We partnered with Harmony Books to share this post.
If you’ve ever tried to change the way your family eats — whether that means eating more vegetables, cooking more at home, or having your kids eat a wider variety of food — even just paying more attention to what goes in your mouth… …the minute you make that commitment, there are obstacles everywhere. The first couple of weeks, those obstacles feel like mountains.
I don’t know about your house, but at my house, sometimes getting dinner cooked and on the table every night is a mountain.(Hello drive-thru!) But the biggest obstacles are my little kids who are highly opposed to ANY additional vegetables being added to their plates right now. If it were up to my middle child, she would subsist on cheese and pasta alone, and maybe cookies. Cookies are good.
Trim Healthy Mama’s Trim Healthy Table
Trim Healthy Mama recently invited us to review their newest cookbook. I have to be honest, until then, I was not familiar with Trim Healthy Mama. I had no idea how passionate people were about Pearl Barrett and Serene Allison, the sisters who created the Trim Healthy Mama concept, their philosophy about food and family meals, and their recipes! (There are a LOT of recipes! This cookbook alone has more than 300 of them!) The Trim Healthy Mama eating style focuses on a simple concept. All meals are anchored in protein. You can eat a meal with protein and carbs or you can eat a meal with protein and fat, but no carbs and fat in the same meal. (There are some important exceptions but this is the general rule.) I get that. It makes sense to me. Easy peasy… When I first thumbed through the Trim Healthy Table cookbook, I thought the photos were beautiful, it was well organized, a section on the diet guidelines was concise and easy to understand, and there was just the right amount of personal chatting and stories to keep the cookbook interesting.My Biggest Meal Time Challenge? Kids and Vegetables!
Because the recipes looked easy, I picked several for my meal plan the following week. We tried, the Cabbage Roll in a Bowl, Creamy Verde Chicken Chili (I LOVE Chicken Chili!), the Blackened Fish Tacos in a Bowl and the Tuscan Cream Chicken.
I was SHOCKED at the problems Trim Healthy Table solved for me at dinner time.
Pearl and Serene have a great philosophy about vegetables for dinner! There are vegetables in every dinner time meal. But there are also HIDDEN vegetables in every dinner time meal. So you can win the war about the tomatoes with your kids but they never know about the cauliflower in the soup that literally cooks away into the creamy goodness.
It is brilliant. I am a big proponent of kids seeing fruits and vegetables in their meals and in the kitchen. How do kids learn that fruits and vegetables are delicious and normal if they never see them in their food? But I like the increased odds of vegetable consumption between the veggies they see and the veggies they don’t know are there. 🙂
My kids ate WILDLY more veggies this week than the week before we were introduced to Trim Healthy Mama.
Putting the Trim in Trim Healthy Mama
What I found after a week of eating Trim Healthy Mama dinners and then eating left overs the following day for lunch – was I was really FULL! Like, satisfied full, not like I ate 5 cookies full. I actually found that I had to reduce the volume of food I would normally fix for myself because I was full much sooner. And I AM NOT the kind of mom that eats a little and waves my plate away… I am the opposite of that mom. So I was really surprised! (I am starting to understand the trim in Trim Healthy Mama.)
Fast Prep + Shortcuts = Dinner I Can Actually Cook on a Weeknight
The last thing I really loved about this cookbook was most of the recipes were really 30 minutes or less, and if there was a possibility of including a shortcut, these ladies, they figured it out. You can really tell that the authors actually have busy lives and families to feed. They have nailed how to get dinner on the table on a weeknight with enough leftovers for lunch the next day. In case I haven’t mentioned it, the food was delicious. My favorite recipe was the Creamy Verde Chicken Chili. It literally took me five minutes to put the ingredients in the crock pot and turn it on. And my family was completely in love with this chili until the last bite was gone. So check out this chicken chili recipe. Download it, and go try it for your family, and when you’re ready, pop over to this link and grab the Trim Healthy Table cookbook that just released in stores! You’re going to love it!!
Reprinted from Trim Healthy Mama; Trim Healthy Table. Copyright ©2017 by Pearl P. Barrett and Serene C. Allison. Published by Harmony Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.
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Indeed you have solved dinner time problems.