Sunny Side Up Nutrition

A cooking, nutrition and family feeding blog to simplify your life

Recipes

Keep it Simple! 3 Quick and Easy Meals

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I can’t believe Thanksgiving is next week! I love this time of year. We’re looking forward to getting together with family and friends as always. However, life gets so busy during this season. There’s shopping for gifts, parties, activities, travel and holiday shows – It’s all so much fun, but it can all feel overwhelming if I don’t take the time to plan and keep meals simple. We don’t want to eat out most nights, which is what happens if I try to wing it. Plus, making dinners allows for leftovers for at least a couple of lunches each week.  

At the end of the day, as Anna highlighted in her most recent post what you eat for dinner isn’t what’s most important.  It’s the meaningful time you spend connecting with your family.  

Here are 3 quick and easy meal ideas you can rely on through the holiday season. I’m also going to use Anna’s printable meal planning template (sign up at the top of our blog to receive it) along with a couple of other go-to meals I wrote about last spring to simplify meals.  

Sausage (vegetarian or meat) with sweet potato fries and sautéed brussel sprouts

30 minute meal

I tend to buy this Neiman Ranch Sweet Italian Sausage. All four of us really like it. If it’s a vegetarian option you’re after, the Field and Stream sausages are quite good.  Shaved or shredded Brussels sprouts are a favorite in our house.  Everyone loves them, there’s no prep work and they cook in less than 10 minutes!  When I can’t find shredded Brussels sprouts, I buy them whole and run them through my food processor with the grater blade.  If I know I don’t have time for that extra step, I’ll cook a frozen vegetable I have on hand.

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Lentil Salad with Feta Cheese and Salami

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Easy Lentil Salad

HI. Elizabeth, here.  It’s been so warm and humid here in the DC area, it’s hard to believe it’s mid-October.  I love fall and am looking forward to some cool, crisp days like today.

This Lentil Salad with Feta Cheese and Salami is just the recipe for still-warm fall days. It’s also hearty enough for cool days.   As I mentioned in a recent post, these Trader Joe’s Steamed Lentils are one of my favorites.  You can typically find them in the refrigerator case on a top shelf above the vegetables.   In our house, we use them either cold in a salad like the one below or heated and served with rice and some grated cheese.  My friend, Amanda adds caramelized onions and rice to them.

This recipe is so easy!  It really only takes a few minutes to make.  I love to have it for lunch on mixed greens. It also makes a nice side dish.  This salad is one of those items my kids still haven’t tried, but I keep offering it. If you have toddlers, preschoolers or even young elementary age kids, you might offer this salad deconstructed.  They’re likely to be more receptive to the individual ingredients.  And remember, even if your child doesn’t try a food after seeing it many times-don’t give up.  They might just try it eventually.  When they do, you’ll want to jump up and down and cheer, but resist the urge.  As hard as it is not to cheer, remaining neutral creates a low pressure environment for trying new foods.

Lentil Salad with Feta Cheese and Salami

Easy Lentil Salad…

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What’s For Lunch?

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Elizabeth, here.  I hope you had a chance to read Anna’s recent post about the importance of eliminating diet talk from schools. And did you see our new resource to share with teachers and coaches?  It makes it so easy to reach out and share your beliefs about food with anyone who works with your children.

Has everyone settled into the new school year?  If you’re anything like me, it’s the time of year you get stuck in the lunch-making-ho-hums.  I don’t love packing lunches and get tired of it pretty quickly!  As a way to prevent the ho-hums and mix things up a bit, I thought I’d share a few more ideas for quick and easy lunches to add to the LUNCH LIST.  

What’s For Lunch?

Leftover Pizza, Clementines and Homemade Oatmeal Craisin Cookies

Lunch Leftover Pizza, oatmeal cookies, clemintines

A teenager or older child would likely need at least two slices of pizza depending on the slice size.  (These are actually quite small. I had to cut this piece of pizza in two to fit it in the container).  Or add a Greek yogurt or some trail mix to lunch if there’s only one slice per older child.  For younger children, make a hole in the top of the clementines to make it easy for littler hands to peel them, or just peel them before putting them in the lunchbox.  

