Easy family meals

smdrew6814

I’ve searched a lot, I have a five year and a year and a half daughter. What are some easy family meals that family members like that are low on calories. Also looking for easy snacks to meal prep for work.

MaltedTea

Sheet pan dinners are super flexible in terms of ingredients, your eldest may be able to help you prep and the clean up is easy. Wins all around!

goal06082021

What kind of cooking do you normally do, if any? Everyone has to start somewhere, so no shame if you are at the Homer Simpson "burning cereal" level. Cooking is a skill--a set of skills, rather--that everyone should develop. Everyone's gotta eat.

I would define "cooking" as a combo of 3 sub-skills: knife work, anticipation, and temperature.

Knife work - a good, sharp 8" chef's knife and a decent-size wooden or sturdy plastic cutting board will change the entire game for you. If you're trying to make good food using a crappy 4" paring knife you bought at Walmart in 2008 and a cutting board the size of a trade paperback, you're going to have a bad time. Get you a decent knife and learn to dice an onion to reach Knife Level 1.

Anticipation - this is something you just kind of have to develop. It's the ability to imagine how something will taste, and nobody can teach you that. I'm at the point where I can read a recipe and imagine how it will probably taste, or taste a dish in progress and figure out if it "needs something" and what that something is and how much to use. I can read the directions and have a pretty good idea of how long it will take and how easy/hard it will be, because I know what to do and how to do it. I can also read a recipe and know what ingredients I can add, omit, or substitute and have it still come out tasting good, because I know what the ingredients taste like and how they behave when cooked. You learn this by doing, and you will occasionally end up with something that is just not salvageable, it's the nature of the beast.

Temperature - this has less to do with you as a cook and more to do with the tools at your disposal, but knowing how your stove, oven, microwave, toaster/toaster oven, etc behave is also important. For instance, I know my oven runs cold - the temp sensor is about 30F off of where it should be. So, I have an oven thermometer and add ten minutes to my preheating time, to allow the oven to actually get as hot as it's supposed to be. An electric stove will behave differently than a gas stove; you can't leave a pan on an electric burner once you turn it off, because it stays hot, but gas doesn't (the metal grate the pan sits on will cool relatively quickly, and the amount of grate that is actually in contact with the pan is minimal). It's also about your cookware. You do things differently on nonstick vs aluminum vs cast iron pots and pans, and glass vs metal vs ceramic baking dishes all behave differently in the oven.

Also, it's your job as a parent to model a healthy relationship with food and openness to trying new things for your kids. Coddling kids around food* is how we get full-grown adults with scurvy because they subsist entirely on chicken nuggets and kraft dinner.

(*It's worth noting that, sometimes, if you have an extremely "picky" eater, it can be indicative of an undiagnosed food allergy or sensitivity, or a sensory processing issue. Sometimes. Kids are new to the world, they don't usually have the language to describe what's happening when they eat a food that didn't agree with them one way or another. So, whether they had a bad reaction, were overwhelmed by the sensory input, or the food just tasted yucky, it comes out the same - "I don't like it." Especially for things they've never tried - if you ate an unfamiliar thing and it made you feel bad, you'd probably be reluctant to eat another unfamiliar thing, right? So, model a healthy relationship with food and an adventurous palate, but listen to your kids when they "don't like it." Ask questions, give them the vocabulary to describe what they're feeling.)

callsitlikeiseeit

i make the same stuff i always have. there may be some substitutions for things, and I don't do a lot of rice/potatoes but those are easy to give to others and omit for yourself.

learn how to use the recipe builder and it will make your life infinitely easier.

my diary is open if you want to add me. don't look at today though., i was not good today LMAOOOOOOOOO

Priasmama416

I recently made "tot-chos" and my family loved it. Its basically nachos, but I used tator tots instead of chips. I topped it with ground turkey made with low sodium taco seasoning, salsa, fat free sour cream, shredded cheese and lettuce. You can change out some of the toppings to your liking.