homemade chicken noodle soup and banana ice cream

Last week I bought a rotisserie chicken for an easy dinner. The boy took a few bites of a drumstick.

This week I used the carcass to make chicken stock, then used the stock to make chicken noodle soup. Verdict = semi-fail. I served breadsticks with it, and he enjoyed dipping the breadstick in the soup, but we had to lure him with the promise of dessert to get him to take actual bites of the soup.

Dessert was, of course, a big winner: banana ice cream. Not ice cream with bananas in it, but the soft serve you make yourself by putting frozen sliced banana in a food processor and continually processing it until it becomes a fluffy, frozen, delicious wonder. Just for fun, I added a couple tablespoons of powdered peanut butter. So there's almost no sugar. And it's vegan, though that's not my concern. And there's more in the freezer waiting for me when I get home tonight.

Win.

tortilla pizza and chocolate spinach smoothies

Last week I made pizza using tortillas as the pizza crust. Sacrilege! But it's so good, crispy, and easy to make it will be on the regular rotation. Verdict = meh. My son may have eaten half a small slice. No idea why, but I will be making it again and will try to rope him into the topping process in an attempt to pique his interest. Here's the recipe I used as a template.

Since my son avoids most vegetables, I snuck them (in full view of him) into an amazing chocolate smoothie! Here's the recipe. Veridict = win! He loved it. He wanted "a bunch." Actually, so did I. Next time I'll throw in a few ice cubes.

Then the other day I found an unused, expired, but perfectly good container of ricotta cheese. I think I bought it in hopes of feeding it to my son with a bit of honey for dessert (the best laid plans...). To avoid throwing out such bounty, I made lemon ricotta cookies and put most of them in the freezer. I believe in health and balance, but sheesh. Ya gotta have a cookie now and then, and I have decided that if I'm going to the trouble of making cookies I will make the best possible instead of trying to make it "healthy." Because it's a cookie. Verdict = are you kidding? It's a cookie. Of course he liked it.

dinner last night

Since I'm the chief cook, meal planner and food gatherer, I'm fairly obsessed about feeding my small family. Yes, Dream Dinners has saved much of my sanity, but I can't eat it every day. Mostly because I actually want to cook now and again. At the end of the day though, my biggest concern is feeding my toddler dinner. More specifically, feeding him something he'll eat besides mac & cheese. Finally, since I know I'm not the only parent in the world who struggles to feed a picky toddler, I'm going to start posting my dinner experiments.

Last night I made mac & cheese. But hey, at least it was organic and I didn't stop there. I also nuked a package of frozen broccoli with cheese sauce and added that to the mix, using scissors to cut the broccoli up as small as I could. And to make it even more irresistable, I added a couple dollops of low fat sour cream. Verdict: Success! The boy ate quite a bit of this.

I also had a separate plate with cut-up bbq chicken breast and turkey hot dogs so we could pick off small bites. Verdict: Success. I believe he ate about half a hot dog and maybe an ounce of chicken (normally he doesn't touch meat but loves soft-textured meat products).

Finally, I served steamed carrots and piled some butter on his. Verdict: Semi-fail. He might have eaten one small carrot stick, and ate the butter instead.

This morning I actually made smoothies for breakfast (I have this habit of buying the ingredients and then forgetting to use them). This contained plain yogurt, unsweetened almond milk, peanut butter, chia seeds, banana and frozen blueberries. No added sugar. Verdict: Success! He drank nearly two cups.