— Omar K

So first question is how old are the children and how involved are they in food prep and maybe helping to design the family menu or maybe grow grocery shopping or help you make an instacart order or whatever. of the easiest thing that I can say to this is doing things like batch cooking a bunch of rice and batch cooking a five pound bag of potatoes. Just throw them in the oven just bake them they're there because they can become the foundation for so many things if you are a family that likes tofu the Ruby recipe for the marinated tofu in my opinion is one of the best recipes ever because you can use it in salads if you make a bun me you can use it cut it into croutons if you make a salad, but I definitely would involve everyone find out what their favorite foods are and then as long as you have those potatoes and that rice in order because they are the longest things to cook when you think about it. It sounds to me like that's a very good way to plan when my kids were growing up. We had a three week rotation of menus. Don't think I'm that organized but it worked most nights and it just kind of helped to you know, move things along and lastly. Don't call leftovers leftovers, but name the dish because if somebody says to you, hey, we didn't think for dinner tonight. And you say leftovers. Most people already have conjured up an opinion about leftovers. So you want to give it a new name or something like that that might also be helpful. Sounds like you have a busy house. and a Crock-Pot might be something helpful where you can pre-cook some beans and I'll give you a great example if you Patch cook a bunch of sweet potatoes. You can make a Texas caviar, you know, it'll keep for five days. So you can have that sweet potato with Texas caviar and you could have some tofu with it and lots of other things some delicious rice. So you just kind of want to figure out what goes together and what your family likes. That's a great question. Oh, there's six and three the youngest is very interested. He will help make food and then refuse to eat it. The oldest is not at all interested, but he'll eat at least a little of what we make. So that's a great start and you know this week. I was grading an assignment and I saw the sweetest thing ever where a student was pouring her chocolate ganache mixture into the pie plate that's filled with pecan crust and her little daughter was holding the the canister to the food processor and I just thought that that was such a great thing. What I will say is Omar do not succumb to the new wave of easy plant-based foods that are coming onto the market because a they're expensive and they're highly highly processed most are highly processed. So keep the kids in the kitchen. And it sounds like you're off to a really good start and I'm glad you found the responses helpful.