Jeff and I have developed a rating system for meals at our house. Everything we eat can be rated from one to five stars. However, unlike others who use stars to rate the quality of food, we use it to rate the number of people in our family who will actually eat it. Consequently, ramen with shredded cabbage is a five-star meal in our house because we are all weird like that.
The rating system is helpful because it prevents us from serving crazy things like lasagna (three-star) or hamburgers (sometimes only two-star) too often. Our biggest challenge is feeding Ree. She is picky by our standards, but it's hard, because we know we have no right to complain. Ree's food rules include no tomato sauce or cheese in any form except on pizza and almost no bread products. (This one kills me. How did I give birth to a non-carb eater???)
In trying to figure out how to keep everyone healthy on a budget, we also have to deal with the facts that we try to limit meat consumption to no more than a couple of meals a week and dinner time in our house in insane. There is never a guarantee that we can cook anything around 5:00 p.m.
One of the greatest things about being home on maternity leave, though, is that I've had time to plan meals and I can cook them in the afternoon while the kids are napping or Jeff and I can divide up cooking duties at dinner time. And so, for the past week, we have been able to indulge in Ree-approved, often five-star meals. We've had vegetable fried rice, minestrone soup, curried lentils, shrimp fajitas, and a couple of recipes from Ree's kid's cookbook including Chinese meatballs and one called Chicken and Couscous with Juice Juice. In my final week of leave we are having bangers and mash, stir-fry, baked fish and chips, another dish that happens to involve chicken and couscous, and a quinoa pilaf. It's going to be sad to return to a world of chicken nuggets or a child refusing to eat and starving because we are having something crazy like spaghetti for dinner when I return to work.
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