Make it healthier – pizza sauce

Pizza is something the boys will always eat! If I ask what they would like for dinner, 9 our of 10 times, the 4 year old will answer pizza. He doesn’t get pizza 9 out of 10 times of course, but with some little tweaks to the recipes, you can easily make pizza a healthy meal for the family.

Fritatta with green vegetables

The quest for new, inspiring and healthy food for dinners continue. As the boys are still a bit young and picky in their dinner choices, I try to find quick and healthy alternatives for us adults to eat after the monkeys are in bed. One new dish I have tried that will definitely be made again is this fritatta. It is a pretty green dinner, but in a good way with all the added goodness of the healthy green vegetables. If you don’t have all the ingredients, you can always swap for something different.

Dinner at a pop-up restaurant

It is always exciting to try out new and innovative food. Every year there is a large food festival in Stavanger, called Glad Mat (happy food), where the entire harbour area in town is filled with food stalls by producers, restaurants and other organizations within the food industry. The restaurants in the region often have special menus featured, there are concerts in town and just overall a great buzz in the entire city.

Broccoli salad with seared duck breast

Trying to keep the mid-week meals high in vegetables and low in fat is always a challenge, but this is definitely a new favorite for a mid-week dinner with the family.

Gyoza

Recently I made an attempt at making the Japanese dumplings called Gyoza. I have to admit I did not have all the appropriate ingredients for the dish to make it fully Japanese, but they turned out delicious nonetheless.

Before you consider getting started, you need to find and buy gyoza wrappers. I found these in the freezer section in an Asian grocery store. The wrappers are extremely thin, but fairly easy to work with.

Summer potato salad

Even if the calendar says June and it is supposed to be Summer, the weather seems to think it is October! The wind is howling outside and it is raining horizontally. But the weather forecast seems to be showing some improvement for the weekend. Fingers crossed that we will finally see some Summer weather and be able to bring out the shorts and t-shirts. It just feels weird sending your kids to kindergarten in June with woolen longs on. But with the cold wind and temperatures still in the single digits, there is just nothing to do about that. At least they don’t look at the calendar when we dress them in the morning still.

Savoury muffins

It is always a challenge to find new and exciting dishes to serve that is interesting to both the kids and us adults. The boys are still so young that they really prefer fairly simple dishes and would happily eat sausages everyday if they had been allowed to. And it is really difficult not to end up in a circle of serving the same dishes over and over. Every now and then I come across ideas for dishes that I can use to make meals we can enjoy together with the boys and that can fairly easily be made into an interesting meal for everyone.

Bulgur dinner salad

A bulgur salad is a nice and filling, yet healthy meal. You can use it next to any protein really and just adjust the content of the salad. Using grain like bulgur adds some filling carbohydrates without being very heavy.

I tend to make these kinds of dishes when we hold off on our dinner until the boys are in bed. It is nice to have something a little bit more flavorful and interesting without it being an overpowering meal quite late during the day.

Spring potato salad

A lot of dishes come to life when you rummage through the fridge, wondering what to use for a certain dish. A little like a mystery box off MasterChef. 🙂 (Yes, I like MasterChef, specifically Australian MasterChef!)

This potato salad is exactly that, a result of finding some pre-cut potatoes sitting in water in the fridge. We had planned to use them for dinner a couple of days ago, but we obviously decided to make something else and forgot about them. Luckily they were perfectly fine still and just waiting to be used.

French onion soup

Again we have had some lovely and busy days on the weekend with exceptional weather on Sunday. That of course has an impact on the time to work on the blog. But not to worry, I have had the opportunity to work on some dishes, I just haven’t had too much time to write up the posts. In the garden, we have dug up loads and loads of dandelions. The boys have helped carry them over to the compost and have been such good little gardeners, sharing a kid sized wheel barrow and running back and forth in the garden. We still have loads of dandelions to get rid off, but a little at the time and we will hopefully get there in the end. It is very nice to be able to work in the garden and have the help from the boys and seeing how helpful they are and how nicely they can work together when they get the right encouragement.