Since revealing our daughter's new dietary restrictions, I have had many people concerned with what she can eat. I have also shared how we went through a period of time where our grocery bill doubled as we were figuring out our new groove. I thought it might be helpful to document what a typical week of allergy friendly meals looks like in our house now to give encouragement to other allergy families or even those who are wanting to eat clean. This particular week, I spent about $100 on food. It is still a little more than what I am used to spending, but overall, I am very happy with this amount, especially considering we rarely eat out anymore, so we are actually saving money in the long run.
Breakfasts
My kids' rotation of meals: smoothies (frozen fruit, collagen, flax meal, spinach or other veg), eggs, bacon or sausage, oatmeal, pumpkin or banana oat pancakes, gluten free pumpkin muffin mix from Trader Joe's
My husband and I eat pretty much the same thing every single day: eggs with greens and mushrooms. If he works early, he eats cottage cheese with fruit. Occasionally, I will have a pancake or muffin that the kids are eating, but most days, we stick to our eggs and veggies.
Lunches
Kids meals: Lunch is a meal I never fuss over. I always buy a variety of options, and they eat "snack lunches" almost every day. Options include sunflower seed butter and jelly on gluten free bread, variety of vegetables and fruit (cucumbers, carrots, tomatoes, celery, mango, pineapple, apples, applesauce, tangerines, etc.), hard boiled eggs, Applegate lunch meats or Aldi's "Never Any" brand (turkey, ham, salami, pepperoni), leftovers from dinner (soups, bbq, etc), burgers with no bun for my daughter, avocado, plantain chips.
Adult lunches: Our meals don't change much. We try to stick to leftovers from the night before. If we don't have any, my husband likes to eat a big salad. I'm far too lazy to cut up all that salad stuff, so I like to eat a turkey sandwich on sprouted bread from Aldi and some kind of fruit and veggies.
Dinners
Here are all of the dinners that we had this week. It's a very typical week around here. All quick and easy. I went into the week with shredded chicken and broth that I had made over the weekend when I made soup. Half of the chicken was boiled and used for gluten free chicken noodle soup on Saturday, half of the chicken was reserved for Monday night. The bones were used to make broth in the InstantPot for later in the week.
Sunday: Broiled spicy cod, green beans, carrots, and baked cinnamon apples. I made this after church in under 20 minutes.
Monday: Bbq chicken from the chicken that I boiled on Saturday. It literally took me ten minutes to make dinner this night. I put the chicken in a pan with bbq sauce and heated it through. My husband and son had theirs on buns. My daughter and I had ours without a bun. I served it with fruit and raw vegetables for my kids. My husband and I had ours with salad.
Tuesday: Potato soup. Instead of using flour and cream to thicken and make creamy, I pureed about a cup of cooked cauliflower and and a small amount of potatoes and stirred it in to the finished soup. No one thought it tasted much different. My husband and son put shredded cheese in theirs.
Wednesday: Pork tenderloin with acorn squash and Brussels sprouts. One dish dinners are my jam. Throw it all together and let the oven do the work. If I was going to do this particular combo again, I would put the squash in first for about 15 minutes, and then the rest, but otherwise, it was good. Pork tenderloin was already in our freezer so I didn't buy this meat this week.
Thursday: Ground beef and cabbage Italian skillet. I seasoned with salt, pepper, oregano, garlic, and thyme, and threw in some salsa since I was out of tomatoes. I added fish sauce and hot sauce for a deeper flavor and it tasted similar to cabbage rolls. A simple meal that took about 2o minutes to make.
Friday: We went out for dinner to an Italian restaurant. My daughter had gluten free pasta with meat sauce.
Saturday: One night of the weekend, I try to serve something fun or a little more special and we watch a movie together. This particular night we had steak, ribs, baked potatoes (Bailey eats her potato with salt only), and salad. My kids had mango and carrots as well. Steak and ribs are usually very pricey, but we still have some meat from our ¼ cow and ½ pig we bought last year, and we are trying to eat down our freezer meat before replenishing it this year, so it becomes an almost free meal, since we paid for the meat last year.
So that is a typical week of meals for our family, some with dietary restrictions, some without. Now you can be assured that my daughter isn't starving. 🙂
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