Transcript
Speaker: Hello and welcome to Outnumbered the Podcast. I'm Audrey. And I'm Bonnie. We are experienced moms to a combined total of 19 children. In our weekly episodes, we explore relatable topics using our perspectives of humor and chaos. Tune in for advice and encouragement to gain more joy in your parenting journey.
Speaker: Hey you guys, we're back and we're excited to talk to you this week about dinner. As in, help, it's five o 'clock, it's dinnertime, and I don't have anything made. So we're here to help you with this episode this week.
Speaker: Yeah, exactly. Is there any day that scenario doesn't pop up for you, Audrey? Because I feel like every day I'm like, dang it. This was the week I was going to plan ahead. Yeah. So yeah, we totally, totally get that stress. And we're going to talk about all kinds of troubleshooting, problem solving hacks for fixing that dilemma. But first, I just want to share something that's been working for us the last few weeks. I had been kind of hodgepodge in my attempt at getting
Speaker: kids to help out with meals regularly and not just dinner, but every meal since we homeschool and have kids home all the time. And so at Audrey's suggestion, I got kids started on a chart. So it was actually systematic and it has been working really, really well. So I set it up so that my big kids all have a turn at least once a day. I'm just using my 11 and up kids, but even the seven and nine year olds could help. If I wanted them to, I just have three of those big kids so I can just use them for each meal.
Speaker: And then they each have to help with one different meal throughout the week. So, for example, everybody gets a term with breakfast, everybody gets a term with lunch, etc. But nobody has to help more than once a day, so they don't start really complaining, right? And it's just been really great. They have helped me plan a little bit ahead of time. Breakfast and lunch, I'm not picky with at all, but I do tell them that we have to have
Speaker: you know, some sort of a fruit or vegetable or something with most meals. And then we've been talking about what makes a healthy meal and what does it and what they like and how they can take some of their favorites and make them a little bit healthier. And so anyway, just a little encouragement to get your kids involved with making dinner because it can make things a lot easier on you.
Speaker: Oh, that is so cool. I'm so glad that's working out better for you. And that is like the perfect segue into this episode because we are all about solutions in this episode. So we've done a couple episodes before. We did a general what we eat and feed our kids and kind of gave you guys a broad overview of what we eat. And then we did specific breakfast and lunch episodes. And then we did one all about mealtime and kind of how to make, you know, feeding a bunch of kids.
Speaker: feeding time at the zoo, I think we called it, how to make meals work with a bunch of kids. So we're going to in this episode, we're going to go a little bit different tack and we're going to share our food pyramids like an overview of how we eat. And then we're going to share different supper problems, situations and how we deal with them. And in the very end, we're going to share our favorite resources where we turn when we're just stuck and we've got to have some help.
Speaker: Yeah, totally. Okay, so we're gonna start by just telling you guys what we aim for our food pyramids to look like. So you know you've seen the food pyramid that the government puts out, right?
Speaker: And I think each family should kind of decide on what their ideal food pyramid would be like. So again, the caveat, this is ideal very often. We don't meet this because kids are picky or we run out of time or whatever. But ideally for us, the base of that pyramid would be vegetables. And then the next level would be whole grains, maybe whole grains and meat split in half.
Speaker: and then fruits and then treats at the top, et cetera. Does that make sense? That's what we aim for. Yeah, that's a great solution, a great food pyramid. Our food, our family's food pyramid is a little bit different because we have so many of us who are trying to eat a high fat, high protein, kind of a keto diet. So the base of our food pyramid is the meat and the protein and the nuts and all the fats down there.
Speaker: And then next is vegetables. So a whole row of meat and then a whole row of vegetables. And then above that is the fruit and the grain. And then the very tippy top is a little bit of sweets every once in a while. Yeah, that sounds great.
Speaker: All right, so we're gonna start with our first problematic situation, and that is being too tired to cook. And I don't know if anybody else out there is ever tired as a mom, but sometimes we don't feel like we have the energy to cook a full meal because there's not resonate with anybody else.
