Friday, June 10, 2011

Food time Friday!

So I've been working on a new way of eating here in our home.  Trust me I have not attained any sort of perfection.  I promise!  But I am working diligently to serve more fresh foods and fewer processed foods.  I'm trying to cut out completely high fructose corn syrup and artificial colorings.  I thought this would be majorly tricky.  But it turns out it's only minorly tricky.  There are only a few things that I feel like we strongly want that I haven't found high fructose or color free substitutes for.  Such as strawberry syrup for the kids' milk.  I was further spurred on to change up our breakfast habits by an article I read about cereal.  No more cold cereal in our house.  I'm not sure that ALL cereal was made the way this article described but really, warm oatmeal with fresh/frozen pureed fruits and honey mixed in are nutritionally better anyway right?  So what do we eat, you may be wondering.  I'll tell you.  This is a rough idea of our general meal plan the past few weeks.

Breakfast:
a piece of fruit (usually a banana) +
oatmeal with fresh fruit and honey or oatmeal with brown sugar and raisins
plain yogurt with fresh fruit and honey
eggs and toast

Sometimes I will make pancakes but given the other options it's not the most nutritionally sound.  I've also been trying to have breads/muffins made up so the kids can have something to munch on before KOJ leaves for work.  My boys are usually all up by 7am and I get up with sis around 7:30 these days.  A muffin or slice of zucchini bread tides them over and keeps them from scavenging until I serve breakfast somewhere between 8 and 9am.

Lunch:
a fruit - depending on what's on sale - this week we've had fresh pineapple, cantaloupe, blueberries, and strawberries.  I also keep apples on hand all year round because all of my kids love them and will eat them if nothing else is on a better sale.  In the winter they eat a lot of clementines.  Except Squirrel who doesn't care for the outer casing of the clementine.  So much like his mama!  Anyway enough about fruit here.
a veggie - this doesn't happen EVERY day but I try to get a veggie in at lunch time - cucumber slices, carrot sticks, broccoli florets are the most common.

PB&J
Tuna sandwich
Tyson brand chicken nuggets
turkey hot dogs or Hebrew Nationals
Cottage cheese
hard boiled eggs

This week we've had PB&J four times already. lol  They don't seem to mind.  But I prefer to switch it up and only do the PB&j two or three times in a week.  It's just what we had that fit in our days this week.  I think that may be the case as summer continues to progress because I plan to be very active out of the house with them this summer and PB&J is the go to meal for out of the house for me.

Supper:
Well I create a new meal plan for supper each week based on what's on sale, what meats I already have in the freezer, what staples I have in my cabinets etc.  This week we've had:

Meatloaf with mashed potatoes and lightly glazed carrots
chicken alfredo with fresh broccoli florets
hot dogs with baked beans and cucumber and carrot sticks
chicken with salsa and fiesta nacho cheese condensed soup in the crock pot - I added corn and black beans and shredded the chicken and served it over rice.  It was pretty yummy. Even Princess liked it.
Tonight we were going to have sandwiches because of Squirrel's t-ball game.  It's storming though so his game might be cancelled.  Not sure yet.
Saturday night we're scheduled to make home made pizza - including the crust.

And I will spend time tonight or tomorrow meal planning for the coming week.  I already know we're going to have a roasted chicken cooked in the crock pot one night because I found one in the back of the freezer this week.  I'll probably roast some carrots and potatoes and sweet potatoes to go with it.  We'll see.

So what do you eat for meals?  Are you trying to meet any particular guidelines in what you choose to eat?  Please feel free to ask any questions I didn't manage to answer about our new way of eating and I'll be happy to answer them.

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