I really don’t know what I was thinking when I said that this Freezer Cooking Day would not turn into Freezer Cooking Week.  You know how people say that God laughs when you tell him your plans?  Yeah, he was definitely chuckling at that one.

For the last two days, Kelvin has been running a 103.5 degree fever….and it was that high when he was on both motrin and tylenol!  Which also means I’ve been up every three hours at night to give him another dose of medicine because I’m scared to death of his fever going any higher than that.  Today, it was lower though….only about 100, so hopefully he’s on the mend!

But even if he wasn’t so sick, I still don’t know if I could have gotten it all done in one day.  Maybe if Chad took the kids somewhere for the entire day, but as long as they’re in the house they are bound and determined to not let me get a single thing done other than playing with them.

So I’ve just been using nap time to knock out a couple recipes a day.  Yesterday, I made Grilled Chicken Pesto Wraps and Frozen Fruit Cups.  Today I made Black Bean Mango Chicken Salad.  I only got one done today because I had to pay bills during nap time.  By the time I was done with the bills, I only had a few minutes left so I cleaned up the desk and did a few miscellaneous things that it seems like I never get to (things like sending in an ipad warranty…and no, I do not have an ipad….that is strictly hypothetical).  So I made today’s recipe with Kelvin sitting on the kitchen counter next to me.  It’s exhausting being loved so much!

I still have Beef Potato Dinner Wraps, Buffalo Chicken Wraps and Fruity Breakfast Burritos.  Maybe if the kids take really good naps tomorrow, I can get all three done and be done with it!  I might take a little bit of time during the rest of the week to make a huge batch of cookie dough to freeze too, but we’ll see how things go.

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Freezer cooking today did not go as well as I’d hoped.  I did get a lot of recipes done, but six of them are still going to have to be done tomorrow.

It started going downhillwhen my kids started running fevers late Saturday.  They continued their fevers all day today, but the weird thing is that there are no other symptoms…..no sore throat, headache, runny nose, cough, diarrhea, nothing!  But they were incredibly fussy and clingy, which is why I didn’t get much done while they were awake.

I managed to start the Harvest Summer Soup and the Harvest Cinnamon Roll dough first thing in the morning, but all the other recipes were cooked during naptime.  Luckily, they took pretty decent naps!

Here are the meals that are done:

2 Harvest Cinnamon Rolls meals
3 Summer Harvest Soup meals
2 Stuffed Buffalo Chicken meals
3 Lemon Chicken meals
3 Tomato Pasta Sauce meals
3 Tangy Marinated Steak meals
2 Bacon & Bleu Burgers meals
3 Tomato & Basil Burgers meals

That’s 21 meals so far, so I guess that’s really good, considering the amount of time I had to work on it.

Tomorrow, I need to do:

Fruity Breakfast Burritos
Frozen Fruit Cups
Grilled Chicken Pesto Wraps
Black Bean and Mango Chicken Salad
Buffalo Chicken Wraps
Beef-Potato Dinner Wraps

I was also going to make Italian Flank Steak Pinwheels, but honestly I think I would get too frustrated with that recipe.  I’ll just freeze those steaks in their original packaging and use them in a different recipe in next month’s menu.

So there you have it.  I really hope I can finish up tomorrow because I can’t spend all of the kids’ sleeping time all week cooking….I have a home based business to run, housework to do, and a MOMS Club board meeting to prep for.

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I’ve always been amazed and a little bit envious of the people who take an entire day to make meals for their freezer and then don’t have to cook for the rest of the month.  I enjoy cooking, but not with two little people underfoot, so not cooking for an entire month but still having homemade meals sounds like HEAVEN!

I’ve attempted freezer cooking days in the past, but they always stretched into freezer cooking WEEKS.  The last time I tried, Kelvin was still really tiny and with all the interruptions and distractions, it just didn’t work.  Now that Ava is 3 and Kelvin is 21 months, I’m hoping to have more success tomorrow.  I wish I had a nanny camera that I could set up in their playroom so I could supervise them from the kitchen….but who am I kidding?  If I’m in the kitchen, they’re going to be right there with me!

I’m planning on making Once A Month Mom’s Summer 2010 Menu (with a few tweaks).  It looks fairly simple and the best part is that I won’t have to turn on the oven at all!  Did I mention we have an excessive heat warning for the next week?  We’re expecting a heat index of 110 every day!  So not heating up the house with the oven sounds like a pretty good idea to me.

