6: Five Recent Family Meals My 3 Kids Loved

Join me for a quick solo episode to help spark some dinner inspiration for your house! I'm sharing 5 recipes/meal ideas that we loved and how you can make them and modify them in your household.

Need some easy weeknight meal ideas? Here are 5 recent meals that my three kids loved! Of course, feeding kids can be challenging with things always changing. Try offering up any of these options!

Want more family recipes? Make sure to grab this freebie!

Recipes mentioned:

• Tortellini sausage soup
• Air fryer pizza bites
• Deconstructed burger bowls
• Easy sweetpotato nachos
• Sous vide steak

Transcript

Sarah Schlichter (00:08)
Welcome to the Managing Mealtime Madness podcast, your go-to resource for making family meals less stressful. I'm Sarah Schlifter, a registered dietitian and mom of three, here to help you simplify meal time from the mental stress and prep work to gathering around the table. No matter what family looks like for you, sharing meals has real benefits. Whether you're squeezing in a workout, rushing to soccer practice, or tackling the never-ending dishes, I've got you covered.

Join us for practical nutrition tips, time-saving mom hacks, and fun, easy meal ideas to make feeding your family more enjoyable. Let's get going. Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the Managing Mealtime Madness podcast. Just a quick solo episode today. It is Monday, the day after daylight savings, and...

I feel like it's taking a while to get back into the swing of things. I actually woke up and worked out this morning. I was tired, but I felt great after, but not a great morning for the kids. It was really tough to get them up and off to school on time. So rough morning over here. Daylight savings is not our favorite, although I'm looking forward to the extra hour of daylight at night.

So today's topic, kind of wanted to just talk about five recent meals that my kids really enjoyed. Now, as we all know, feeding kids is, can be temperamental. There's lots of ups, there's lots of downs, there's wins, there's losses. Sometimes you really don't understand if you win or lose, like which way did the game go? Did they eat that? Did they throw that away? Didn't they just like that last week? Didn't they ask for this food specifically and I made it and they still didn't eat it. So yeah.

It's very frustrating. can be frustrating. It can be joyful. And today I'm sharing how it can be joyful because I don't want you to always hear the negative things. anyway, the goal of this podcast is to encourage and encourage us all that we can enjoy the meal time chaos and it doesn't have to be so stressful. So five things my kids really liked first, a tortellini sausage soup.

Now this recipe is actually on my blog. It's delicious, but tortellini is something that we really like. I try to buy it from the grocery store often. I just get the big frozen bags. To be honest, if you go to Costco or Walmart, you can get a bigger bag and with three kids and two hungry adults, it lasts us a while. So the tortellini sausage soup, it's ready in 30 minutes, a little bit less than that.

We use ground sausage, but again, you could use ground beef, could use ground chicken, you could leave out meat, you could use pork, whatever works for your family. But this recipe is a hit. I actually had my two-year-old helping me make it. He was kind of pouring the frozen tortellini into the Instant Pot, and for him, that was very exciting. And for me,

That was exciting to watch him enjoying this. So when the soup was ready, he was saying how he helped with the tortellini, took some agency in the process and it's great. And there's actually lots of veggies. have carrots, we have celery. I think we have peppers in that soup. So it's a great way, great winter cold weather, sick recipe, ⁓ delicious. And it's all made in the instant pot. So that's a winner.

The second one is air fryer pizza bites. Now you don't need an air fryer. You can definitely do this in the oven and it really uses like if you've seen those pill berry packs of crescent dough, that's the secret ingredient, which is fun for kids. And you kind of just like unroll the dough, cut it into little triangles and then fill it with the filling. So I just use pizza sauce, shredded cheese, pepperoni. I did put some diced pepper in there really

small pieces to get some veggies but oftentimes like if we're having play dates or this is kind of like an after-school snack I will really not serve it with veggies but have a veggie plate on the side and then add whatever seasonings you like. I actually just buy like a pizza seasoning blend. I think it's oregano, basil, maybe Italian seasoning, salt, pepper but you can season it how you like. This is ready in under 20 minutes. It's fabulous.

If you do have the air fryer, use, we have like a Ninja, just a double air fryer, which is great because I can do two servings at the same time, like one in the upper tray and one in the bottom tray. This is a hit. My kids love anything pizza. So love that one. The third one I actually made last week and I shared about it on social media. So if you saw that reel, you can get the recipe that way, but it is just Greek.

burger bowls is what I called them and the base was some ground turkey. It would also be great with ground beef and I actually did just buy some ground lamb so I might try it that way eventually. I had bought a bag of Trader Joe's cauliflower rice and it had peppers in it. I missed, I saw the sign for it being spicy but I was surprised at just how spicy it was. It was almost too spicy for me.

So I did not serve that to the kids. did it with, I think I did white rice for the kids, cause we're a big white rice family. You could do brown rice. You could do another grain couscous. You could just do a bun, a deconstructed bun, if you wanted to. But so you have whatever your carb or whatever your base is, we have the ground turkey that we used, and then we kind of have like the toppings and I separated them all. So it was deconstructed for kids. So I did.

red onion, which again, you may or may not want to serve that to kids. ⁓ or I tried to just get them to take a bite red onion. did Romaine and this is actually one of the first times I've really offered Romaine. Like they're very familiar with spinach. We throw spinach in our smoothies. think actually there's spinach in that tortellini soup recipe that wilt up. So they're very familiar with spinach, but Romaine was different. And I think what made it so fun and such a hit was that it's very crunchy.