Speaker: Uh, yeah, because it's supper time and you've been working hard all day long and you just really are tired, too tired to cook, but everybody's hungry and crabby and also too tired to cook. So here are some suggestions. Grab yourself a snack, grab a little couple of slices of a, of a cutie or an apple, get your blood sugar up a little bit.
Speaker: turn on some music, get your mind in a different spot, and then enlist some help, just like Bonnie was talking about, getting her kids involved. So a lot of times I will also go to my teenagers because we have it all separated out by who has the responsibility for what meals. And my meal is supper.
Speaker: And so I'll go to somebody who's already cooked a meal that day or who isn't on supper responsibilities and say, hey, I just need you to help me with one part of this meal. So we usually do like a meat and a vegetable and then maybe a carb with it too, if it's not flushed out.
Speaker: And then I'll just be like, just give me an idea. What can I do? I'm making this for the meat and I'm making this for the vegetable. Just give me an idea. So like get somebody else kind of to do the inspired energetic work for me. And that's three solutions that I use when I am just too tired to cook.
Speaker: Oh, I love that idea, especially the snack thing. So many of us were raised with the don't spoil your dinner mentality, but that just makes for really cranky, overly hungry people at dinner time, especially if you're in charge, that's a recipe for disaster, right? Because, you know, as moms, we're going to dish up all our kids and make sure they've all got food before we get food anyway. So it's not like we're ruining our food. I mean, our supper because we're going to be the last ones anyway. And half of us are nursing babies anyway. So, yeah.
Speaker: Right, right. And I've also noticed that, you know, with a traditional American diet meal plan, we eat breakfast at maybe eight, we eat lunch at about 12, and then we don't eat dinner till like six sometimes. And that is way too long to go between meals. So definitely okay to eat a snack, keep your energy levels up if you're prepping dinner. Hey, so if I get supper by six, I think I'm doing really good.
Speaker: Okay, so I'm fine. I feel scenario here. Okay, so my too tired solution is a little bit different and that is to adopt more of a European style schedule. So I've lived in a couple of foreign countries and one of my favorite things about the Latin countries especially is that they tend to have their heavy meal earlier in the day at about 2 p .m. and then they have a little siesta, a little nap.
Speaker: And then they have a lighter meal around our dinner time or maybe even a little bit later, kind of like a pre -bedtime snack type of thing. And when we have eaten like this, I have felt so much better and I don't feel like I have to have this huge burst of energy to make a huge meal at five or six o 'clock in the evening.
Speaker: Now, this doesn't always work out because so many people have their mom or dad or whoever the primary provider is come home at about 5 .30 or 6 and so then they want to eat all together. But no one says it has to be your biggest meal of the day. Maybe you could sit down with your spouse and say, what are your thoughts on making this a little bit of a lighter meal? If you're still hungry, then you can have second helpings or you can have leftovers or whatever.
Speaker: Very often even my husband eats a big lunch with clients or friends or something at work and then he'll come home and not even be very hungry for dinner. So just the shift in mentality of making the lunchtime or like late lunch a much bigger meal can save your energy for the evening when you're already kind of worn out.
Speaker: Ugh, that is fascinating. I love that. You know something? We eat this way on Sunday and oftentimes on the weekend. Oh yeah. We will eat a big meal for Sunday dinner and then supper time is just like, you know, kind of a snack if you're hungry, help yourself. And I know that Sunday afternoons, I love them because they're so freeing for me. I'm like, Hey, you know, I don't have to cook supper and we'll just grab a light snack if I'm hungry. And same thing on Saturday. Usually everybody's working out, you know, in the garden or whatever outside and we grab a big bunch together and the supper's a little lighter.
Speaker: And I know it feels so much more free to me. That's maybe because I'm responsible for the supper, but that is an awesome solution. You know, you could even schedule a couple days of the week that are your busy days or, you know, if it doesn't work out every day to do a big, you know, switch up the lunch and supper, just do it a couple of days a week.