Leftover Pizza, oatmeal cookies and clementines

I love these Sistema lunch cubes as I mentioned here a few weeks ago.  They have plenty of room for a full lunch.  And the fact that the container closes between sections means less likelyhood the pizza or cookies will taste like clementines and vice versa.

Sistema Container

My youngest loves leftover pizza for lunch!  This makes me happy because it’s so easy and it really satisfies her.  …

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3 Favorite, Easy Back to School Lunches

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I love seeing all the back to school pictures this time of year!  (I’ll post a back to school picture once both kids have gone back to school.)  I can’t even believe it, but our 14 year old started high school on Monday.  Naturally, I’ve been thinking about what to pack for school lunches.  I settle into making the same lunches pretty often. I’ve definitely done that this summer.  So, I thought I’d start the school year off with some lunch ideas to share over the coming weeks. Hopefully, these will also be helpful to you and your family!  In the midst of all this meal planning, don’t forget to think about meals and snacks for yourself, too. 

Lunch, like all other meals and snacks doesn’t need to be perfect! There’s so much pressure to feed ourselves and our kids in some perfect way. At my house, the containers we use don’t match and I sometimes use plastic baggies. And my kids will eagerly tell you I’ve been known to forget to put things in their lunch bags, like utensils or even food. At some point last year, I got a text from Caroline during the day with a picture of the empty Thermos I put in her bag.  I forgot to add the food!  

3 Easy Lunches

One of the easiest lunches for me to pull together is lentils, rice and grated cheese.  I love these Trader Joe’s Steamed Lentils!   You can heat them or serve them cold (recipe for a lentil salad coming soon). All you need is some extra rice, or buy precooked, frozen rice to mix with the lentils and a little salt. I heat the Thermos by filling it with boiling water from our electric water kettle.  You can also use hot water from the tap. Screw the lid on the thermos and let it sit while you make lunch. Heat the mixture for 1-2 minutes on high in a microwave safe dish. The time will vary depending on your microwave. Remove it from the microwave and stir in about a 1/4 c grated cheese. Empty the hot water from the thermos and add the heated lentils, rice and cheese.

Easy back to school lunches…

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Peel N’ Eat Shrimp – A Family Beach Trip Tradition

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Peel N' Eat Shrimp

Anna and I both happened to be at the beach last week (different beaches).  Relaxing at the beach took me back to the food we ate during our annual trip to Emerald Isle, NC with dear family friends.  We had some sort of fresh seafood most nights, and my mom often made peel n’ eat shrimp.  That’s one of Anna’s family beach trip traditions too!  

As I watched my children and their cousins laughing and diving and jumping waves, I found myself reflecting on Anna’s most recent post  An Open Letter to My Daughter’s Camp Counselor.  When we focus on what not to eat or what we think we are supposed to eat, or weight loss; we miss out on life.  Instead of enjoying connecting with friends and family, we are distracted.  Food provides opportunities to create meaningful connections, traditions and memories.

Peel N' Eat Shrimp

Peel N’ Eat Shrimp

Anna and I each make peel n’ eat shrimp a little differently. I make it the way my mom did: by seasoning the water with some veggies, salt and lemon.  Anna’s family cooks the shrimp in unseasoned water.  I love this!  It doesn’t get any easier!! We had cocktail sauce my mom made by mixing horseradish into ketchup.  I think we also had plain ketchup for those who didn’t want any spice.  Anna’s family sets out horseraddish and ketchup to allow everyone to make their sauce as spicy or mild as they like.

I’m so glad I made peel n’ eat shrimp when I was at the beach!  WHY don’t I make this for dinner at home sometimes??? It’s SO EASY!  And the smell of the water as it came to a boil with plenty of salt, celery, carrot, onion and some fresh, flat leaf parsley took me back to heart warming memories of our yearly trips to Emerald Isle.  

Another method is to roast it in the oven instead of boiling it. I’m definitely going to try that soon! 

