27: What We Ate Last Week #2

Sarah's back for another quick solo episode sharing the family meals her family enjoyed last week with reminders to embrace imperfection. From some planned meals, to some off the cusp, here's how she and her family made it work. Don't forget about frozen foods for those busy weeks ahead!

Try these recipes:

• Pumpkin Chicken Chili
• Easy Skillet Lasagna
• Turkey Sweetpotato Chili (NEW!)
• Applesauce Oat Bars
• Low Sugar Cookie Dough Bites

Chapters

• 0:07 Introduction to Real-Life Meal Planning
• 2:10 Weekly Meal Highlights and Family Favorites
• 6:03 Creative Cooking with Kids
• 8:17 Fun Family Dining Experiences
• 10:04 Healthy Snacks and Unique Recipes

Transcript

Sarah Schlichter (00:01.464)
Hello everyone. This is something that I'm trying to do monthly and I can do it more often based on feedback, but I did get some great feedback from my first What We Ate episode. I'm kind of doing this off the cusp. I do have a note in my phone about What We Ate and this was a few weeks ago. So hopefully I can recall some of these. As always, I will put any recipes

in the show notes, but the goal here of course is not to strive for perfection. It's to show you that even as a dietitian and someone who talks about this and really works in this field, we still don't have it figured out. Our meals are not perfect. Our meal plans change. We have to adapt. Things come up. Time runs short. Kids don't eat. Right? This is why I do this podcast because this is real life and it's happening to me too.

But hopefully if you need some new meals to offer to your kids or you are feeling stuck in the kitchen, that is the point of this. And it's supposed to be a quick episode, listen to on the way to school drop off or on a quick walk or while you're cleaning dishes. Okay, so this was, I think this was late September. It was right before I was leaving for the Fency Conference, which is the food nutrition.

conference and expo that I went to in Nashville. So on Sunday we made a chicken sweet potato chili. This is actually pretty standard for our Sundays, at least during the fall and football season. My husband takes the reins on this, which is great. But what I love about chili is always double the batch. So we have some to freeze. So that can even be used for meals the following week or later in the week.

I usually try not to go over four days storing it in the fridge. So if we haven't used it by then it will go in the freezer. And for the most part, my kids do okay with chili. The oldest loves it. The middle two will eat some of it. We like to crumble tortilla chips on top shredded cheese. And yeah, that was our meal. Sometimes I'll heat up just

Sarah Schlichter (02:21.58)
like some frozen rolls or crescent rolls to go with it. Or if I'm really feeling simple, just half of like a whole wheat English muffin and put some butter on it for them. Okay. Monday. I do remember this now. I tried a new recipe. It was from the real food dietitians and it was a turkey lasagna and you make it in a skillet. So to me, this was enticing because I didn't have to use the oven.

I didn't have to layer things. So that's sort of what turns me off about lasagna is just all the layers. And then the scheme of things is probably not that time consuming or not that big of a deal, but I just don't want to do it. This, you kind of just do it in a big pot. So it's not as layered as a typical piece of lasagna, but it was delicious. And it did use cottage cheese, which I don't eat cottage cheese alone, but I do use it in many recipes. There's actually several recipes on bucketlesstummy.com that have.

cottage cheese in them. So there was cottage cheese in this, which I didn't mind. I thought it was pretty similar to ricotta cheese, but yeah, it added a lot more protein. So that was a win. I liked that meal. I think two out of three kids ate a good amount. So for me, that's a win. Tuesday, we did, let's see, a frozen chicken entree for the kids. Oh yes. So.

I, a couple weeks ago, I did make a reel. It was like this frozen chicken with veggies bag and maybe some rice in it. And the point of the social media reel was really to show like frozen foods are okay to eat for your family. Like they're not quote unquote bad. So I heated that up for them and I tasted it. It was, really good. It had like chicken and peas and corn and there was some starch in it.

The point was, yes, you could buy all of those ingredients separately, but it might be a more time consuming meal and it might be similar in nutrition. So if a frozen bag of dinner is easiest for you, then that's okay. So I made that for the kids and my husband and I went out to dinner that night. Wednesday, we did a sheet pan meal. So I always do at least one sheet pan meal a week because it's easy cleanup.

Sarah Schlichter (04:42.434)
This was a recipe I'm testing for the blog. It was chicken thighs and veggies on the sheet pan together with the sauce. That was great. I love chicken thighs and actually my kids like chicken thighs. I think it's just more fat equals more flavor for them. But what stood out about this meal was the quinoa. So I cooked up some quinoa and I like quinoa, but for kids I can get it. It's maybe kind of boring.