Speaker: Okay, situation number two, you're too bored to cook supper. You are in a rut, you have cooked the same five meals the entire month, and you just want to barf if you have to cook those same things over again. Ever been there? Yeah, basically, especially when your kids will only eat like three dinners over and over and over, right? You're like, okay.
Speaker: So I have two solutions for this. The first one could actually be a solution for many of these different problems and that is to do a dinner swap with friends. Have you ever done anything like that? Oh, that sounds so awesome. I've only done something like that when like somebody's having a baby and then they don't really swap it back.
Speaker: Okay, so we did this with some friends maybe 10 years ago, and I think there were four of us, and so Monday through Thursday of the week, we each had a day where we brought dinner to everyone.
Speaker: And so it meant that I made four dinners on Monday, you know, dinner for enough, enough dinner for four families on Monday, but then I didn't have to cook again until Friday and Friday usually, you know, went out or had pizza or something. And it was really, really fun. So a couple of caveats, obviously you have to have, find people that have similar likes and diets as you.
Speaker: And you can't have ginormous families. It would not work with our family at this point. We had, I think, three kids at that point because just making that much food, enough food for four families of 10 kids would not really work. But if you have a smaller family and a couple of friends you want to try this out, give it a shot. It is really, really fun.
Speaker: So that totally got me changing up my routine because other people would bring us food that we had never had or things that we hadn't had in forever, things we hadn't thought of. That was really fun to get us out of a rut. And then I would try some new recipes as well. I thought, well, they brought us that really good stew. Maybe we could make something similar to that next week, you know?
Speaker: And then my other board solution is just to just start googling some new recipe blogs. So you probably have one or two resources that you go to over and over and over.
Speaker: For me, it's Mel's Kitchen Cafe, and I never get bored with her things. But occasionally, I'll be like, I'm not in the mood for any of my standbys. So I'll go hop on a couple of other ones, like get on Pinterest and start going through some of those pins that you've saved a million years ago. Or even call up your neighbor and say, what do you guys eat nonstop that your kids love? Ask a couple of friends. But there's so many resources online. The trick is just kind of getting out of your everyday, same old, same old websites.
Speaker: Oh, you have the best solutions. I think I'm going to like listen to this podcast at least once a week.
Speaker: All right. Yes. My solution is try something new that you've never had before. And like if you can tie it to something the kids are studying in school, if they're sitting in different country or a different time period to get them involved and they kind of get excited about it. And then everybody likes to try it and they say if they liked it or if they didn't like it, that's that's a good solution to try something new that you've never had before. OK, that's great. And we are moving on to our
Speaker: problem number three or situation number three and that's no time to cook which is also something I'm sure we have all encountered. Yeah because oops it's four o 'clock everybody's hungry or it's five o 'clock or oops it's six o 'clock.
Speaker: So quick suppers. My quickest supper is spaghetti with broccoli. It takes steamed broccoli. It takes like, I could do that one under 30 minutes. Spaghetti with steamed broccoli. The meal that we call Mexican, I think your family calls it burrito bowls, where we just do up all the ingredients. That is another under 30 minute meal. And my third under 30 minute meal is soup. Just start throwing stuff in a pot with some bone broth and call it soup.
Speaker: and toast some buns to go with it and everybody's happy.
Speaker: Yeah. I love soup for dinner. Sadly, half my family does not. I don't know what the problem is, but I always get the hankering for soup like at random times, like in July. And my husband's like, oh, I'm so glad we're having soup. It's 110. My new business. You can choose if you want to make dinner. Yeah. Okay. So a few of our quick dinner solutions are nachos. Very easy. We just throw some tortilla chips on a plate and we can load them up with whatever we want. Usually what we do is we will
Speaker: Sprinkle some cheese on them, cook them, and then have the other things out so kids can add whatever they want. Some kids hate beans or meat or whatever, so they get to add whatever they want. And then anything else that lends itself to simple things like that. So what I really love to do is cook meat ahead of time. I think we talked about this in the lunch.