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On-The-Go Summertime Snacks

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Hi!  Elizabeth here!  Anna and I were recently brainstorming about our next post ideas and summertime snacks was one she mentioned.  It got me thinking that I’ve fallen into a bit of a snack rut of late. I’ve been offering prepackaged, peanut butter crackers A LOT lately. (Nothing wrong with prepackaged, I just haven’t been offering enough variety).  Our mouths and brains get tired of the same old same old.  As Anna talked about in he post Variety – It’s Not Just About Fruits and Veggies, our bodies and minds need variety.

And we also need snacks!  With the transition to trips to the pool and the summer weather, it’s time to bring on some new snacks!…

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Black Bean Taco Soup

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Black Bean Taco Soup Recipe

Hi!  Elizabeth here.  Thanks for stopping by!  I’ve been thinking a lot about Anna’s post about food rules  from last week.  So many of our clients come to us with a lifetime of unhelpful, rigid rules around food.  A big part of our work is guiding them to establish new, flexible, useful rules or guidelines.  Like Anna, I had similar, unrealistic rules about food when my girls were very young. Those rules about organic, local, in-season, etc, etc were impossible to follow without feeling like my head was going to spin off!  Thankfully, I have greatly relaxed those rules.

One guideline I use now is that I don’t have to make everything we eat.  I love to cook, and most food cooked at home tastes better than what you buy at the store. But we can’t live with me trying to cook everything!  I remind myself and my clients that it’s completely fine to buy pre-made, pre-packaged foods.  All meals aren’t meant to be made from scratch with a LOOOOONG list of ingredients.  I encourage clients to ask themselves, “what can I fix to eat that isn’t complicated and that will meet my (or my family’s) nutritional needs?”   Life is often hectic and we need guidelines to help us find balance in our lives – including with food….

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White Bean, Sausage and Kale Soup for a Wintery Spring Day

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White Bean Sausage and Kale Soup

I hadn’t planned on sharing a soup recipe this week.  But the weather has been so up and down, I found myself really craving a nice warm, hearty soup.  The weather experts had us expecting a “wintery mix” here in the DC Metro Saturday.  Thankfully, the forecast has changed, but it’s still going to be a good weekend for soup.  

Ellie and our Scottie, Nessie enjoying the snow a few weeks ago on the first day of spring.  

White Bean Sausage and Kale Soup

What do you love about soup?  I love soup for so many reasons.  It’s quick, easy and economical to make.  You can make a soup with pretty much any ingredients you like.  It’s also wonderful because you can easily make a big batch and have enough leftovers to use for lunches and still freeze some for those nights you need a ready-made meal.  And most of all, it’s warm and comforting. …

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Variety – It’s Not Just About Fruits and Veggies

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Growing up, my house didn’t have snack foods like chips or cookies. They weren’t necessarily forbidden foods, but they weren’t something that was in my pantry. I remember when I’d go to slumber parties as a teenager, I’d be pretty excited if there were chips. I still can remember that excitement about having these snack foods without my parents around and I typically would eat a lot of them. Yes, chips are quite tasty, but they also had more value to me because they were limited in my world. Recently, I wrote about 3 things parents can do to promote positive nutrition and healthy relationships with food at home — Focus on Family Meals, Practice Basic Meal Planning and Offer a Variety of Foods. I’ve been thinking over the last couple of weeks about elaborating on the concept of variety and the complexities of variety when feeding children.

“Clean eating” and diet culture have created fear around feeding children certain foods. Variety is important so …

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Favorite Everyday Salad with Mustard Vinaigrette

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Everyday Salad

Anna and I were recently brainstorming topics to share with our readers.  She mentioned her clients often ask her how to make a good salad and suggested I write a post about salads.  So, I thought I’d go ahead and share my family’s Favorite Everyday Salad.

We all love salad in our house!  But that hasn’t always been the case.  It’s one of those examples of food I kept serving even though the girls didn’t touch it for years.  They’d eat apples dipped in mustard vinaigrette or cucumbers and carrots dipped in dressing, but no salad. I followed (and still do) the Ellyn Satter Division of Responsibility that Anna talks about in Family Feeding – The Long Haul.  Letting kids decide what and how much they’ll eat of what’s offered allows kids to use their internal and intuitive cues….

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