As parents, does it sometimes feel like a full-time job keeping your kids fed?
We have and we’ve found two meals that are our go-to when things are a bit crazy. The best part of both meals is the kids love them whether they’re freshly made or as leftovers. What are these two magic dishes you ask? Pancakes for breakfast and chili for lunch or dinner.
Let’s start with our favorite food group – Chili.
Why chili? Simple – easy to make, easy to store, lots of protein where you can hide all those vegetables (we add extra) and best of all, the kids will eat chili at any time – fresh or as leftovers. This fact alone makes dinner a breeze on those nights we’re running late from work or the kids have evening activities where we don’t have time to make dinner.
We’ve made chili from assorted box fixings and have made chili from scratch from assorted online recipes, but they never seem to be “just right”. We recently found a crock pot chili recipe we really like and just had to share. The recipe is Jaclyn’s of the Cooking Classy Food Blog and you’ll find the recipe for what’s sure to become a family favorite at this link to Cooking Classy Slow Cooker Chili. We recommend you give Jaclyn’s recipe a try with sourdough bread or a baked potato – all easy to make and delicious!
Our family’s other favorite food group is pancakes.
As we all know, all kids love pancakes. We love that we can make a large batch, freeze the extra and we have an easy to go breakfast for those mornings where we can’t seem to get breakfast made. The product that made our life simple is the Kodiak pancake mix. We use non-fat milk for additional protein but since our kids love chocolate chips, we indulge them and add chocolate chips to the mix. However, we will not let them add syrup to chocolate chip pancakes as that’s just a sugar road too far for us. What we do is make half a batch that’s plain and half a batch with chocolate chips. Then we let the kids decide – if they feel like syrup, plain pancakes with maple syrup it is. If they feel like chocolate chips, then it’s chocolate chip pancakes. We also serve berries with the pancakes resulting in happy and satisfied children at breakfast.