So my five-year-old had the idea to add some cinnamon to it. And I don't know where she got this idea, but she just added cinnamon and she ended up eating three servings then she wanted it for lunch the next day. So cinnamon quinoa, I mean I can even see this going. Apple cinnamon quinoa, cut up some apple slices because quinoa is one of those grains that really goes great with fruit and veggies and it kind of bulks things up. So cinnamon quinoa was a huge hit.

and because my five-year-old loved it, my three-year-old was also willing to try it. So win, win. That was great. I did cook the quinoa. I'm seeing this note. I did cook it in bone broth so that ups the protein a little bit more. And my tip for the chicken thighs was serving it with a fun dip. So you could do really any dip. I think we did like a honey mustard or something but an avocado crema dip would be really good.

If kids like ranch, we kind of have ranch out with veggies sometimes. And my three year old loves ketchup. So I'm sure he dipped some of the chicken little pieces and I did cut them up in smaller pieces for him as well. So Thursday was a turkey sweet potato skillet. It looks like we did a lot of like chicken and turkey.

this past week. So I think this was another recipe I was testing, but it was ground turkey and sweet potatoes. And I added cranberry sauce because I was testing a recipe for Thanksgiving and thinking if you have leftover stuffing or Thanksgiving turkey to combine it in a skillet with sweet potatoes and some other ingredients in the cranberry sauce on top. And this turned out really, really good. I was pleasantly surprised.

Sarah Schlichter (07:01.132)
My kids were like really confused, like why do we have cranberry sauce out right now? But you know, the canned cranberry sauce is fairly sweet. So I think they had a few bites of that. And I did serve it with my typical cold veggies. We'll cut up cucumbers, we'll have baby carrots and baby peppers, like the little pepper, mini peppers. And I always have that for them. And I think I probably did.

maybe white rice as a safe food for them on the table because as we've talked about in this podcast, you always want to have a safe food for kids, especially if you're introducing something new. You never want to serve all new things all at once. So Friday, I actually was at my conference in Nashville and my brother lives in Nashville. So I went out to eat with him, his wife and his three little ones. So I got to be fun auntie.

And side note, it made me realize that sometimes with your kids, you can be so serious and you know, things have to get done. The chores, the dishes, the laundry, the bedtimes, the baths. So sometimes it's hard to be fun. You kind of lose that playfulness. But when you're the auntie, you have a little less responsibilities and I almost feel like the kids look up to you to be fun. So I actually enjoyed this dinner. First of all, we ate out, so there was no prep for any of us and no cleanup.

But second of all, was very, we were at some sort of outdoor space. It wasn't a brewery, but it had outdoor picnic tables and an outdoor kids area. So you would order your food and sit outside. And I was able to kind of play and let loose with four, two and nine month olds. So they're little and that was really fun. I had a burger and a Heffenweizen beer, which is my choice.

and that was a great way to lead into what became a non-stop event, which that is what this food and nutrition conference is every year. So was nice to have some family time before that. For snacks, one thing I did want to point out is we made this low sugar cookie dough. It's from Mary Ellen. She's a dietician and she comes up with like low sugar recipes. I think she has type 1 diabetes and she's

Sarah Schlichter (09:24.066)
Talks a lot about, you know, insulin and glucose control, but this recipe was really good and it used chickpeas, almond flour, vanilla extract. I think it used a little peanut butter. Maybe not oats. And you just kind of blend all that up in the food processor. And then we added some chocolate chips and you keep it in the fridge. And my kids loved it. Just having it in their lunch every day. I like knowing there's some extra protein and fiber in there.

I mean, we rely on beans for that so much every week. Love, love, love my canned beans, but I love when you can use them in unique ways, like throwing them in a cookie dough. So that was actually a big hit. And then the other snack we made, what was the other snack?

Sarah Schlichter (10:14.69)
I'm like, I made my applesauce oat bars because I love, I love them so much. Their butter and whole wheat flour and oats and the applesauce kind of acts like mashed bananas in the recipe. And then you add strawberries. You really could add any fruit. So you're getting a couple of servings of fruit in there and they are like perfectly crumbly. So I had frozen some from

the previous time I made them. So I'll make sure to link that recipe in the show notes because it's such a good snack. And that was that week. So again, I try to keep these short. I hope this is helpful. All the recipes will be in the show notes. And if you're not on my email list, definitely join because we send out recipes each week. They go out on Sundays, what to make this week. And I also send out other tips throughout the week of

kind of what we're eating, tips for feeding kids, you know, the whole deal. So I will put a link for that in the show notes as well. And I would love to see you on the list.