This week in dinner....and a little about dessert

Dessert seems to be one of those topics that moms don't discuss a lot.  I don't know if they fear judgement of their mom peers or it just doesn't come up in the dozens of discussions about feeding youngsters, but I want to share how we do dessert in our house and how it has blessed us with children who don't beg and whine about sweets.

Before Atticus was born, dessert was a sort of haphazard thing that didn't happen with any predictable regularity.  Many times Little Ish and Lily would ask about it and Ish and I would say, "No, not tonight" as we didn't have anything planned.  Cue whining and disappointment from the kids.  They also, not knowing when they would get a sweet treat again, would often spend a lot of time pestering and whining for sweets.  Shortly after Atticus was born, I read the book French Kids Eat Everything and it inspired me to change the way we handle dessert in our home.  As an experiment, we started having dessert every single night.  Within less than a month of doing this, Ish and I both noticed that our children had stopped asking about sweets at all.  We realized that since they knew they would get dessert after dinner, they didn't have any need to ask about them.  Kids like routine and they like knowing what is going to happen.  Demystifying dessert by making it a routine did that for Lily and Little Ish.

How does your family do dessert?  


And now onto what we are eating for dinner this week:

Monday: Nachos at the request of Lily.  These are served with tomatoes, guacamole, refried beans and sometimes corn if someone requests it.

Tuesday: Irish Rice.  There is actually nothing Irish about the rice.  When I was growing up my dad made a dish that his family calls Irish Spaghetti.  It is diced tomatoes, ground beef, and onions all cooked up and thrown into a pound of thin spaghetti.  When I was pregnant with Lily, I had gestational diabetes and pasta was not a good food option for me.  Ish suggested we make the dish with brown rice instead of pasta.  It was delicious and the dish has stayed in our rotation ever since.

Wednesday: Potacos at the request of Little Ish.  I don't know what website I originally got this idea from, but basically it is a baked potato topped with taco meat and other taco toppings.  This is my family's favorite taco meat recipe; it freezes well so double the recipe for a quick meal some other night.

Thursday: Breaded baked chicken,  corn on the cob, and green beans

Friday: Dinner with family.

Saturday: A birthday BBQ for friends.

Sunday: Pizza at Ish's parents' house.

Linking up with Simcha!