I like to keep my kids on a schedule.
For the past two years, yes two years, I’ve been feeding my kids the same breakfast food week after week. It was a simple schedule:
Oatmeal Monday
French Toast Tuesday
Waffle Wednesday
Huevos Jueves (Loosely translated to Eggs on Thursday)
Free Choice Friday
My feeling was always, “If it isn’t broke, don’t fix it.” Then, recently it started to break. The kids ate less and less each day. I started looking for new breakfast ideas. In order for me to accept a new breakfast choice it needed to fit the following criteria:
– be reasonably healthy
– something I could make in less than 15 minutes
– preferably not something straight out of a package
After a few hours of Google searches, I came up with some new ideas that we tested out last week.
Parfait Monday- Vanilla yogurt, blueberries, and granola topped with strawberries.
Tuesday- Peanut Butter Pancakes. We buy a pretty good pancake mix from Costco that just needs egg, milk, water and oil added. I subbed out some of the oil and water with peanut butter. We topped them off with strawberries leftover from the day before.
Wednesday- Sausage, egg and cheese English Muffin. For some reason we had a gigantic 3lb. tube of sausage in our freezer, so one afternoon I formed it all into patties, fried it and froze it. We now have a month’s worth of ready to go sausage divided up into bags that each hold a weekly serving.
Thursday- Blueberry Power Muffins with Almond Streusel. I had the leftover blueberries from parfait Monday that I needed to use, so I kept googling recipes until I found a muffin recipe where I had most of the ingredients. I made these during nap the day before, it was a lot of work, but I made three weeks worth of muffins during one nap time, so that felt like a success. They weren’t the healthiest muffins either because I substituted two cups of ice cream for the non-fat yogurt the recipe called for. And what makes them Power Muffins? I have no idea, but my son thinks the muffins give him special powers so we will keep calling them that.
Friday will forever remain “Free Choice Friday,” but if I’m being honest, Free Choice Friday should more accurately be called, “We’re almost out of groceries for the week, eat whatever is left.”
This is the new Breakfast Routine. We’ll go with this for a few weeks and then decide whether or not to make it “official.” If you have any other breakfast suggestions you’d like to share, please feel free to do so. I would love to hear what you are serving for breakfast and I’m sure others would like to know too.
Thanks.
-Pete