Family Friendly Meals

Preparing family friendly meals can be a simple process when you have the right tools. You don’t have to scour through cookbooks to find meals that your family will like. Chances are you will just find a bunch of recipes that you don’t have all the ingredients to make anyways. Here are some simple guidelines you can use for ideas:

Use what works already – Sit your family down and find out what they like. That can be your basic list of meals.

Ask other families for their favorite recipes – If a group of moms shared 5 of their favorite recipes each, the other moms could have a great list to choose from.

Use a book of compiled recipes – Cooking from Your Cupboard is filled with 30 family friendly recipes along with color coded ingredient lists. If you keep these ingredients on hand, you can make any of the recipes at any time. You can basically put your cooking on auto-pilot and focus on spending your time with your family instead of trying to figure out what to make for dinner.

Once you have the meal on the table, plan the dinner time conversation to teach your children important things they need for life. Cutting out distractions like TV will help facilitate better conversation. Eating, after all, can be a pleasurable experience. Food can act as a social glue too – eating meals together helps create a sense of connection among parents and children, providing emotional, intellectual and spiritual nourishment in addition to good nutrition habits.

Children from highly connected families have been shown to eat healthier foods, get better grades and have lower risk for smoking and drug and alcohol use. Studies have shown that when children eat with their families regularly, they increase their intake of vegetables, fruit and fiber, consume less soda and fried foods, and eat smaller amounts of saturated and trans fats. Those are certainly all things that we want for our children.

Using the tools mentioned above should give you plenty of family friendly meals that you can use. If you limit snacks to only fruits and vegetables up to 2 hours before dinner, you will have a much greater chance that your children will be hungry enough to eat and enjoy the meal.