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Family Meals Made Easy
By Polly | October 24, 2007
Family Fun Idea
The next couple of months we are going to use dinner time as a way of establishing meaningful opportunities to talk with our kids. Using dinner time to engage in meaningful conversations with each other is an easy way to reconnect, share thoughts, and check the pulse of the family. This isn’t something that should be forced in the family. The ideas for conversation are just thought starters. Feel free to modify them as needed for your family’s tastes and ages. They are meant to be answered by both parents and kids.
Conversation Starter Idea
Talk about something that was hard or difficult for you either today or sometime this week. Why do you think it was hard? How did you handle it? What can we do to make it less hard in the future? How do you need mom and dad to help you?
Why this Question is Important….
Asking each other to talk about the difficulties in their lives helps family members release any built up frustrations. With the parents also participating, it shows the kids that mom and dad also struggle with things in life and that they don’t always have all the answers. It also gives kids a chance to feel important by giving them the opportunity to help mom and dad.
Great Recipes
One of our favorite meals in the fall and winter is a simple meal of soup and bread. I love making fresh made soups and usually designate Sundays in my monthly meal planner as soup day. One of our favorites is a chicken gumbo recipe from Recipezaar.com. It isn’t necessarily a quick and easy meal to make because of the large number of ingredients, but it does make a large quantity of which I freeze any extra and pull it out the following month when it comes up in the monthly rotation.
Mean Chef Chicken, Andouille, Ham and Okra Gumbo
Ingredients
1 cup vegetable oil
1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
2 1/2 cups chopped yellow onions
1 1/2 cups chopped celery
1 1/2 cups chopped green bell peppers
1 lb okra, either fresh or frozen and cut into pieces
1 1/2 lbs hot smoked sausage, such as andouille or kielbasa, cut crosswise into 1/2 inch slices
3/4 lb smoked ham, cut into small cubes or ham, nugget cut into small cubes
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1/2 teaspoon cayenne
3/4 teaspoon fresh ground black pepper
3 bay leaves
3 quarts chicken stock or chicken broth
3 cups cooked chicken meat
1 tablespoon Pickapeppa Sauce
1 cup chopped parsley
2 bunches chopped green onions
hot sauce, to taste (optional)
4 cups cooked long-grain rice, accompaniment
Helpful Hints
To make this gumbo recipe easier to make, I usually fill my crock pot the day before we plan on eating the soup with chicken thighs, water, salt & pepper, and onion. I then use the cooked chicken (without the bone and skin) and the broth for the 3 cups of cooked chicken and the 3 quarts of chicken broth. To make it healthy, I let the chicken and broth sit over night in the refrigerator. This gives the fat in the broth a chance to settle and rise to the top and is very easy to skim off the next day.
When working with a recipe with a lot of ingredients, it is often helpful to have a quick way of checking for equivalent measures and possible substitutions. A good resource to use for this is GourmetSleuth.com’s Cooking Dictionary - Ingredients Substitutions and Equivalents
Make family meal preparation easy and less stressful with either our monthly family meal planner or our new weekly meal planner.
Related Entries:
Weekly Meal Planner
What’s in the Sock?
A, B, City
Family Meals Made Easy for November
He Misses Me
Topics: Conquering the Chaos, Family Fun, Family Meals |