- my iParenting
- quick clicks
- recipes today articles
- recipes today q&a
- message boards
- research baby names
- prepare a birth plan
- content channels
- ip channel rss feeds
- read birth stories
- read parenting stories
- recommended books
- e-newsletters
- safety recalls
- ip diaries
- ip store
- mom of the month
- dad of the month
- editor's letter
- letters to the editor
 |
- e-newsletters
- Sign up to receive our free weekly e-newsletters
- award-winning products
The iParenting Media Awards program helps parents find the best products for their families.
Pancakes for Dinner
Don't Flip Out at Dinnertime
By Joan Oberndorf
Creating menus and cooking meals can be complicated. Searching for great dinner ideas is a thankless job. It's hard to be creative within the typical families' time limitations. Add on the requirements of good taste, nutrition and kid appeal, and the task looms over the day. Eventually it wears you down and burns you out.
So what do you do, in your burned-out, worn-down state? As a single, childless 20-something, I used to eat Oodles of Noodles. Most likely everyone on the planet has eaten these, but in case you haven't, Oodles of Noodles was an instant noodle soup mix, made by boiling the noodles and adding a packet of salty brown or yellow powder (beef or chicken, take your pick). My version, I think, was especially tasty. The trick was to drain the noodles (forget about the soup entirely) and mix them with butter and half of the seasoning packet. When I wanted to be fancy I'd grate a little cheddar cheese on top. Back then my motto was, "Almost anything tastes better with a little cheese on top." This was my dirty-little-secret meal; the kind of thing you don't talk about with friends or family. My friend, Mary Ann, once told me about her dirty-little-secret meal. In the early days of her marriage, she confided, she and her husband would sit down to a dinner of ... cereal. To me, this kind of meal seemed way too low fat and not nearly salty enough to qualify for the dirty-little-secret category. To me it sounded more like a candidate for the ideal meal: quick, nutritious and with minimal clean up.
I haven't fed my husband and daughter Oodles of Noodles yet, though they'd probably love it. But I do believe that having breakfast for dinner occasionally is not such a bad idea, though for me, cold cereal doesn't do the trick. I eat it almost every day first thing in the morning, and I want something heartier for my evening meal. There's another slant to the whole breakfast for dinner idea, and I read about it in a newsletter put out by a parent's group I belong to. In it, the author mentioned feeding her boys pancakes for dinner. I give her total credit for starting me on my pancake journey.
