Kids Meals without a Side of Plastic

I have almost completely eradicated plastic from my kitchen (except for a few sippies my kids just can't yet part with). Those of you who have small children know this is not easy to do since small children have a tendency to break things. So what do I serve my kids' meals on that won't break? Stainless Steel!

My little ones eat every meal on stainless steel army surplus mess trays - they won't break if dropped, won't trap bacteria, you can cut food up on them, you can put warm items on them without worry of melting plastic, they are dishwasher safe, and they have lots of compartments so I don't hear the "MOMMY! My peas are touching my pasta!!" (accompanied by the theatrical "slump over and die" mime). They take mealtime drinks out of stainless cups and eat with child-sized stainless flatware. On the go, they typically drink from stainless steel sippies and lunch/snack is packed in stainless containers.

Improving Our Food

I love to cook and I love talking about cooking.

I'll start by saying I am not a highly experienced cook. When I was working, I ate great lunches - none of which were prepared by me. But dinner? Before I was married, that was whatever I could scrounge after finally leaving the office. I made zero effort to cook for myself. It was a major challenge whenever I tried to impress a date with a home cooked meal! But once I married eight years ago, my husband and I really tried to eat dinner together each evening, and we made effort to incorporate fresh vegetables. My husband is a great cook. In fact, he had a job as a short order cook when he was in high school. So he can make a great burger, steak, sandwich, omelette and pancake. I had to ramp up my skills in the kitchen. I took out the cookbooks we received as wedding gifts and began to read, slowly expanding my repertoire.

When I became pregnant with my first child, I completely transformed my diet. I became far more conscious of eating all natural, if not organic, foods. I had known for some time about the concerns of plastic leaching chemicals into food, so was very careful not to buy hot foods in plastic containers on my lunch break and I never put plastic in the microwave. Over time, I became more and more careful. By the time my first child was born, I had become totally devoted to eradicating hormones, pesticides, chemicals and antibiotics from our food. I became determined to feed my baby only the healthiest foods. I was breastfeeding, so this meant that my diet became exceptionally good. This continued once my child began eating solid foods.

After my second child was born, I became even more focused on preparing delicious, all natural meals. I wanted to make dinner time one meal for which everyone wanted to be there - I think it's important, as a family, to eat together. And by this point, all of our meat and dairy was organic - most of our fruits and vegetables, too. Basically, I wanted anything that we ate or drank a lot of to be organic. Beyond that, I stayed away from the obvious dangers - high fructose corn syrup, anything that had highly scientific words in the ingredients, artificial colors or flavors, MSG. It was pretty simple.

I recently read a book that made a lot of sense to me and I highly recommend it - Master Your Metabolism by Jillian Michaels.

In future postings, I'll share some of the recipes we enjoy most (none of which take very long) and I'll share a few tips that help me in the kitchen.

Tap Water

We read our city's water report, then had our tap water tested and determined it was safe to drink, though a bit hard. So we stopped buying bottled water and started drinking from the tap. To improve the taste, we filter the tap water with a Brita filter insert fitted to a glass pitcher (I've yet to find a glass Brita pitcher in the US).

I highly recommend doing this. Knowing your drinking water is safe from major contaminants gives tremendous peace of mind and allows you to eliminate bottled water, which can be expensive and carries its own health risks (chemicals leaching from the plastic containers).

We bought our kit from National Testing Laboratories.

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