How Our Dinners Evolved

Note in these pictures our son was in charge of setting the table.

Back somewhere in 2007 / 2008 I had a frustrating moment with dinners.  I would make this amazing time consuming meals for my family of 3.  Anticipating the time my husband would come home.  Just to have him not show up for 1-2 hours later.  The kicker was he only worked a mile away.  Each night dinner continued to get colder and colder until I decided to just eat and put the extras in the fridge.

After having our 2nd child I decided that the types of meals I was making was not going to help me lose the added weight gain of 2 pregnancies and medical complications afterwards.  In addition to add in that my husband was at a new job and got home after the kids were in bed.  So I made kid meals.  Grilled Cheese sandwiches, pancakes, cereal. You get the idea.  The ones they never complain when they eat.  

Then I started the journey ahead of me.  In two years I lost weight.  Yet in the process of moving out of State and the stress of buying a house out of State.  I gained a little back though for a total I have kept off 70 pounds.  Which is a huge accomplishment.  For months I wanted to get back to cooking for my family.  I wanted to cook healthy meals.  Though after 2 years of not cooking regularly it was a big undertaking without even adding the healthy aspect.  Since I had lost the weight not cooking I had a warped interpretation that losing weight was not possible while cooking at the same time.  For some reason I felt that I had to cook two different meals.

In the month of January I moved to counting calories.  From Christmas day until now I have gone down 10 pounds while cooking for my family.  You mean it is possible??  But how??

It took effort real effort in the beginning to take a meal and add up all the ingredients.  To figure out how many servings I would use and then know 1 cup of Taco Soup = 161 calories  or that I made 7 servings of Pasta and each = 291 calories.  After taking the time to do this once and maybe add it up a time here or there if I use different ingredients.  I love using Livestrong.com to add these recipes together.  Especially the complicated ones.

Taco Soup has the date on it since I just made two batches to have for dinner and freeze after.  

The great thing was jumping back into real dinners for the family was like I had never stopped.  

So now I am in search of new dinner ideas that your family loves!  Post a comment and share your favorite family dinner recipe.