Following along the same lines as yesterday's post, let me share our menu today and some random ideas that came to me while cooking dinner.
When I picked up my son today from preschool/daycare he announced with a huge grin, "I want donuts! I want to see Daddy!" Apparetly the two d's go together and so we've already had a talk (Husband and I) about no more donuts on the way to school. Does that seem harsh? I don't think so, considering he wailed about the donuts almost the entire trip home and apparently they had crossed the line from treat to almost expected item. Not cool. I've been talking to him about "sometimes foods" which I think is a great concept. I know a lot of people got up in arms over cookie monster quitting the cookie binges and saying cookies are sometimes foods but I think it's a good lesson to learn and it's not as if they've been proclaimed BAD FOODS or something ridiculous. The fact of the matter is today's children are largely inactive and treats of every shape and size are available. I'm pretty sure the norm of yester year was not 24 hr access with no holds barred. When I was growing up (not that long ago) we just did not have the financial resources to eat junk (chips, soda, desserts, etc). My mom had rules if we did get to have these things, 1 soda a day if that, only eat chips with a sandwich, etc. Back to my original point...
So donuts are not ruled out for eternity, they are just not an on the way to school option. This morning Husband came in to our bathroom where I was getting ready to head to the hospital and said he needed to get to work early and our Son was just not cooperating this morning to have time for a sit down breakfast and he'd just have to go through the drive-thru donuts place he guessed. I quickly flipped through my mental catalog of what food we have and suggested a dark choc and cherry Kashi cereal bar instead. Not my ultimate choice but a damned sight better than donuts.
Our snack today was hummus with carrot strips, grapes, and red. fat string cheese. He yummed it all up, in fact it only took us two days between the two of us to finish off the hummus and half of the bag of carrot strips. Yesterday he dipped them in 2% cottage cheese. This leads me to something that occurred while cooking dinner. Kids like interesting shapes or colors a lot of the time, at least mine does. Carrot sticks were okaaaay but the strips with ridges like a potato chip are a hit. The dark purple almost black grapes were requested specifically.
Something else: he likes to dip things. I can almost always get him to eat something if it has a dip, something he inherited from his mama more than likely.
Dinner tonight: roasted squash, spaghetti and meat sauce made with whole wheat linguini, 99% lean ground turkey and 93% lean turkey sausage links.
To make the squash: I just chopped two yellow squash into round sections, heated the oven to 425 degrees and drizzled olive oil ad worchestire sauce over the squash while the oven heated. A few shakes of coarse ground sea salt and that's all it took-20 minutes and you have gorgeous carmelized on the bottom squash that I've had to fight myself to not devour before we sit down to dinner.
I'm focusing on at least one veggie at dinner for each night and fruit if we want a dessert. Progression, baby steps, and all of that.
Dinner time!