Well hello there, we have apparently reached the time of year when I have small freak-out about breakfast. Join me, won’t you?
The issue, in a nutshell, is that I continue to need quick weekday breakfast options for my child. Ideally, they would be portable and at least semi-nutritious. This is Quite Challenging, because a lot of breakfast foods do not appeal to my kid. I am and have always been a Very Picky Eater, so I get it; it’s not always a matter of “just eat it because it’s good for you.” Sometimes the preferable option to a food you don’t like is simply not eating. As a Very Picky Eater, I understand. As a Tends-Toward-Fretful Mother, I want my child to fuel her body before school.
The bacon and egg sandwiches I mentioned here are fine, but they are not an everyday desire. The French toast muffins I mentioned in the same post were fine, but I think Carla got sick of them. However, muffins do seem to be a well-received mechanism for delivering calories and (modest) nourishment to my child, so I think I’m going to make some apple cinnamon muffins and some pumpkin cream cheese muffins in the hopes that they do the trick.
Speaking of calories and nourishment, I haven’t done a great job of planning meals this year. I am, however, less great at winging it. So let’s get back to meal planning, at least for today.
Dinners for the Week of March 2-8
- Slow Cooker Korean BBQ Chicken: I am in need of some slow cooker meals this week, and this sounds yummy. I’m using breasts instead of drumsticks, and I’ll shred the chicken and use it to make some rice bowls.
- Slow Cooker Chipotle Chicken Tortilla Soup: I’m always in the mood for this soup, and it’s another slow cooker meal, so that’s a win-win.
- Lemony Garlic Butter Shrimp Orzo: My husband and daughter got me a new cookbook for my birthday, and I love it. It has many, many recipes I would love to make and eat, including this one. My husband doesn’t normally care that much for shrimp, but he said he’d be happy to try any recipe from the book and I’m taking him at his word.
- Ramen: My daughter is into ramen lately, and I like ramen well enough. My favorite way to make it is with shrimp and edamame, but my husband would prefer chicken. Hopefully we’ll have leftover Korean BBQ chicken he can add to it.
- Chicken Paprikas: This meal doesn’t necessarily scream “spring is on the way,” but it’s tasty, simple to make, and usually produces enough leftovers for another meal.
What are you making for dinner this week?
My older daughter makes ramen quite frequently. It’s delicious. Being mostly vegetarian, she uses tofu. Health-ish muffins are a great option for a quick and portable breakfast.
Dorothy has been loving Belgian Boys mini pancakes with fruit and whipped cream with a side of Jones Dairy chicken sausage links. She is also a huge fan of making her own yogurt bowls. She likes either plain Greek yogurt with honey or those Chobani 20g protein cups from Costco. She adds granola (I have been buying the Kodiak protein granola which is pretty ok), shredded coconut, and berries. I can also prevail upon her to drink a glass of Fairlife chocolate milk, too (another 13 grams of protein).
I just want to shout out that Jones Dairy is located in my town. That is all. The Jones family are real philanthropists and they pay their workers fairly. They are really bad to cows, though. *shrug* Go Wisconsin!
Feeding children can be so stressful. I was trying to think of what the boys ate at that age, but I think that was the age where they suddenly were starving all the time and ate anything that was remotely edible. I do remember breakfasts as being frequently: toast with peanut butter and jam, Mini Wheats with milk, fruit and yogurt parfaits, and smoothies. I hope the muffins do the trick. Does she like banana bread? I frequently make banana muffins, or zunana muffins, both with chocolate chips, that are very well received. But then again teen boys are very different from tween girls in the food department, so I may be, as they say, talking out of my ass.
Dinner this week: pasta tonight, big fun salad tomorrow, possibly stir-fry on Wednesday, possible wraps on Thursday. We are true empty nesters this weekend so WHO CAN SAY, maybe I’ll get a little crazy for our little table of two (no, probably not crazy at all)
I am sold on the Korean chicken – do the chicken breasts have to be an inch thick? Will we compare the size of our breasts over text later?
I’m in the middle of two husbandless weeks, and my iron is low, so I cooked a roast last week and ate it all week. This week I’m batch cooking to bring stuff down to Eve over March Break. I do not miss the days of trying to figure out what they would eat for breakfast. Let’s just say I was not proud of my cereal cupboard.
I love that cookbook! The sheet pan chicken poblano fajitas are a favorite.
I have a yummy blueberry & lemon muffin recipe that she might like. I recently altered that recipe to make lemon poppyseed muffins that are delightful. What about vanilla yogurt parfaits?
