S2E08 - Planning Family Dinners

Nutrition Bytes with Jessica Siegel, Registered Dietitian of Gelson's Markets | Health, Nutrition,

Planning Family Dinners

When my husband and I first got married 12 years ago, we were already committed to having family meals together. In our younger and freer days before having kids, we used to walk to dinner at 10 pm many week nights. Those spontaneous days are behind us now that we have two young daughters, but we are more committed to family meals than ever. The logistics are infinitely more complicated now though. That’s why when it’s 4:30 on a weekday, the last thing I want to be asking myself is “what’s for dinner?”

It’s time to stop the weekday afternoon panic by getting organized and planning in advance. I’m going to share my menu planning strategies with you so that you too can get organized with a family-friendly dinner menu plan that will support you in having family meals.

Family Meal Motivation

Before I delve into how to become an expert menu planner, I want to make sure you’re sufficiently motivated to actually sit down with your family to eat! We all have our own personal barriers that prevent us from regularly getting a good family meal on the table. My barriers are disorganization and not having a lot of time. Other people’s barriers could be a lack of confidence in the kitchen, a near-empty pantry or fridge, a family of picky eaters, a busy family schedule, or even not being in the habit of eating together. However, the benefits of everyone sitting down to a meal together, especially a homemade meal, are enormous. Keep in mind that although dinner is the focus of this newsletter, any meal can be a family meal—breakfast may be easier than dinner for many families, and if you can make both breakfast and dinner family meals, that’s even better!

Research shows that children who eat meals with their families perform better in school, eat a better diet, have better mental health and verbal development, and are at lower risk for obesity, substance abuse, and other risky behaviors. Family meals help children learn to like new foods by exposing them to variety and adult role models who hopefully eat and enjoy an array of foods. Adults who eat with other people tend to have better mental and physical health, stronger social connections, and have a lower risk of high blood pressure and obesity. I hope that’s sufficient motivation for you to start making family dinners a priority.

You need to know that family meals are a commitment. Eventually they become second nature, but in the meantime, there are plenty of ways to get derailed. I hear from many people who get so bogged down with nutritional rules that they become paralyzed when it’s time to actually plan a meal because they are afraid that something won’t be healthy or that their child will eat too much or not enough. Sometimes, kids behave badly at meals, or even refuse to eat something you’ve worked hard to make. Yes, all of these things can be discouraging, but don’t give up on your commitment! Approach this with a positive attitude and resolve to enjoy your work--including the planning, shopping, cooking, and eating parts. This is important parenting because you’re facilitating structured family time that will provide exposure to new foods, social support, sharing, connection, and opportunities to model positive eating habits for your family.

If you’re child’s behavior or eating habits are preventing you from even wanting to have family meals or are making your mealtimes together unpleasant, here is a life-changing strategy called the Division of Responsibility from the feeding expert Ellyn Satter: It is up to the parent or caregiver to decide what, when, and where kids eat and it is up to the child to decide whether and how much to eat.

Everyone has a job to do with feeding and eating. Do yours respectfully and trust your child to do theirs in order to bring the joy back to mealtimes. To learn more about feeding kids, listen to my 4th podcast, called Family Meals.

Your Menu Framework

My goal is to teach you how to take one day a week to plan and shop for five night’s worth of dinners. But if you’re not yet in the habit of having family meals, first get into the rhythm of sitting down together to share a meal without worrying about the nutritional value or quality of the food. Go to a restaurant, order takeout, or pick up some items from our Service Deli. At the same time, start practicing Ellyn Satter’s Division of Responsibility. Once you’ve got those pieces in place, you can add in menu planning and cooking. (By the way, menu planning is 100% your job, so please don’t ask your kids what they want for dinner.) I don’t expect you to cook every night, so I’m assuming you’ll eat out one or two nights a week and maybe have leftovers once. If cooking three or four nights a week is more realistic for you, that’s fine; it’s still worth the effort to take some time to plan, shop, and cook. Just be realistic about what will work for you and your family.

