Dinners, BLAH!!! (or, it's not Julie and Julia)

So, what does one cook for the evening meal, each day every day? If you hear our kids tell it, it is, "nothing but stir fry; yuch!".

I never thought of it, but perhaps Liz and I do have a bit of a restricted repertoire. To be fair (to us), we have made various pasta dishes. And, Liz did some great things with lentils that the kids even liked.

But, there was that first Friday evening when Steve made a tofu stir fry. Then during the next week, we made chicken thighs - oh, yes, that was as a stir fry. And, then, finally, last night Liz made tofu (ooops ... again a stir fry).

It's not so much the idea of the stir fry, we think. (The "we" being Liz and Steve). But, what is "IN" the stir fry. Stir fries (spelling?) tend to have to have all those green things diced up. So the kids refuse to just dig in and eat the stir fry. They pick out the parts that they deign edible (i.e. string beans, peanuts and carrots. They eat the rice separately. They leave a lot of food on their plates. The seasonings don't seem to matter - more, less, all the same from their perspective. They look grumpy and moan. They push food around on their plates. And Zach asserts that he just really really really doesn't like tofu.

The big victory yesterday was cutting up the onion so very small and describing it (during the chopping process) as a root vegetable whose name I did not know in Chinese (true, I don't know how to say 'onion' in either Mandarin or Cantonese) that it was not recognized and removed. However, not much of the total stir fry was eaten, so in all, upon reflection, a pretty small victory.

So, push came to shove last night, and the kids rebelled.

They had had enough --
THEY'RE MAKING DINNER!

So, here is their menu for this week:
(Tuesday & Friday are "Dinner out" days, they decided. Tuesday is "to be determined", the Friday one is "Shabu Shabu" (so, our kids have some taste, yes?). There can be no substitutions. If you don't like macaroni and cheese or if you don't want scrambled eggs for dinner, you still need to eat it. You cannot make yourself a peanut butter and jelly sandwhich.

You can barely make out on the left side an arrow switching Penne pasta and rice&beans so that the burritos and rice&beans are not on adjacent evenings because they knew that they were too similar to one another. We were also told that there would be some vegetable served at every meal.

Finally, a shopping list was generated after much peering in the pantry and refrigerator. Because we have many of the items necessary for these menus on hand, the shopping list for the week was:
one can of black beans
ice cream
chocolate sauce
sprinkles
maraschino cherries

Well...today was Monday, so here was their first decision point:














They took turns cooking it up:















Don't forget to add the "special sauce"!














How shall we set our table?














The vegetable dish (cucumber)....















Happy faces during our meal:















BUT ....
There was a problem.

.....the Mac N Cheese box contained all of about 7.5 oz, leaving some diners a might bit HUNGRY afterwards and requiring a preview trial of Saturday's burrito meal (ZD) as well as a late evening cheese sandwhich (SD):



















The evening ended, after a hard fought game of hearts, with some chocolate ice cream, decorated with various jimmies and chocolate sauce. How can u go wrong.......














Where was Liz during all this? Out watching coral spawn. Missed the whole meal. Will post pictures of the coral and the Hawaiian Institute of Marine Biology ASAP.