5 Fam Faves, Healthified

I’ve written before about our diet, and how it changed for the better over a decade ago. Sometimes people think that making a healthy meal means there’s no flavor, but that doesn’t have to be the case. And when it comes to feeding kids, it just won’t do. We have to find some balance of healthy enough and still yummy.

I think most kids go through picky stages. All of ours have! There’s also a wide range of likes and dislikes to consider with each person in the family. That means that a lot of evenings I get some frowns over what I’ve made for dinner, if not straight out complaints. But there are a few meals that we all enjoy.

Today I’m sharing with you 5 of our family’s favorite meals, and how I’ve tweaked them to make them healthier, but just as appetizing. There are lots of details we could get into about eating healthy, but to keep things simple I want to focus on these things: aim for less fat and sugar, aim for more fiber and protein, and look for a simple list of whole ingredients.

Making Tacos as a Healthy Meal

Tacos is one meal our whole family loves, even with our picky eaters. Here’s what we tweak to make them more healthy:

• Buy tortillas or taco shells with whole grains.
• Buy ground beef with no more than 20% fat, and drain most of it out after it’s cooked.
• Mix refried beans into the ground beef, because they are high in fiber and protein.
• Instead of sour cream we use plain yogurt, which tastes almost exactly the same, is lower in fat and higher in protein, and has probiotics that make a healthy gut.
• Don’t forget the chopped lettuce and tomatoes to add more fiber and vitamins, not to mention some color and texture!

Making Waffles as a Healthy Meal

Waffles is another of our family’s favorites! Breakfast for dinner is always a hit around our house.

Here’s how I make waffles more healthy:

• I use a mix of unbleached white flour and whole wheat flour to keep the soft texture but also give the protein, fiber, and vitamins that wheat was grown with. Did you know that most white flour starts as whole wheat, gets stripped of the brown part, and then gets bleached? That leaves only fluff to eat…
• We like to use a less refined sugars in our recipes and in our syrup to avoid the sugar rush that overprocessed sugars give. You can also use less sugar than the recipe says without changing the flavor much (especially if your kids dump on the syrup like mine do 😐). Avoid high fructose corn syrup, as the high fructose means it’s a concentrated form.
• We cut the fat in the waffles in half by trading half of the oil for applesauce. I’ve tried replacing all of it with applesauce and it doesn’t come out well. But just replacing half works great.
• We like to put peanut butter and vanilla yogurt on our waffles. We look for natural peanut butter that doesn’t have hydrogenated oils. We also look for the sugar content in the yogurt, because some kinds get pretty crazy with the amount of added sugar.
• Serve with plenty of berries that are full of fiber and vitamins!

Making Potato Soup as a Healthy Meal

One of my favorites growing up was potato soup, which was just boiled potatoes in white sauce. Yum! To make that an acceptable meal after we tried to healthify, we needed to add some slow carbs. So we chopped and steamed some cauliflower and added it to our soup, and you know what? We love it that way!

Making Stroganoff as a Healthy Meal

Another meal our family all enjoys is stroganoff. This one has really similar tweaks to the other ones:

• Make sure the ground beef is no more than 20% fat, and drain it after it’s cooked.
• Make sure your noodles have fiber in them.
• “Better than Bullion” is a good alternative to bullion. It doesn’t have as many strange ingredients in it, and it really tastes good.
• Use plain yogurt instead of sour cream.
• Any dish that doesn’t include slow carbs, needs some on the side, so with our stroganoff we have chopped veggies.

Making Pizza as a Healthy Meal

I have met very few people ever who don’t like pizza! And our family is no exception. Sometimes we splurge and buy pizza from a restaurant, but most of the time we make it our healified way.

• We make the dough with half unbleached white flour and half whole wheat flour.
• Making it ourselves we can control how much cheese or other toppings we put on our pizza.
• As always its served with chopped veggies.

I hope this gave you a good idea of how to healthify your meals, and maybe gave you an idea of what’s for dinner tonight. 😊 You can read more about our efforts at nutrition in Simple Nutrition for Your Kids.

I hope you’re enjoying your adventure!