So I said, look, you could take some of the ground turkey and put it on your little romaine. It's like a surfboard or a bowl that you can put something on. Why don't you try that? How crunchy is it? What do you think this would taste good dipped into? So we sparked some curiosity that way. And just personally for me, it was very satisfying to have something crunchy in that bowl. And then I also diced up or cut up some pickles, put that in there, added some feta cheese.

And then what's a burger without a good sauce? So I took the shortcut. I used like a store-bought tzatziki, hummus would be great. I also really, really love the Primal Kitchen sauces. So particularly I love their special sauce. I think they have like an avocado-based mayo. They have a chicken sauce and these sauces are so good.

So highly recommend loading up on those. actually have a code if you use the code BLTUMMY, so BLTUMMY, that will save you 10 % on your orders. But we always have those Primal Kitchen sauces on hand because when you can't make your own, the ingredients are great. The taste is outstanding. And they really go well with so many things. I also did make a note if you are plant-based or vegetarian or vegan, you can definitely

omit the ground meat. You could use tofu or tempeh. Tempeh might have more of that like meat consistency. I actually love tempeh. Or you could just throw beans on there and kind of make it like a grain bowl of sorts. The next one we probably make these every other week. This is a fun one in our house and it's sweet potato nachos.

So it's a spin on nachos, but rather than using tortilla chips, we're using sweet potatoes that you kind of dice chop into a coin shape. And what you do is kind of bake those and then you add your toppings. So this recipe takes a little bit longer, but it's not hands-on work. It's just the sweet potatoes cooking in the oven.

This was great for my kids because they could determine their toppings and add their toppings. And actually this recipe is so budget friendly because this is where I use so many of my canned goods. Like we used canned corn, we used canned black beans, we used canned olives for topping, and then we used cheese. So like pre-bought shredded cheese, or if you want to shred your own cheese, if you want to use nutritional yeast, ⁓ this is just a very fun recipe.

and it kind of melts on there. Your sweet potato coins are a little bit thicker to hold that and then you could add salsa, you could add sour cream, you could add Greek yogurt, dice some avocado on there. This is just a really fun, very nutritious spin on nachos and has been a great family meal for us.

So that's the fourth one. And then the last one, and this one was kind of a surprise for me, is the sous vide steak that I got from Costco. And this was actually a big impulse buy for me last week when I was there. saw it. We really like steak. It's not something I cook a lot, but we like it, especially my oldest. And I was like, you know what? I'm just gonna buy this and give it a try. So if you're watching video like on YouTube or on your podcast or podcast listener,

This is what the packaging looks like. Sliced grass fed beef sirloin. So if you're not familiar with sous vide cooking, it's just like a method of cooking food where they vacuum seal it and then immerse it in really warm water and it cooks that way. And I find that it's almost perfect. Like the flavor, the texture, however this cooking method is done, I've never done it, is delicious. If you enjoy Kevin's natural foods, I believe they do sous vide cooking as well.

So very safe, very tasty. And the best part is that when you buy it, it's already pre-cooked. So you just have to reheat it. And if you wanted to add other seasonings, you could do that. So there wasn't much work involved with this. I just heated this one up on the stove in some butter. And then we served it with some diced sweet potatoes, this white bean garlic mixture. was like cannellini beans, butter, garlic, parsley.

tomatoes, maybe something else. It was delicious. I really liked it. The kids thought it wasn't pretty looking, but again, that's why we have all of these other foods on their plate. ⁓ Steak is sort of a safe, comfortable food for my kids. My six-year-old loves it. I was pleasantly surprised though at how well this meal went over. All three kids devoured it. My four-year-old was trying to like cut it on her plate and...

You know, we had like a dull knife out, not a steak knife. So she was having some trouble, but she was very interested in doing it by herself. And then for my two year old, of course, we cut them into much smaller pieces that he could pick up. And obviously nutritionally speaking, beef is a great source of so many nutrients, iron, zinc, B vitamins, ⁓ so many things. So nutritionally speaking, it was a home run. ⁓

Again, I was kind of pleasantly surprised at just how well that meal went over. Serving it with sweet potatoes for us, that's such a staple food. So again, very familiar with that. I let them dip the sweet potatoes in ketchup or the primal kitchen sauce. And another thing I was thinking about is that we had this meal yesterday and yesterday morning we went for a family hike and then we kind of played in the yard all afternoon. So they probably were really hungry and that might've played into it. We.

we were a little bit more active than normal, a lot more active than normal yesterday. So all of these things, again, we can never predict how and what kids are going to eat, but as a parent, kind of having a background and overlay of like what the previous parts of their day have looked like can be really helpful.

So this is just a short episode. hope it's helpful. If you want more episodes like this, like actual recipes or meal planning or meal ideas, I'm happy to do this. I'm thinking this is something like I'll just kind of squeeze in once a month or so between interviews and longer form content. But ⁓ this is just something quick and hopefully, hopefully helpful for all the busy parents out there.

So thanks for tuning in and I hope you have a great rest of your week. If you found this episode helpful, I would love if you shared it, if you shared it on social media, if you sent it to a friend who really needs it or would benefit from it. And also if you would take 30 seconds to just leave a review, that would mean the world to me as I really tried to build up this podcast and would love to hear some feedback and see some positive reviews out there. So thank you for your time and.

I will be back next week.

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