The Challenge of Dinner

Making dinner is important. First of all, it is a good time to bond with your family. Studies show kids who eat dinner at home with their family do better in life. Another reason to make dinner at home is because eating out can break the budget. Also, you can serve more nutritious meals at home if you choose. But it can be quite the challenge. The time. the effort. the cooking ability. I am starting to realize that all it takes is some planning, trying new recipes, thinking outside the box, and buying chicken when it's on sale.

Here we are little newlyweds, not knowing that the simple act of making dinner would become such a big part of our lives. I started out making spaghetti 2-3 times a week. I didn't really know how to make too much else. But Justin was happy.

Then I got brave and made homemade lasagne. Justin actually loved it!Then I read this book. It didn't really tell me how to make good dinners but it did tell me why I should make dinner. I highly recommend this book to any married woman.

And then I had kids. Making dinner for kids is a whole different ballgame, especially if you have picky eaters like I do. If you have any tips for feeding kids, please send them my way.

My dad taught me a few things about making yummy dinners as a child. This is him showing us how to make sushi. He is an excellent exotic foods chef.

Here is one of our favorite dinners, yellow chicken curry with black rice.

I ordered this cookbook off of Amazon a few weeks ago. It has a ton of great info on cooking basics.

I recently had a goal of making a two week mealplan but when I sat down to write it, I realized it can be easier than this. I just wrote down about a dozen of our favorite healthy dinners that we had all the ingredients of. Instead of assigning a dinner to each night I am going to pick one then cross it off until the whole list is made. I have realized that if I don't have the ideas up then I resort to mac and cheese or frozen pizza, just because I can't think of anything to make. I am discovering making meals from scratch can save a lot of money and trips to the grocery store. What meals are your favorite to make from scratch? Do you have a hard time figuring out what to make for dinner, too? Or is it just me? Anyway, wish me luck on feeding my family better food for less money without sacraficing the taste. Here goes...

Side Note: I have come to realize this whole blog thing is basically like our family journal. It's amazing. Sorry if some posts bore you but I've realized I blog to keep a family record of our lives and it is such a fun thing to go back and see what we did on a birthday or how our day to day life is going. Why do you blog?