veggieTOT, Author at veggieTOT

8 Healthy Make-and-Freeze Breakfasts for Toddlers (And I’ve Tested All of Them!)

11.21.2016 by veggieTOT // Leave a Comment

I have a love-hate relationship with cooking. I love it because for years, it’s been a hobby of mine, and then it became a career. It’s brought me a lot of good things! But I hate it because: time. Or, rather, a lack of it. When you have a toddler, you can’t exactly spend a leisurely morning making waffles. I’ve learned that when I do have time to cook—mostly on the weekends—I need to prep as many meals as I possibly can to make weekdays easier. And make-and-freeze breakfasts are the perfect place to start because mornings are the most chaotic time of the day.

The problem with freezer meals is that some things just don’t freeze well. Who wants to waste all that time preparing something to freeze and have it end up being inedible? So you have my personal guarantee that these breakfasts are freezer-friendly because I’ve made every single one of them—and most, I’ve made multiple times.

Make & Freeze Cinnamon Peach Baked Oatmeal Squares
I’m not a fan of freezing traditional oatmeal—I know a lot of people do it, but I’ve found that to get a creamy texture upon reheating, I have to add a lot of liquid, and adding all that liquid dilutes the flavor. Boo. This is the perfect solution: oatmeal in squares. It’s like oatmeal meets cake meets bread pudding and it’s a favorite in our house.

Almond Butter Pancakes from Two Peas and Their Pod
These are simple to make and I love that they incorporate almond butter for a protein boost.

Sweet Potato Banana Bites from The Lean Green Bean
I don’t know what it is about these things, but Sweet Pea can’t get enough of them. I’ve made several batches—they freeze beautifully and they work well in lunchboxes too.
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This Week’s Eats

10.30.2016 by veggieTOT // Leave a Comment

Need some tried-and-true meal ideas? I know the feeling and I’m here to help! Every Thursday, I share some of the meals we’ve eaten in the past week—only the winners, because who wants to waste time on recipe fails? Here’s what was on our menu this week:

Roasted Cauliflower with Punjabi Seasoning from Vegetarian India
We rounded this out with naan and chickpea curry—I cut down on the oil a little bit, but stuck to the recipe other than that. This week, we had several breakthroughs with Little Pea where she’s finally eating foods she normally takes one bite of and promptly spits out; cauliflower is one of them. I had read that even if a toddler doesn’t eat a certain food that you should keep serving it to them (as opposed to saying, “well, so-and-so won’t eat cauliflower, so I won’t bother making it”) and I’m glad I followed that advice because it paid off.
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Sheetpan Chickpea Fajitas with Cumin-Lime Crema

10.24.2016 by veggieTOT // Leave a Comment

Normally when I make fajitas, I make them in a skillet. I also like to call them fa-jee-tas, because I’m a weirdo. Anyway! Skillet fajitas are good, but I thought I could make them even tastier by baking the filling on a sheetpan—the veggies would get nicely browned that way and, if I used chickpeas, I could get them to have a perfectly crisp exterior. Crispy chickpeas! They are the best, right?

This is the part where I make the case for buying dried chickpeas. Buy dried chickpeas! I used to always buy canned beans because, hello, who wants to spend all that time cooking the dried ones? But then I read that even BPA-free cans might not be safe—the chemical used to replace BPA is kind of sketchy too. If I were just making food for myself and my husband, I probably wouldn’t think much of it, but since I’m cooking for Little Pea now, I decided to switch to dried beans.
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