Created to Organize Your Meals

I’ve been reading a lovely little book called Created to Be His Helpmeet. If you are any kind of feminist or atheist then this book is not for you, but I’m sure you guessed that after hearing the title!

One of the chapters in the book talks about simplifying your breakfast and lunch meals so you have time to make a nicer dinner for your husband because let’s face it; do your kids really appreciate all the work you do to get a nice meal on the table? No. Your husband most likely won’t either but at least he will appreciate the taste! (We hope anyway.)

The author suggests feeding your kids the same thing for breakfast every morning and the same thing for lunch every afternoon. Doesn’t that sound simple! Thank you Debi, for giving me the permission I needed to simplify my life by torturing my spoiled bratty children! Now I know where I went wrong.

Many years ago I decided that my kids weren’t going to eat ECC (Evil Cold Cereal) anymore. I started cooking eggs, oatmeal, pancakes, muffins and such every morning until my kids were breakfast snobs. One day, “I don’t want eggs. I want oatmeal!” The next day, “I’m never eating oatmeal again. I want pancakes!” We slowly added more interesting dishes to our breakfast repertoire like crepes, German pancakes, baked oatmeal, waffles, quiches, etc. I’m not telling you I cooked something fancy every morning but my kids felt deprived if I didn’t.

A week ago we talked about this during our daily family counsel and came up with a plan and a list of things we would like to eat. I explained to the kids how we were going to make our lives easier by eating the same things every day with maybe something special on the weekends. Our Breakfast Options: Boiled eggs, peanut butter toast, fruit, granola (homemade so it's not evil). Our Lunch Options: Salad, sandwiches, burritos.

The kids and I cleaned out the fridge and washed all the dishes. I really try to keep the leftovers cleared out of it but things got pretty out of hand over Thanksgiving. When you run out of storage containers you know you are in trouble!

We went to the store and bought all the ingredients we needed to make a Salad/sandwich Kit and a Burrito Kit. I love to eat salads but normally I’m too lazy to cut everything up. So this time we just bought everything we could that was already cut up and washed. Persistence. My 6 year old cut up the rest of the vegetables and we put everything into baggies. I’m not, however, too lazy to make my own salad dressing because it’s so easy and bottled dressing is just yuck.

Salad Kit

Burrito Kit

Now I don’t have to hear, “What’s for breakfast,” and “What’s for lunch,” twenty times a day. When people are hungry they know what they can eat and they can prepare it themselves. Not only that but I'm not tempted to grab takeout when I know we have a quick meal waiting for us at home. We are all loving our new simplified meals, even Stranger!

More on refrigerator organizing tomorrow!