I think muffins as a form of calories (and if they are nutritious – all the better) is something that we can all get behind. Yum. Your dinners sound good enough for me to invite myself over . . . if only. Now that basketball is over, I’m thinking I should dive back into making meals vs just phoning it in with turkey taco meat and chicken and carrots in the crockpot. But it is almost grilling season, which is something Coach takes the lead on – hooray for that. I’m not feeling overly inspired to feed my people lately. Easy is the answer in my book.
I would think muffins would be a great idea. So many options. Or those healthy granola-like breakfast bars. I’ve seen some good recipes for those online so if nuts and oats are a hit, that’s got potential (and maybe for a school snack). A fruit fan? Yogurt loaded with fresh fruit and granola for crunch is good but I’m not sure how yogurt goes over with kids. I don’t envy you.
I’m not a meal planner — I keep a well-stocked freezer and usually decide the morning of, when I have time to get fresh veg if needed. My freezer always has shrimp, salmon, pork tenderloin, chicken and ground beef, along with a couple of frozen fast meals for two or three and a box or two of Lean Cuisine for when Rick isn’t here!
Ramen is nice because there are so many different ways to dress it up to your own taste. Pumpkin-cream cheese muffins are one of North’s favorites. (I think they’d volunteer to be your kid if they knew that was on the menu.)
Beth’s out of town for a week so with one fewer cook we’ve been slacking off a little, Mexican takeout on Sunday, leftovers from the freezer last night. But I am going to make a cream of asparagus soup tonight with Gruyere and crackers on the side. Noah’s making a noodle soup with tofu, mushrooms, and spinach Wednesday. I’m making ravioli with tomato-cream sauce and broccoli on Thursday, then one or the other of us will make homemade pizza on Friday. Saturday is up in the air.
Our boys eat 2 breakfasts most days! At home, Paul eats several bowls of cheerios and Will eats a yogurt. Then most days they eat breakfast at school, too. It’s very carb-heavy, though, like waffles or french toast sticks, etc.
For meals this week, I made chili last night and plan to make some walleye later this week. A neighbor on a block gave us a bunch of frozen walleye from his trip to Alaska. The downside is that they left the skin on one side of the filet. I guess that’s done to prove that it is in fact walleye? I don’t know. I tried making fish tacos w/ it a month ago and the skin made that problematic. So I am going to try to bake it this week and hopefully the skin comes off more easily when it’s baked. Otherwise I will give the walleye to my parents and they can figure out what to do with it!
I think my daughter ate Eggo waffles every day in 6th grade. She would eat them in the car on the way to school, and they had butter on them which would get on her hands and she would wipe it on her jeans and it was a thing that she cannot imagine now, as in, “Why was I so weird?” But I kind of think of it fondly, as she wasn’t as obsessed with looks and clothes yet. Sigh.
That orzo and shrimp dish sounds amazing. I miss cooking orzo, I have 2 recipes that I love. My husband can’t eat that much pasta though, and my daughter is vegetarian and they both have chicken. SIGH.
Monday we had pistachio crusted fish (cod) that my daughter made. Yesterday we had sweet potato and black bean tacos. Tonight I’m taking the sweet potatoes and black beans (and guacamole) and making quinoa bowls. Tomorrow, who knows?
Ah. Well, I can’t help you with breakfast because this is one of the areas where I have apparently Given Up On Parenting. After trying a zillion different options, my daughter has decided she doesn’t want breakfast- she doesn’t have time, she’s not hungry, and she’s not going to eat. I mean, she’s 17- what am I going to do? To be honest, I didn’t eat breakfast when I was in high school either (although it’s not something I would recommend!)
Dinner, arg. Maybe once a week I cook something for everyone, and sometimes my husband will do that as well. Otherwise we all kind of fend for ourselves. Yep! We’re barely limping along here, but looking on the bright side, my daughter will have some cooking skills when she goes to college.
Your list of meals makes me miss cooking in my slow cooker (the Crack Pot, as my son would call it). I haven’t used it all winter, probably because it makes too much food for just the two of us. Korean BBQ sounds delicious.
Will Carla eat yogurt with fruit or granola in the morning? That seems easy and portable.
I’ve not had to prepare anything this week, aside from what I want to eat, since the husband is gone; tonight that was a salad with strawberries, gorgonzola cheese, almonds, and poppy seed dressing. And I roasted broccoli that was going bad and a few ripe tomatoes. Girl food!
The cookbook looks like a winner!
The last several years I have actively hated breakfast foods. So I decided to embrace what I once found so weird about international travel breakfasts – food that I don’t associate with breakfast. Yummy salad stuff? Leftover Thai? Cold cuts and cheese? All now breakfast items. It’s not everyday but it breaks me out of the ‘I hate everything’ first thing some mornings.