List.
Reader Q&A:
Q: How do I plan family meals when one of my kids is such a picky eater?
A: I see this question so much in social media and parenting groups. It can be really hard to manage family meal planning when some of you like a wide variety of foods and some of you have a very limited list of what feels safe to eat, but I have figured out several ways to navigate this that work for my diverse family. Here are my top suggestions:
1) Make deconstructed meals.
Plan to make the foods you like to eat and cook, but figure out how to deconstruct the components of that meal and serve it as a make-your-own bar style of dinner. The easiest example of this is instead of a loaded one pot pasta with the noodles and sauce and meatballs and veggies all mixed together and topped with cheese, serve all of those components separate. If someone just wants pasta with cheese, they can do that. If someone wants just meatballs and sauce and veggies but no pasta they can do that. But if the meal you wanted was all of it together, then you still get to have that. Everybody is happy.
Other ideas for this type of meal include taco bar, baked potato bar, ramen soup bar, rice bowl bar. Make a list of all the meals you like and see how many you can figure out how to separate into a deconstructed bar. You’ll probably be surprised at how many you come up with.
Cooking this way is also awesome for meal prep, because if you’ve made extra of the separate components each night, then you can easily combine those things in new ways for probably several more different meals.
2) Have an available safe food for the picky eater.
I always try to make sure there is something available for the meal that my pickiest eater will eat.
If I really wanted to make that one pot pasta or a loaded casserole or spicy gumbo, then I will always have something available that is separate. This brings us back to my tip above about making extra. Did you know that plain pasta and rice freeze really well? Make extra when you’re cooking and freeze some in single serving portions. Then you can always pull out a bag of cooked pasta for that one kid who is going through their “nothing but buttered noodles” phase. I also recently discovered these pouches of single serving pre-cooked pasta and I always make sure I have some in my pantry. My picky eater makes this for herself often, just a minute in the microwave and a little butter and she has a dinner she is happy with.
3) A bowl of cheerios is not an unhealthy dinner.
Maybe an unpopular opinion, and I don’t care what your mother-in-law says, it’s ok to let them eat cereal for dinner sometimes. I don’t buy cereal that I’m not ok with my kids eating, so super sugared cereals aren’t an option here, but a healthier whole grain cereal is always an available meal choice.
Teach them how to slice a banana, or have some cut fruit or a container of blueberries available. Have them set their place and bring their cereal bowl and a pitcher of milk and their fruit to the dinner table and eat it with the rest of the family. They are getting a balanced meal, and they are still learning about healthy eating by seeing what you serve and what the family is eating, nobody is feeling shamed for their food choices, and you’re not feeling guilty about them not getting a healthy meal. I can almost guarantee you that eventually they will feel brave enough to try what the family is eating because you are leading by example and without pressure or shaming.
Lunchbox Inspiration:
Weekly lunch packing inspiration and ideas.
Here is a quick and easy lunchbox idea: Sandwiches don’t always have to be boring. A fun twist on a simple sandwich is to use mini bagels instead of bread. Kids love bagels. Making lunch fun and cute isn’t hard, really takes no extra time, but does make it much more likely that your kiddo is going to want to eat it.
I shared an example of this lunch on my Instagram today - check it out ➡️ Easy Bagel Lunch
I also wrote a quick blog post with this lunch - and even included a fun little video about how to make it and links to supplies I use to make it easy and fun.
Meal planning:
Updates on our weekly meal plans.
I’m doing Whole30 this month, which means I’m not having any grain or dairy or sugar or alcohol, and a few other things. But I still have a family to feed so I just have to get a little extra creative with my meal planning. If you’ve planned ahead it’s pretty easy to adapt your meals to work. My biggest meal planning tip for when you are trying to eat a little different from the family is the same as my first tip above - deconstructed meals. I’m planning meals for this month that are easy to take apart into components. So the family can still have spaghetti and meatballs, and I am very content with my bowl of spinach and meatballs.
Here’s an overview of what we had for dinner last week, and a peek at what is on my list for the coming week. I’ve included links to pictures and recipes where I have them.
Last week’s menu:
If you compare the actual to what I had planned from last week’s update, there are always some differences. But the beauty of meal planning is that you’ve already got some ideas figured out, so even if you need to rearrange or change things up, you aren’t starting from zero. Here’s what we actually ate last week:
Sunday: Salmon, pasta, green salad with berries & lemon vinaigrette.
Monday: Chicken with basil and garlic, zucchini patties, sliced tomatoes
Tuesday: Fish tacos (fish sticks for kids, leftover salmon for adults, I had mine as a salad)
Wednesday: Leftovers
Thursday: Baked pasta with cheese sauce, chicken, tomatoes & basil; Cobb salad
Friday: A frozen pizza for the boy, a salad for me (the others were camping)
Saturday: Leftovers for the boy, a salad for me
On the menu this week:
Here’s the menu this week. Check back next week for the actual list of what we ate, we’ll see how well I managed to stick to the plan.
Sunday: Big meatballs, pasta, spinach
Monday: Teriyaki chicken, rice, broccoli
Tuesday: Chicken tacos
Wednesday: Leftovers
Thursday: Thai basil, chicken, & lemongrass soup (my garden is overflowing with Thai basil)
Friday: Homemade pizza
Saturday: Chicken shawarma, flatbread, lettuce, tomato, cucumber, etc.
Sunday: (we have company) Moroccan spiced pork shoulder, roasted veggies, couscous, maybe a kale salad
Social Media Highlights:
Here are some highlights from my recent social media activity.
If you’re not already on Threads, come on over and join the conversation!
This week I asked for ideas for cooking a whole chicken, and folks came through with some awesome recipe links that you’ll definitely want to grab. ➡️ Click here to read that thread.
Seems like the excitement is mostly happening on Threads these days, but I’m posting almost daily on instagram too. That’s the spot to see what we’re having for dinner in almost real time, so be sure to follow me there too.
Here’s a fun one - this is my first year with a garden at our since we moved here three years ago. Something I’ve always wanted to grow is melons, but I never could grow them where we lived before because it wasn’t warm enough. I have finally had success with growing melons and I’m seriously giddy about it. I shared a couple of pics of my melon bounty here and here.
Coming Next Week:
Next week I thought I would share some of my favorite protein packed lunch ideas, maybe some school day breakfast suggestions, and some of my favorite household cleaning hacks. And always answers to reader questions, meal plan updates, and more. What would you like to hear more about? Be sure to check back and subscribe so you never miss an update.
And coming soon - hopefully - I’m working on a series of blog posts all about my simple meal planning method. What’s funny is that the method is really simple but somehow writing the blog posts isn’t.
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 and Threads for daily tips and inspiration.
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Wishing you a delicious and stress-free week ahead!
– Lisa