Tonight I did all the prep work….shredded the cheese, chopped the fruits and veggies, browned the ground beef, cooked the bacon, put the chicken in the crock pot to cook all night, etc.  It took about 2.5 hours, so I’m thinking that investment will save me even more time tomorrow since I won’t be trying to do all of it with the kids around.  I also got the 4 meals’ worth of the pasta sauce completely done and in the freezer.

I will be updating at some point tomorrow!  In the meantime, head over and see the freezer cooking Money Saving Mom is doing!

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Getting kids to eat enough vegetables is a problem that plagues almost all mothers at one time or another.  Many moms have at least one picky eater in the family.  In our family, it’s Ava.  She was willing to eat all kinds of veggies when she was a baby, but then the terrible two’s hit and vegetables fell out of favor.  Kelvin, on the other hand, is still willing to eat any vegetable I cook.  That’s him in this picture with a giant asparagus we got at the farmer’s market!

Even though our kids view veggies as the enemy, we moms know how important they are for growth and development, health, and even for avoiding the need for future acne treatment gel.

Here are some tips that I’ve found helpful:

1. Try serving vegetables in different ways.  If your child boycotts one recipe, find a different one featuring the same vegetable to try the next night.
2. Sneak vegetables in.  I’ve been using The Sneaky Chef: Simple Strategies for Hiding Healthy Foods in Kids’ Favorite Meals for the last few weeks and I absolutely love it!  It’s so easy to make kid-friendly meals into super-healthy meals without them even realizing it!  Of course, I still serve vegetables in their natural form (i.e. not pureed and mixed into other food), but at meals where they skip over the steamed broccoli, I know that they still got lots of nutrition from their other food.
3. Try, try, try again.  Experts say that children often need to be served a food several times before they are willing to accept it.
4. Get them involved.  The kids and I planted beans and tomatoes this year and I know Ava’s already excited to eat them, even though she typically doesn’t like fresh green beans (only canned).  Simply getting them involved in cooking them works well, too.
5. When all else fails….ranch!  I can get Ava to eat almost anything by giving her ranch to dip it in!

What are your tricks for getting your kids to eat their veggies?

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A few years ago for my birthday, Chad got me a George Foreman Contemporary Grill – 80 sq. in. (GRV80), which I was really excited about.  I know some people don’t like getting kitchen or household things as gifts, but I love it.  I stay home with the kids, so I’m using stuff like that all day.  I’m not going to complain about something that makes my everyday life easier or more fun!  I might complain if he tried to pass off the best treatment for acne as a gift, though.

Anyway, back to the grill.  I love it, but it only took one use to realize that it is a pain-in-the-butt to clean!  This one doesn’t have removable plates, so I was stuck scrubbing all the burned-on juices off of it every time.  That easily made up for the time I saved by not starting up the grill outside!

Until my grandma gave me a really great tip that I now use every time I grill!  As soon as I take the food off of the grill, I unplug it and lay a wet (not damp) paper towel over the plates and close it up while we go eat.  When I come back to it after dinner, it’s a snap to wipe it off quickly and put it away.  And I’m all for anything that makes cleanup go faster!

For more great tips and tricks, visit Works For Me Wednesday.

Disclaimer: This post contains an affiliate link.

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I’ve expanded my baby-food-making efforts this week.  Kelvin has just started eating meat in the last few weeks.  When I first started him on meat, life was crazy and we were out of town and stuff, so I just fed him the jarred baby food dinners with meat in them.  He didn’t seem to care for them much, but he tolerated a little bit at a time (and filled up on fruit instead).

This week, I made him a Chicken, Carrot and Rice Dinner and a Beef, Peas and Potatoes Dinner (I made lots of each of them and froze them, of course).  I think he’s in love.  He just gobbles up several “cubes” at a time!  It looks kind of gross (maybe a little like pet supplements ), but he thinks it’s great!  I think the main reason he prefers my homemade food over jarred food is the texture.  Mine isn’t perfectly smooth and he seems to like things that he has to chew a little.  And I’m perfectly fine with that…my homemade baby food costs a lot less, is better for him and I know exactly what’s going into it!  It’s a win-win situation!

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I can’t believe that I have two kids, but I just tried making my own baby food this week.  I even had everything I’d need for making baby food when Ava was a baby, but I was really overwhelmed by it for some reason.  I don’t know why, because it’s so easy!

