Brown Rice Vegetable Risotto

I love risotto.  I have been craving some lately so I went on a search to find a recipe that uses brown rice after noticing that our market carries short-grain brown rice.  I found this great recipe from whole foods and made a few modifications to use items I had in the house and vegetables that we found in-season at the farmer's market.  I used zucchini, carrots, and yellow squash, substituted homemade chicken stock for the vegetable stock, omitted the butter, and substituted Manchego for the Parmesan.  It was really delicious along side our shrimp wrapped in prosciutto.  The kids were excited enough about having their "cheesy rice" (which is what they call risotto) that they were willing to try all three veggies in it and they ended up loving the veggies. Definitely a success!

Gluten Free Pancakes

Ever since I switched to a gluten and dairy free diet I have been missing those Sunday mornings with my family eating something yummy and comforting like pancakes or waffles.  There has been one other time that my husband tried making me pancakes and used and all-purpose gluten-free flour.  They just weren't very good.  Even my husband who will eat just about anything wouldn't touch them.  The problem is that most gluten-free flour blends have garbanzo bean flour in them and you can definitely taste it.

One-Ingredient No-Stir Peanut Butter

My family loves peanut butter.  One of the things we have switched in our quest to eat healthier real foods has been to natural peanut butter.  The main downside to the natural peanut butter you buy in jars is that it separates and then you have to stir it and refrigerate it.  My biggest complaint has been that once refrigerated it can be very hard to spread.  Also to get a good natural, organic peanut butter it was getting quite pricey for us because of how much we go through.  We decided to try to make our own and experimented with different techniques and ingredients.  We tried our meat grinder which eventually led us to the food processor.  One of the great things we learned was that we don't need to add any oil to make this delicious peanut butter.  But by far the best thing was that this peanut butter is creamy, spreadable, and doesn't have to be stirred!  I promise you won't want to buy peanut butter anymore, it's so simple.

No-Fail Quiche

One of my most favorite sections of Food Network Magazine is when they do their mix and match recipes.  These are usually a base recipe that you can decide which ingredients you would like and make it your own.  I knew I would love the May issue when I got it because of the 50 Taco ideas advertised on the front but I was really excited when I saw the quiche recipe.  My mom actually called me to tell me she tried it and is is really fool-proof.

Mini Baked Oatmeal

Today was a typical morning where I woke up to hungry kids wanting breakfast before I could get out of bed.  Then I realized that I had forgotten to make up our refrigerator oatmeal yesterday.  I've been trying to think of things to make breakfast a little more exciting (my daughter hasn't been too crazy about oatmeal lately) so I decided to make up some individual baked oatmeal.  My kids all have different tastes so I could put different toppings on them.  I wanted to add some mashed banana in the mix but that wouldn't please everyone so I just sliced some up on a couple of them but I think these would be even more delicious with the banana mixed in if you like it.  It would taste a lot like banana bread.  I topped others with coconut, walnuts, sliced almonds, and some homemade berry sauce.  Tip:  the almonds were still kind of loose on top so you would want to push them in a little. They were easy to mix up and done in 30 minutes. Success.

Homemade Chicken Stock

This week is one of those crazy weeks so I tried to keep our dinners as easy as possible.  One of my favorite new recipes is the best whole chicken in a crockpot that I found over at 100 Days of Real Food. (If you can't tell already, I'm obsessed with that website.)  The chicken is so delicious and literally falls off the bones.  It's nice having that roasted chicken dinner without turning the oven on, especially as the weather is getting warmer.  And let me tell you this is very kid-friendly.  I think my two little ones would eat the whole chicken if I let them have it.  One of my favorite parts about cooking the chicken in the crockpot is that it makes it so easy to make some homemade chicken stock.  It makes about 4 quarts of chicken stock so it's a big money saver vs. the boxes in the store and it is so much tastier.  I'm going to use the leftover chicken to make some chicken enchiladas again because the family loved them so much last time.  The leftover stock will get used for some Turkey Chili I will be making and then I will still have some left over in the freezer.  I really feel this is a fool-proof recipe for stock and you don't have to tend to it because it can just sit all day or overnight in the crockpot.

Fruit or Veggie Muffins

I'm sure many parents can relate when I say I'm constantly trying to get fruits and vegetables in my kids.  They are slowly trying more things but it seems to change from one day to the next what they will be willing to eat.  I came across this great zucchini bread recipe from Lisa over at 100 Days of Real Food.  Zucchini is a vegetable that I can never get my kids to eat.  But, I love a recipe where I can put it in there and they will eat it and I always make sure to tell them they are eating it:  "Guess what kids? You like zucchini!"  I made my own gluten-free version of the zucchini bread.  I prefer them as muffins because they are already portioned, freeze really well, and don't make as much of a mess.  So far I've done this recipe with zucchini, carrot, and apple.  All were really good!  We like to have a couple of these muffins with a nice big smoothie as one of our easy lunch ideas.  The kids love it.

Whole Wheat Pizza and Pizza Sauce

Friday night is kind of a celebration around here at the Dobson home.  It's the end of the week and the kids are excited about Daddy being home for two whole days without having to go to work.  Over the last year, Fridays in our home have become our designated pizza night.  The kids look forward to it because they love pizza so much and I look forward to it because it's easy and I always know what we are going to have on Fridays.

Eating Healthy Without Breaking the Bank

As I'm thinking about making my grocery list for the next week, I thought I'd share some of my favorite money-saving tips to eating healthy.

This Week's Plan

So, in the future I hope to gets these meals plans out early in the week and and I can do more posts highlighting the individual recipes and what-not.  The plans will always end at Saturday morning because after breakfast is when we head out to the farmers' market and do our grocery shopping.  Here is our plan for this week:

What we ate last week

Last week was the first week in a while that we made a meal plan for the week and got all of our shopping done in one day.  We are really going to make a good effort to stick to doing this each weekend as it relieves so much stress during the week to already have everything planned out.  I actually look forward to our shopping day. We go to the farmers' market which I'm really getting excited about because I find our kids get more interested in different things.  The first time my daughter every tried grapes was when a lady at the farmers' market gave her a bunch to try.

Changing Our Diet / The New Blog Plan

Well, I know I've given this a try again before but I'm really going to give it another go. We've had a lot of changes in the past 5 months in the way we eat.  Many we're brought on by a trip to the doctor that forced me to change many things in the way that I eat.  I don't necessarily thinking we we're eating very badly before but we didn't exactly pay attention to everything we put in .our mouths.

The changes in our family since changing the way we eat have been amazing.  I've had some changes in my health (which I'm sill working on) including losing more than 10% of my body weight.  And I really feel that my skin, hair, and nails have really made a change for the better.  My husband and my teenage son have both lost weight.  In fact, we need to buy them new clothes!  We've all had an increase in energy too.