Speaker: in the lunch episode and then pull that out and you can just make just about anything with it. Okay, we're going to make quesadillas with this leftover chicken or burritos. We eat a lot of Mexican food too. Or yeah, like throw it in a soup or whatever. But if there is absolutely nothing in the fridge, then yeah, just a quick pasta, a quick customizable salad bar. Basically, we just clean out the refrigerator and get creative. Nothing sparks creativity like
Speaker: Hungry children and nothing planned. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. All right. Moving on to the fourth situation. You're too busy. Like your mind is totally engaged with something else and you don't want to stop and shift gears and think about supper. You just want to do something where your mind can still be working on this other thing, like a brainless supper. Does this make any sense or is this just me?
Speaker: No, I definitely have days where I'm like, I want something fun and fancy and I like look up the craziest recipe and I want to spend an hour and a half creating this really fun meal, especially if it's a special occasion. But many, many times I'm like, no, I want something to just be cooking while I go finish my sewing project that I just got started on really excited about. Or I just got interrupted, you know, reading a great book and now I want to go back to it and have dinner just simmering.
Speaker: So for me, my favorite solution is crock -pop meals. Now the caveat being you have to actually think ahead for these, but if you do, and I like to set myself a timer or a reminder in the morning because sometimes mornings just get crazy and I forget, but if I...
Speaker: have the foresight to hop on that and just put a few things in the crock pot, then usually there's very, very little to do come five or six o 'clock to pull it all together because the main thing is already simmering in there. But that being said, if you haven't had the forethought for that, there's always the Instant Pot. And now I have used the Instant Pot about a million times since I got it. The first six months, I was a little afraid of it and I didn't really know what to make.
Speaker: And I started looking up some recipes and now we just love it. And then main reason I love it is because I don't have to remember to saw the meat. So if we're having some sort of meat based meal and I forget to pull out of the freezer because we have most of our meat just stockpiled in our freezers.
Speaker: then I'm kind of out of luck, right? But the Instant Pot does all the work. It takes about as long as you would cook something just on the stove, but it's completely hands off. You don't have to do any of it. I mean from frozen. If it's already thawed, it takes half the time. So definitely a big fan of the Instant Pot. Oh yeah, those definitely are in my arsenal too, Crock -Pot meals. I like to do hamburgers on a grill. That's pretty brainless for me.
Speaker: Nachos is another one where I can just kind of do it and still be sewing in my head.
Speaker: A couple other options for me are like a meatloaf or a roast where you make it and then you put it in the oven and it goes for an hour or a couple hours and you can go back and work on your other thing that you're busy with, your other project. Another one is roasted vegetables. Those don't take a lot of thought. You just chop up a bunch of vegetables, put them in to roast or broil and walk away, well, not too far away. But they don't take much thought. To do a roasted vegetable.
Speaker: Yeah, in fact, before we move on, I think I shared this on my lunch episode, but my favorite easy, busy, simple meal is the roasted chicken sausage and vegetables. You just chop it all up. Whatever vegetables are languishing in your fridge, throw them on a pan and bake them at a high temperature for like 15 minutes, done. And it's nutritious and really good. And you gave zero thought to it. So I'd share that one. That sounds good. OK.
Speaker: Okay, so the next situation is you're looking for something special. Let's say you're having an anniversary at home or it's a kid's birthday or you really do want to just have something a little bit nicer. What do you do then? You add bacon, duh.
Speaker: I'm not joking. No, I like to do something a little special, cook something special or make it look a little special. So one of my favorite recipes is creamy garlic mushrooms with bacon. Of course, I'll add that link to that one of the show notes. But like to level up a little bit, I'll add an appetizer or a dessert.
