Scratch and Sniff

We all do it. The internet and cooking shows and cookbooks and Pinterest have made it so easy to find recipes that look amazing, so we bookmark or print or pin or save them somehow and then never. look. at. them. again. I've got dozens and dozens of recipes like that, most of them that call for ingredients I tend to keep on hand. And then we make the same things over and over because it's easy and we know the recipe by heart and our kids will actually eat it.

I do bulk cooking to save a bit of money and hassle and usually have a freezer full of the same meals that we can just pull and heat and eat. I'm tired of those. I'm tired of our usual recipes. But I'm also stupid picky so trying new stuff almost always involves some kind of recipe editing.

So, in an effort to shake things up a little, save some money by using what we already have and only have to buy a few things to finish off, and to eat maybe a little healthier (ok, so not too much but at least without lots of unpronounceable ingredients) I've been cooking dinner from "scratch" at least once a week for the past month or so using some of the many recipes I've got stashed all over.

We've had mixed results.

Asher is even pickier than I am. He eats zero vegetables willingly. I eat like 6 so I can't fault him too much. He hasn't liked much of what we've had that's new, so I make sure to throw in an old standby periodically so we know he's eating at least once a week.

I've messed up a couple things. I've underseasoned (I weirdly HATE tasting what I'm cooking. I can't explain it, I just don't want to do it. If Austin's around, he's my taster.). I've over cooked. I've had to cut meat in half to get the middle done in time to serve it with the rest of the meal because the rest was cooked to the point that it was almost mush.

We're all surviving. And we're saving a lot on food.

We buy gift cards through the church for restaurants then we end up eating at other restaurants and buying tons of groceries and snacks and wondering why we have spent $1000 on food this month. Now, when we want to eat out, we try to use those cards. It's pre-paid for food, and we pre-paid so long ago it feels like free food.

I quit buying lots of snack foods and chips so now the kids are actually hungry at dinner and typically eat an actual meal instead of 20 packages of fruit snacks or 15 cheese sticks or half a bag of chips. I do still buy cheese sticks because that's an easy quick snack for me while breastfeeding, but since none of them can open the packages by themselves, I can control how many they get. This backfires because I get snacky late at night and toast gets real old, as do cereal bars, granola bars, and cheese sticks. Sometimes I just want a handful of chips or Oreos or something.

Tonight we had tacos and met with mixed reactions. Asher didn't like them at all. Eden wanted to eat the meat out of the shell with her fork, then when we tried to dump the meat on the plate for easier access, flung the shell around so now there's meat chunks on the floor. Elijah ate 2. Austin had 4 1/2 and I had 3 1/2. Most of it we had on hand. $1 for some shells and a couple bucks for sour cream (which I'll use the rest of for something later next week) and some veggies from the farmer's market and we had a nice meal.

For dessert, we're making a cinnamon roll cake that I had all the ingredients to on hand and have been wanting to make for a while. I just hadn't gotten to it because buying a cake or some cupcakes or whatever is so much easier, but it usually doesn't taste as good. We'll see how this tastes. We did edit the recipe a bit: it called for plain icing and we made cream cheese frosting, because cream cheese frosting makes pretty much anything better.

A benefit of this method of feeding my family, besides the whole saving money thing, is that Elijah wants to help. He wants to learn how to make things, specifically cake. He wants to pour the eggs in and watch it mix up. He wants to watch me spread frosting on cake. He wants to know how to make his favorite things. He's slowly getting interested in making dinner, too. I'd love to raise kids who know how to cook and cook well and cook more than one dish well. Or at the very least, kids who know how to follow a recipe and adapt it as needed.

The cinnamon roll cake is now out of the oven and the house smells amazing: cinnamon and cream cheese and sugar. We're going to let it cool a little before digging in and it'll be another thing that brings us all back together around a table, enjoying each other and our food.

At the end of the day, that's the best part. We sit together and eat. It doesn't matter if I made it from scratch or if Austin picked up a $6 hot and ready from Little Caesar's on the way home. Eating together with my family is my favorite part of any meal. Except when food goes flying and wails of anguish rise up because I'm making someone eat something they don't like. Life is hard, y'all. Especially when you're 6.