What to Cook For Dinner? An Easy Idea to Make This Fun!

The time is 5 o’clock and your stomach clenches – What to make for dinner is the question racing through your mind. You know you want to prepare healthy meals for your family, but you’re tired and you don’t have all the ingredients for your favorite “go to” recipe so you pull out the frozen pizza instead.
Erin A. Kurt, author of Juggling Family Life: A Step-By-Step Guide to Stress-Free Parenting, has a fantastic and fun way for you to solve this ever arising problem!
Erin’s faboosh family dinner idea:

Choose a day of the week (I suggest Sunday) to sit together as a family and go through some inspiring cookbooks. Children as young as three can participate in this activity. Each member of the family is responsible for choosing a recipe for the main dish, and a vegetable that would accompany that meal. A salad is a given, and a dessert is optional.
Have everyone take turns reading out the ingredients needed for their recipe. A parent will usually be the one who writes down the ingredients, however if your children are nine or ten years old they can take this over every once in a while (great for spelling practice!)
Be sure to create a chart either made on the computer or by hand that states the days of the week along the left side and the words, Main Dish, Vegetable, Salad, and Dessert along the top. Depending on the age of your children, you could add the word “Chef” along the top as well so that you rotate the cooking responsibilities. (This should be reserved for children aged thirteen years or older).
After this is done, go shopping all together and have each person go off to find certain ingredients. As each ingredient is put in the cart, cross the items off the master list. The shopping trip will take less time and everyone will stay focused on the task at hand. If made to feel part of a team, your children will absolutely love to help out. Their self-esteem will grow because they feel part of a loving unit, that they are capable and that they are a respected, important member of the family.

Like this idea?
Get more amazing parenting tipz and ideaz from Erin HERE!