Speaker: it's a little bit more special. Maybe a dip instead of just throwing some chips out there, make a kind of a special dip. Ooh, one of my kids' favorite dips with just plain ruffle tortilla chips is to soften some cream cheese, squeeze a lime in there, shake on a bunch of dill, mix that up, boom. So easy. And my kids eat it like it's candy.
Speaker: Yeah, it sounds good. Yeah. And my final way to level up is just do a little garnish on top like they do at a restaurant, make it look fancy. And it took, what, like two seconds? Like you were going to throw out the little leftover piece of pepper that you didn't use in your nachos anyway. Yeah, just throw it outside. That's a brilliant idea. Make it look special.
Speaker: And you know what? Like leveling up your meal a little bit for a special occasion is the stuff that kids dreams are made of. Like my kids get so excited when the meal is a little bit special. Now I'm not, we don't want to like guilt trip any mom for making, you know, plain bean burritos most days of their life.
Speaker: totally acceptable and our job is just to feed them, right? But sometimes you do want to make things a little bit special. The first day back to school or Christmas Eve or anything or just you just want to show them that you love them or something. Yeah, birthday, whatever. Any of these suggestions can be fun to just make things special.
Speaker: A side note, my seven -year -old is turning eight in just a couple of weeks and he has been talking about his breakfast in bed for his birthday for about nine months. He wanted it last year and we just, something happened and we didn't get to it and so he's been like, you didn't give it to me last year and this year I need the breakfast in bed and it's going to be two fried eggs sunny side up with bacon for a smile
Speaker: And I got to ask him what the nose is. I can't remember. So he wants a little face made out of eggs and bacon. It's the cutest thing to hear him talking about it. So, you know, food is everybody's love language. Doing stuff a little bit special.
Speaker: Amen. A couple of my solutions for this are, well, I'll just tell you one of my favorite special occasion meals, and that is chicken marsala. So I think they have a version of this at Olive Garden, but it's basically just a roasted or fried chicken with a mushroom sauce that's made from like red wine or something. And then you
Speaker: serve it with mashed potatoes and gravy and sometimes bacon too. Why not? It would be delicious with bacon. So basically anything with mashed potatoes and meat is like a really delicious comfort meal and kind of special occasion. But yeah, I love your tips for appetizer, dessert. One of my favorite special occasion desserts are molten lava cakes. Have you ever made those? They're so fun. Just like little teeny chocolate cakes that you dump upside down and then cut into them and the inside is like chocolate lava and add a little ice cream. They're ridiculously good.
Speaker: Yeah. That noise you hear is me wiping drool off my microphone. That's some really fun special occasion. Great. I don't have to be too hard. All right. Situation number six. You're low on money and you are not going to the grocery store until payday, low budget or whatever. You've got to make what's in the refrigerator last until Friday when you get paid.
Speaker: Yes, so I've totally been there before and thinking I've already been to the grocery show this week. I will not go back. I have to figure out something that's in the fridge. So my favorite tip for this is just to find something you definitely want to use and Google the ingredient. So you just type recipes with broccoli, recipes with
Speaker: potatoes that have started sprouting, like whatever, just sitting around in your pantry. Google recipes with that or go to your favorite recipe blog and just type in that ingredient. Most blogs can just pull it up by ingredient.
Speaker: And then you can find all kinds of great ideas. And I have found recipes that have become our favorites because I've just been trying to get rid of this thing. Most of us have ingredients that we will buy for one or two recipes and then not know how to make them with anything else. So this is a great tip for getting rid of those things that are sitting around and not doing any good, but you need to eat it.
Speaker: Yeah, I inevitably buy sun -dried tomatoes for one special thing and then they're sitting there and I'm like, oh, well, okay, what can I use that for? So yeah, I've totally done the Google one ingredient too. I mean, in fact, if you see me in the kitchen at five o 'clock on my phone, I'm probably Googling what to do with, you know, something.
Speaker: Oh, another thought I had was I'll challenge myself to see how much I can cook out of the freezer or out of the pantry. So I'll go dig down to the bottom of the freezer or look in the back of the pantry in those dusty corners and find, hey, I've got a jar of roasted red peppers. What am I going to do with that? And kind of this weird ingredient will.
