Menu planning is a wonderful tool for: Reducing food waste, easing daily stress (what’s for dinner?!), and economizes your grocery bill. 1) It’s best to choose the same day and time every week to plan the next week’s dinners. If you frequent farmer’s markets, you probably know what is in season and what might be available. 2) Look at what you have in your fridge, freezer, and pantry. 3) Look at the schedule for everyone involved. 3) Begin writing down each day of the week and under that day write the family schedule so you are reminded this is piano class day, or yoga class, or whatever. Now from all the other information you’ve gathered create meals for each night. The busiest days you want to make easy meals like stuffed baked potatoes, pasta and sliced veggies, or rice and seasoned beans with avocado and salsa. easier days you might go for a stir fry on rice, enchiladas, a veggie lasagna, or a bean soup. There are lot of recipes in the Nitya Living Cookbook , available on Amazon. This is the cookbook we use for Summer Yoga Camp. When making your weekly menu plan, try to have one day like Sunday afternoon when you might make something that can be frozen or put in tupperware and used for lunches or a quick dinner. What you are trying to avoid is processed packaged foods, and fast food. Going out to eat is fine but remember the salt content is typically really high and you don’t always know where their food is sourced. I have been eating a seasonal, local, vegetarian diet for over 12 years and find it to be the cleanest, healthiest, most sustainable way to nourish my body.
Eating together as a family is an ancient tradition and a beautiful way to come together at least once a day to say a prayer of gratitude, to share what happened in your day, and for children to learn to eat what their parents eat. Everyone eats the same dishes all together. At Summer Yoga Camp we have turned many picky eaters into adventurous eaters. This really begins by getting your children, even as young as 3 years old, into the habit of going to the farmer’s market, and coming home to make a meal together. Your child being an active participant begins to understand where their food is sourced from, how it is prepared and cooked, and then how it tastes as it is nourishing them. Food is great when it is tasty but we eat to be nourished, to grow, to develop our brains, to support a strong immune system.
When in the grocery store try to avoid single use plastics, mini cups of applesauce, overly processed cheese sticks, sugary squeeze yogurt tubes, granola bars that often have as much sugar as a candy bar. Use re-usable containers to buy foods in bulk and dele out portions suitable for your child. Waste is a huge problem in the USA. A sliced apple is far more likely to be eaten than giving a small child a whole apple. A big banana could be sliced in half. Set your child up for success by giving them things they can open themselves. If they go to school and are in a class of 12-24 kids, the teacher may not be able to assist every child. Give them things they can easily open themselves.
Read labels and teach your kids how to read them too. See how much sugar is in their cereal, for example. Sugar is a real issue and it is just like a drug in how our body reacts to it. No child should be given candy, cookies, and all these sugary snack items. I don’t even call those things food because they do not nourish us. In fact, sugar weakens the immune system, it slows down brain function, causes foggy thinking, irritability and mood swings, and hyperactivity. Good sugars show up in our diet naturally like potatoes, grains, fruit, and dried fruit. Avoid being a science experiment and look for the labels that say NO GMO, Organic, and buy things that aren’t heavily packaged.
You are your child’s teacher, and you are teaching yourself too, how to live a healthy, sustainable life by making the best food choices you can.
Follow Us!