I have the Kidco Feeding System, but you could easily make your own food with just a food processor and ice cube trays.

I made green beans yesterday and apples today.  For the green beans, I cooked 2 cups of fresh green beans, sent them through the electric food mill, added enough water to make it like Stage 1 food and put it in trays to freeze.  Then today, I just took the cubes of food out of the trays and stored them in a ziploc bag in the freezer.  For the apples, I used 2 apples, cooked them with 3 Tablespoons of water on the stove until they were mushy and then pureed and froze them.  It’s so unbelievably easy and doesn’t even take very long.

I’m sure it’s going to save us lots of money, because Kelvin is like a bottomless pit.  It always took Ava several days to finish a jar of baby food, but Kelvin eats at least 1, sometimes 2, every day.  Tonight he actually ate 6 oz of food (2 oz of green beans, 2 oz of apples and 2 oz of cereal).

I’m going to try carrots tomorrow….now that I’ve started, I just don’t want to stop!  By the end of the week, I should have enough different kinds of food made that I won’t have to use any jarred food anymore!

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This week, we had a WIC appointment, so we had a discussion with a dietician as usual.  She was looking over Ava’s food log and then at mine and noticed that I eat less fruits and vegetables than she does.  I explained that we eat the same thing for breakfast and dinner, but I usually fix her a balanced lunch while I’m holding Kelvin and then I just grab leftovers or something really easy after they go down for their naps.  She suggested that I eat lunch with her, too, because it would help me eat more fruits and vegetables and it would also set a good example for her when she saw me eating them.

I decided to give it a shot, but didn’t expect to see much difference in Ava’s eating.  She’s already really good at eating a lot of fruit and she eats TONS of green beans and broccoli, but doesn’t really like other vegetables.  So the next day, I made lunch for both of us and included carrots as part of it.  Usually, she won’t even touch carrots but I was out of green beans so I gave them to her anyway.  Sure enough, she saw me eating carrots and polished off all of hers and even wanted seconds!

I’ll admit I was very surprised.  I knew children are always watching their parents and picking up their habits, but I didn’t think a simple thing like seeing me eat carrots would change her attitude about them!

And here’s a thought…you could probably get your children to drink more water if you buy these snazzy promotional water bottles and they see you drinking out of them!

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We’ve had a very rough weekend at our house and it’s continuing this week now that I’m sick. I didn’t want to neglect our little blog now that we’re whipping it back into shape, though! I have several post ideas, but I get exhausted just thinking about writing them now.

So instead, I’m going to share a very helpful website with you, Wholesome Toddler Food. I’ve done tons of research on feeding toddlers because Ava tends to be a very picky eater, but this one is the best one I’ve found…hands down! It has meal ideas, menus, recipes, and tips for feeding the picky eater. Honestly, this site has been my bible for feeding Ava for the past year. I hope it helps someone else as much as it has helped me!

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I wish I had enjoyed having uninterrupted time in the kitchen before I had Ava.  I guess that’s one of those things that you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone.  Deep down, I really do enjoy cooking, but it’s hard to remember that when I’m always rushed when I’m in the kitchen.

That’s why I’m always interested in finding ways to save time on both food prep and cleanup.  Here are some of my favorites:

1. Buy meat in large quantities, cook it all at once, divide it into meal-size portions and refreeze it.  I do this with ground beef and both my mom and I buy whole turkeys to do this with.  This is honestly my biggest time-saver of all.
2. To quickly clean pots or pans, boil a little vinegar and water in them.
3. When you’re making a meal that would freeze well (pretty much all casseroles), double it and freeze it in a greased casserole dish.  The next day, fill the sink with an inch or two of hot water, put the casserole dish in it for about a minute and the entire casserole will pop out easily.  Then your dish won’t be out of commission in the freezer and you can keep the casserole either in a zip-loc bag or wrapped in aluminum foil.
4. Keep a roll of masking tape and a permanent marker in your kitchen.  When you’re putting away leftovers, write the name of the food and the date on the tape and place it on the lid.
5. Make a menu before doing the grocery shopping.  This saves tons of time with not having to make frequent trips to the store during the week.  It also saves time because you don’t have to go through your cabinets and refrigerator at 5:00 wondering what on earth you’re going to make for dinner!
6. If you don’t use an entire green pepper for a dish, chop the rest of it up and freeze it for future use.

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