I think our new weekly schedule is pretty much set for the next eleven months or so. Now comes the tricky part of making that work. For sure one night a week, the kids and I will be taking dinner on the road with us. Two nights a week we arrive home late- not too late to have dinner, but too late to prepare dinner- so those nights dinner will have to be ready and waiting. Most likely crock-pot meals. A second night of a porta-dinner is also likely, depending how Andy’s work schedule ends up working out each week.
Last year that portable meal pretty much went through a standard revolution. One week we had tacos or burritos, one week we had pasta, and one week we had calzones, then we’d repeat. It got old, to be honest. I’ll admit, also, that there were definitely weeks where I would look at all the other kids with their Easy-Mac and other purchased microwave meals and think wistfully about how much easier that would be. Same for those who brought in drive-thru meals or sub sandwiches. But the reality is that my two kids dance a lot and need the proper nutrition to sustain them and give them energy for their intense workouts. Abigail is up to 12 hours a week of hardcore physical activity and Zander is up to 8 hours. That’s a lot of exercise for growing kids, and convenience meals are just not going to provide the important nutrition they need. Never mind all the preservatives and horrifying ingredients in those convenience meals.
So I’m going to attempt to force myself to think outside the box. While the probability is that almost anything I make at home could conceivably be taken along and reheated, the reality is that not everything reheats without a serious quality loss. And not everything I make is ideal for dance nights either. Strawberry Pancakes may be delicious and fit the bill as far as cheap and satisfying goes, it’s rather empty as far as proper nutrition goes. So to force myself out of this little box of tacos/pasta/calzones, I’ve devised a new category here at Tummy Treasure, and we’ll see if I can fill it up with all sorts of take-it-with-you ideas.
But Erika, you might be asking, why don’t you just slap a couple of sandwiches together and call it good? The short answer is that we have a lot of sandwiches at lunch time and I like dinner food at dinner time, not lunch food. The long answer is that with a sandwich you can only put so many good nutrients inside before the kids start to get squeamish or start picking things off. When I make something like a stir-fry, even if the kids end up picking certain things out, they’re still getting a good dose of protein and veggies.
Oh, there will still be a few sandwiches- but special ones, I hope. And salads, we need to work more of those in because both kids enjoy salads. Tonight’s take-along dinner is a simple Fried Rice which I’ll share tomorrow, hopefully it will be a hit, and hopefully it won’t take me long to accumulate a good repertoire of meals on the go.