Here are a few things I do to make our week nights a little easier:

1. Break out the crock pot. In the fall when the weather starts to get a little chillier I enjoy soups  and meals I can throw in the crockpot early in the day. I can let them cook all day, and supper is ready whenever we have a moment to sit down at the table.
2. Do a little weekend prep. I like to chop up fruits and vegetables when I get home from the grocery, and put them in containers in the fridge so they’re ready to go when I need them.
3. Make a menu, and stick to it. I try to make a weekly menu, and from that menu I make a grocery list. Then I know I have the ingredients I need to make the meals on my menu for that week.
4. Lay out or check your supper ingredients first thing in the morning. Then there are no surprises when you are ready to make supper.
5. If you have a weekend day free, make a few meals ahead and freeze them for later. One of my favorite make ahead meals is lasagna. I can make several at a time and put them in the freezer for later.

How do you get quick meals on the table on hectic school nights?

Image (c) L Gerlach

Post from: Blisstree

5 Quick Supper Tips For Back To School

If you work at making small positive changes to your diet you can have a huge positive result long term. Doing things like tracking your food intake, menu planning, or trying new fruits and vegetables can help you start healthy new habits one step at a time.

Many people try to do an all or nothing “diet” and completely change their way of life and their way of eating. This is just setting yourself up to fail. Sooner or later (it was always sooner for me) you will rebel against that strict new routine and return to your old ways.

March is National Nutrition month, so it’s a great time to pick one small thing in your diet you would like to improve and make that change. Whether you’re trying to lose weight, lower your blood pressure or blood sugar, try one small change and track your progress and the results.

Are you up for the challenge? I’m committing to trying new fruits and vegetables to broaden my food choices.

Post from: Blisstree

Small Changes In Diet Equal Big Results

For example: 

• Monday: Chicken, rice, and veggie night
• Tuesday: Soup, bread, and salad night
• Wednesday: Fish and veggie night
• Thursday: Left-over night
• Friday: Pasta and salad night

This is flexible enough to be open to interpretation; for example, you could buy cheese or Spanish rice for Monday, and have fruit salad instead of veggie salad on Friday; but at least you have a general idea of what to shop for and what you’ll be cooking. This works better than an inflexible menu plan, because people seem to hate being tied down to food.

Another perk of this plan is that anyone can follow it – your spouse, your older child. Whoever is home knows what they need to get started for dinner.

On the weekends go nuts and do whatever. If you want to streamline even more, create a plan for breakfast and lunch as well – waffles on Mondays, tuna on Tuesdays, and so on.

[image via stock.xchng]

Post from: Blisstree

Back to school tips – managing mealtime madness

Then however, I had all these magazines left over. What to do? I don’t like reading them, so that’s out. I actually came up with lots of ideas about what to do with my old magazines, but my most used idea is my cookbook idea.

A lot of those magazines were women’s magazines (yawn) but most do have a rush of cool recipes. I spent a couple of hours ripping out all the recipes I wanted, then inserted them into plastic page protectors. Then I simply put them in a few notebooks (one each for, main dishes, baking, sweets). In each of the notebooks, I added some tabs to divide dish types – rice, beverages, cupcakes, etc.

Now I have these totally cool, very brightly photographed cookbooks. Much better than cookbooks you can buy. A bonus of my cookbooks is that the plastic page protectors keep ingredients off the pages. We all spill pumpkin pie mix sometimes.

My total cost: About $15 (it took a lot of page protectors) but that’s way cheaper than cookbooks full of stuff I won’t make.

If you don’t have magazines stock piled you can get some SUPER cheap:

• People always used to give me magazines for free, so you can ask your friends and neighbors.
• Thrift stores sell old magazines for soooooo cheap, like 10-50 cents per issue. Just make sure you don’t only get magazines from 1978 when whole fats were still all the rage
• Garage sales – many have cheap magazines.
• Free! Your doctor’s office (at the end of a month), your library, the dumpster or recycling center, the hair salon; plenty of places buy magazines and if you ask nicely you could score some.

This has actually helped me organize mealtime, because I didn’t add anything to the cookbooks that I wouldn’t be willing to make. It takes time to flip through a real cookbook, when half the recipes look lame. It also helped to split the books into categories. I never half to search for pasta sauce, because they’re nicely altogether. This project also gets bonus points for being green – you reuse magazines instead of tossing them.

Have you ever done this?

[image via stock.xchng]

Post from: Blisstree

Organize A Super Cheap Cookbook