As regular listeners know, my family uses the Mediterranean diet as a framework for our eating. That means we eat two to three vegetarian meals a day and eat animal flesh, such as fish or poultry, up to once a day. We usually make breakfast and lunch our vegetarian meals and dinner our higher protein meal where we basically have fish or chicken with a variety of non-starchy and starchy vegetables, I use organic extra-virgin first cold pressed olive oil for cooking (olive oil is an essential part of the Mediterranean Diet). We have fruit for dessert most nights and have portion-controlled “real dessert,” as my 7-year-old calls it, about twice a week.

Recipes Redux

Choosing recipes can be the most fun, but also the most time-consuming part of this whole process. The keys to success here are (1) finding recipes that match your cooking abilities and time limits, (2) using recipes your family likes, and (3) organizing those recipes so that they are easily accessible when it is time to plan your menus and cook.

It’s important to have a reliable resource for healthful, easy and tasty recipes. I use my own recipes that are conveniently posted on the Gelson’s website at www.gelsons.com. Epicurious.com and cooking.nytimes.com are other great websites for finding good recipes because they are reviewed by people who have tried them. Magazines, cookbooks, family members and friends are other resources. I tear interesting sounding recipes out of my cooking magazines and store them in a folder that I can browse through on days when I’m looking for recipe inspiration. When collecting recipes, try to amass a good variety of fish, poultry and vegetarian recipes and always be on the lookout for easy vegetable recipes.

There are many ways to organize your recipes. You can create your own shopping list and save the recipes you like to a personal recipe book on various cooking websites. For recipes you pick up at Gelson’s, print, or tear out of a magazine, try to use a notebook with clear plastic sleeves that will become an organized home for all of your recipes. If you also use cookbooks, you should keep a piece of paper in your recipe notebook with the name of the recipe, the cookbook it came from and the page it is on (you can download my “Favorite Recipes” form available on www.gelons.com). Alternatively, you can make a photocopy of the recipe from the cookbook and store it in the notebook. Some super-organized people actually scan their favorite recipes into their computers so that they can access them all from one place. Whichever method you decide on, finding one centralized home for your recipes is a must.

Once you have been planning menus for several weeks, you can start to reuse the ones you like, so keep good records!

Planning the Menus

The best way to start the menu planning process is to pick one or two days a week when you have time to sit down, look at recipes, plan menus, and shop. On your designated menu planning day, begin by looking at your family members’ schedules to see what events that week might get in the way of your cooking or having a family meal. Perhaps you will need to schedule take-out or leftovers for a very busy night. Alternatively, if you will have some extra time one morning, make a slow cooker meal in which you prep all of the ingredients and add them to the machine so the meal will be ready at dinnertime on a night when there’s no time to cook.

The menu should be the same for everyone, with textures and seasonings modified according to your child’s ability and age. You can be family-friendly with your menus without limiting them to only foods that your child likes. Do not short order cook! Do a good job with menu planning, cooking, and providing structured meals and snacks so your child can come to the table ready to eat the variety and amounts that are right for his or her body at each meal. Just try to include at least two healthful foods (like milk and fruit) that your child has accepted when planning your dinner menus, especially if you are trying a new recipe, or including new foods or not-yet-accepted foods.

When planning dinners, try to envision a dinner plate arranged with at least one-half vegetables, a quarter protein, and a quarter starchy vegetables or whole grains. You’ll want to include a variety of colors, flavors and textures on the plate. Once in a while, a “one-pot” dinner is nice, too. One-pot dinners include vegetables, protein and starch all in one dish. Every week we also have “clean out the fridge dinners” where I heat up all of the leftovers from the last several days, put them on the table, and let everyone choose what they want. I include portion controlled desserts twice a week in order to teach my children how to handle sweets.