Speaker: start spark. Oh, I could make a pizza. What could we put on a pizza? Okay, we've got olives. Yeah, we can. Okay, this is sounding more pizza, you know, you just start start adding things to it. So yeah, definitely kind of a challenge there.
Speaker: Yeah, and one thing I also forgot to mention is try cleaning out your fridge or freezer. If you know you're going to have a couple of days where you have to try to stretch what you've got, we all end up with fridges and freezers that just become jam packed full of who knows what. And what I hate is cleaning it out at the end of the month and finding things that could have been used and eaten, but they got stuck in the back and they went bad. So just the other day, our fridge was so packed full, but I had zero clue what was in there. So we cleaned it all out.
Speaker: got rid of the old stuff, and all of a sudden, it was like I went grocery shopping. I'm like, oh my goodness, look, I forgot we had a few grapes left. We had this, we have that, and we've just made it our goal to eat nothing but what's in the fridge for the next few days because we found it all. Yeah. I think my mom used to call that goulash. Pretty sure my mom used to call that goulash. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker: Okay. Last situation we want to talk about is you need a nutrient boost. So let's just say you come off Christmas vacation, you're all full of, you know, refined flour and sugar and a bunch of garbage and you just really need to pump your family full of nutrients. What do you do? Oh yeah. Definitely times like this. Usually Monday is a day where we've kind of slipped a little bit over the weekend and Monday dinner, we definitely need nutrient dense solution.
Speaker: So we'll do fresh vegetables, fresh vegetable platter instead of cooking the vegetables for supper. We always have greens in our garden and just grab a bunch of greens, fry them up, throw them in something or just serve them straight on the side. Chicken noodle soup or any soup with like a bone broth in it. Those are our best solutions when we need a huge nutrient boost.
Speaker: Yes, greens are usually our solution as well. So I try to find any chance I can get to put them in something. Like you said, soups are really easy. You can throw any kind of nutrients in there. Green smoothies, I will often saute or roast vegetables and puree them and stick them in something so my kids, I don't have to deal with the fight of, I don't want to eat this weird green thing, but they're still getting it. We recently made a macaroni and cheese recipe that was delicious.
Speaker: bacon in it, and it was baked with bread crumbs on top, but the sauce was made of a cheese sauce, but also had cooked cauliflower pureed in it. And it was delicious, and nobody was the wiser. I'm a big fan of teaching my kids to eat vegetables, but sometimes I just don't want the fight, and I want it in their body, so that was a great solution.
Speaker: Yeah. Anytime I make a cheese sauce for my kids, they'll eat any vegetable. I'm like, just put cheese sauce on it. And they're like, okay, yeah, pass the cheese sauce. All right. So now we're going to share our favorite resources that we use time and time again, every, every day for supper. And then where we turn for inspiration.
Speaker: I've got three favorite online sources and I've got three cookbooks, favorites from my arsenal. I have like an entire shelf of cookbooks in my library, but I'm just chose three. So we're going to link these in the show notes. My three favorite online sources to turn to are get inspired every day. She does really healthy paleo and
Speaker: They're not always keto, but she does really, really healthy meals and tons of things with vegetables. Plus her photography is just absolutely gorgeous. I just love, I feel inspired just looking at her pictures of food. My second favorite place to turn for food is the Pioneer Woman.
Speaker: Ree Drummond can make, like she's just so down to earth. She's cooking foods that we're all cooking and we're all eating. And she loves baking as much as I do. So, you know, there you go.
Speaker: And my third source is the Magnolia. Joanna Gaines now has a cookbook and a restaurant and a website and all, anything that she cooks, she publishes a lot of her recipes from her show right on the Magnolia website. Everyone I've tried is just delicious and also super down to earth good home cooking. Those are my three last sources. I haven't tried hers. Yeah, I'm going to check out recipes. I'm always just looking at our home stuff.
Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. And then, um, well, she has a cooking show now too, you know, so, and she's so down to earth. Like I love it. She's like, oops, I just whipped these. I just whipped those egg whites, over -whipped those egg whites. And this is what over -whipped egg whites look like. I haven't actually watched her show. I've just seen snippets like on Instagram.
Speaker: All right. My three favorite cookbooks in my kitchen that I turn to every day is Betty Crocker's new cookbook. And I got that one for my wedding and I have gifted it to my kids that went off to college and all my kids will get it for their wedding gift. And it's just like the cookbook that I use in my kitchen. My second one is Martha Stewart cooking school. I love that one because I don't always know how to do like, you know, an artichoke or something. And everything that you need to know to cook is right in there.
Speaker: And then my last one is the roasted vegetable cookbook. My kids will eat any vegetable that I roast. They will eat like I cannot physically cook enough roasted vegetables for my kids. They love them so much. So those are my three favorite online and three favorite actual hard cookbook resources linked in the show notes for you. I think I need to go buy all those cookbooks now. Thanks. Thanks a lot.
Speaker: Okay, so my favorite online ones are Mel's Kitchen Cafe. I talk about her all the time. She always has delicious things. And side note, she's one of the recipe bloggers that I actually read the entire blog post because she's hilarious and really down to earth. So, you know, there'll be like paragraphs and paragraphs of talk and then the recipe and everybody just skips to the recipe. Not me. I read everything she says. She's hilarious. Two peas in their pod is a good one as well. They have tons and tons of recipes and lots of really fun stuff.
Speaker: They have both decadent recipes and some healthy ones, so that's always kind of my second place to look if I'm looking for something unique. And then I'm a big fan of cookie and cake as well. Hers is vegetarian, and so if I need something just packed with vegetables, I'll go there. Sometimes I add meat to it as well, but I just love the bases.
Speaker: the base of her recipes for a really good healthy option. And I also have her recipe book, and the name escapes me right now, but we'll link that in the show notes as well. When I'm looking for something fancy, I love Bon Appetit's website. I used to subscribe to their magazine, and it was my favorite time of the month when it came. But then I had too many children to ever make anything gourmet, and so I stopped subscribing to the magazine, but you better believe when most of my kids are gone, I'm gonna go back to making the fancy things, because everything in there is delicious. And just really unique flavor pairings, just really fun for a special occasion.
Speaker: We also have a classic cookbook for all those recipes that everyone needs to know how to do. And I believe it's the Better Homes and Garden cookbook. We'll link that in the show notes as well. And that one is just a really great basic one that I'm going to send also with my kids off to college because there's a recipe for pizza dough and spaghetti and, you know, all the things that everybody needs to know how to make for the rest of their life. You know, the classic chocolate chip cookie, whatever.
Speaker: And then finally, I wanted to share that if you are a bread person, my favorite bread recipe book of all time is called Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day. And they also have a healthy bread in five minutes a day cookbook, and I own them both. And they're amazing. They teach you how to make the freeform loaves that you can just make the dough stick it in the fridge and then just pull off a chunk and like make this delicious freeform artisan bread anytime. It's very dangerous. You might just...
Speaker: Eat delicious bread for the rest of your life every single day. But would that be a really bad thing? I don't know. Maybe if it makes you sick. Don't buy these if you're gluten free. But anyway, those are my favorite books and online sources. All right, you guys. That's all we have for you for this episode. We hope that we have helped you think differently about some of these common situations that come up at supper time and how to overcome them. We struggle at supper time, too. We are in the kitchen at 5 o 'clock forgetting that
Speaker: We're supposed to cook this large herd that we have. And so we just wanted to share some of the solutions that we've come up with with you guys. Thanks for listening, friends. Click the link in the show notes to subscribe to our email and never miss another episode. Show us some love by leaving a review on iTunes or sharing the podcast with a friend. Thanks for all your support. We'll talk to you next week.
