Dinnertime Disaster?

Dinner is always a struggle with busy parents. Especially as a dad who loves to be in the kitchen. I love cooking for people, parties, or events. I find no greater joy than cooking for someone. When I make food for someone I find a sense of gratitude. We all need food to survive so when I cook, I am literally giving someone nourishment, helping them to survive.

When I don’t get home until 6p, it’s hard to come up with a meal for my family. My wife does a great job at picking up my slack. She does a wonderful job at planning our meals for the week. When she works 12-hr shifts she’s not home to eat with us, so we make Crock-pot meals.

These crock-pot meals are our saving grace. When I get home after picking up the kids, we have a hot meal ready at our fingertips. Putting in recipes for this blog would be a little much but I’ll outline what we do and where to find great recipes.

First, get a cook book. Cookbooks may seem old fashioned or antiquated but let me tell you, it’s so much easier than trying to find a meal on the internet. We have a “Crock-Pot” branded cookbook we get a lot of our recipes from.

Secondly, I hate eating the same thing over, and over, and over again. As a ride-or-die leftover fan I can only eat so much pasta during the week. We’ve resorted to this routine: one chicken, one pork, one beef, one fish, and one vegetarian meal a week. If I could eat steak every night I would. But steak is expensive and too much red meat could be detrimental to overall health. So we’ve resorted to this form of meal planning that helps to spread it out and give our kids a wide range of food that isn’t hot dogs and chicken nuggets.

Having a well balanced meal plan creates well balanced kids. Our kids eat carrots, corn, fruit, broccoli, green beans, rice, blue cheese, tomatoes… you get the idea. We encourage them to eat what is given and have been practicing this for years. I never wanted to raise a picky eater and we don’t have them (more on that for a later post).

Dinnertime doesn’t have to be a big production each night. Just being together is enough and having good food makes a difference.