Wednesday, October 12, 2011

what happens when you combine beef kidney with prunes and yogurt???

Well, here we go again folks, another year of blogging for Gotaminute, and i am excited. I believe our efforts just in my family alone paid off in numbers last year. This year we have four of us around the table, sometimes five when my step-daughter and college girl Brooke comes home to roost. my wife and i have an 11 year old son together, and i have 22 year old son who is living upstairs for a while. he has turned into our source of grocery money, as his rent goes straight to Aldi's food store. eating a big dinner at home five nights a week can get expensive, unless you are a penny pincher like me. I never bring a list to Aldi's, no...i buy what is on sale. last wednesday we had planked salmon on the grill with creamed corn and a spinach salad, with brownies for desert. sounds good, doesn't it? Everything in that meal for four people was less than 10 bucks, making it $2.50 per plate. I even used the cedar board scraps from our bathroom remodel for the planks.
My family, bless their heart, went through some tough times while i figured out what food went well with other food, though. one night i combined boiled beef kidneys with canned pork and beans, finishing with a prune and raisin yogurt desert, and within one hour you had to take a number to get in the bathroom, not to mention the ugly scene we created for my wife on laundry day....on the plus side, that whole meal only cost 23 cents per serving....
to be serious for a moment, i will tell you that we absolutely need to sit down with our families a few nights a week if we want to keep those family values and morals that we were taught while we sat around the dinner table growing up. This IS where we connect with our kids, my friends. If someone told you they had a secret way to find out what their kids were up to each and every day while at school or hanging with their friends..if they told you they had a way to get your kids to tell you how their day went, what they are thinking each day...wouldn't it be worth almost anything to know? well, folks, it's really not a secret. Simply stated, the key to knowing how your child is doing day to day is to sit down at a table with them, shut off the tv and radio, set a plate of food in front of them and listen...easy as that. Give it a try, folks, give it a few nights a week for a couple of months and see what i am saying. Let me know how it goes.,