To get started with planning your menu, first decide which protein you will have each night and build from there (for instance, fish on Mondays, poultry on Tuesdays, vegetarian on Wednesdays and Fridays and red meat on Thursdays). Plan to use the most perishable foods like fish and poultry earlier in the week so that they are at their best when you use them, since your meal is only as good as the quality of the ingredients you use. With that in mind, use convenience and processed foods strategically to complete your menus. I am totally in favor of using ingredients from our salad bar or service deli, frozen vegetables, canned beans, pre-cut fresh vegetable blends or jarred sauce, but I try to use healthful convenience foods and be picky when reading the ingredient lists (especially with sodium). By all means, please use prepared foods if they will help you get a healthful, semi-homemade meal on the table for your family!

A successful meal really comes down to how much thought you put into the details. If you have one recipe that is complicated or time-consuming, then the other meal components should be relatively simple to prepare. You also want to be mindful of which flavors and types of foods go together—Chicken Parmesan and teriyaki vegetables will not be a big hit, trust me! You can also choose a theme for each night, like Mexican (Taco Tuesdays) or Italian (Milanese Mondays). I have created a Weekly Dinner Menu Planner that you can download from www.gelsons.com to help remind you of all of the important food group components as you plan your meals.

Making the List

How you bring all of your recipes together and make your shopping list will depend on your recipe sources. I personally just print out my recipes and take them to the market with me. Once I know what I’m making, I go through my pantry and refrigerator and check off the items that I already have. At the market, I check off ingredients as I put them in my cart. Some websites make a shopping list for you. You can also handwrite or type your shopping list, or you can cut and paste your various recipe ingredients into a new shopping list document on your computer. I’ve also made room for you to write your shopping list on my Weekly Dinner Menu Planner.

Going to Gelson’s

Realistically, you’ll probably have to go to the market twice a week but you can still take just one day to plan a week’s worth of dinners and then split the ingredients into two separate shopping lists. Try to group foods by department (e.g., produce, deli and dairy) so that you won’t be crisscrossing the store for items you forgot because they were written down in random order. Start by buying the heaviest items first and finish in the produce department so the most delicate foods can go on the top of your cart.

Ready, Set, Cook!

Some of you may start preparing dinner once you get home from work, but if you have some spare time the night before or in the morning, consider preparing the ingredients ahead of time. I’m encouraging you to cook a lot of vegetables, and vegetable preparation takes time. Squeezing in some measuring and chopping when you have a few extra minutes will shave time off your total cooking time in the end. Another time saver is to recruit kids and adults in your household to help out in the kitchen (it is important to bring younger kids into the kitchen to help, but it will probably not save you any time). For extra time-saving convenience, explore Gelson’s produce department for pre-cut fresh vegetables and fruits and the freezer section for frozen pre-cut vegetables. Frozen vegetables are just as nutritious as fresh vegetables and they save my life on a daily basis!

Start out with the recipe that takes the longest to prepare and cook, then work on the next most time-consuming item, and so on. Take preparation and cooking time into account so that you can get everything on the table at the right time. Beyond that, just jump in and start cooking!

Eating Family Dinner

Once the food is on the table, your only jobs are to eat and enjoy your food. Keep in mind that this is a meal for you, too! Set a good example for your kids by using good table manners, making conversation, and taking pleasure in eating, but don’t make a big deal about the food. Be matter-of-fact; don’t be manipulative in any way. Just offer it and eat it yourself, don’t negotiate, threaten, praise, or even talk about the food. Kids don’t have to take a bite or even touch it. Unless they are very young and can’t feed themselves, don’t get enmeshed or chase them with the food. It is important to find the right balance between offering help when they need it and being too involved. Let them do what they can do and help them advance to the next level of eating. At the end of the meal, give everyone age-appropriate jobs for helping to clean up. Finally, please be sure to keep all electronic devices away from the table for the duration of the meal, including phones and TV, plus any low-tech distractions, like books. This is a time for everyone to come to the table at the end of the day and reconnect over a shared meal.

I hope I have inspired you to start planning, cooking, and eating family meals. Whether you’re cooking for a family of one or six, you can make family dinners on weeknights. Start with structure, approach the process with enthusiasm about planning, shopping, cooking, eating, and feeding, and then try some of my family’s favorite recipes from the Family Dinner Menu and the accompanying recipe cards on our show notes page at Gelsons.com.