Freezer Meals and No Fear Dinners

Homeschool is a full time job. I struggle with having meals always prepared on time. So a great friend of mine taught me about freezer meals. This week our family got together with another family and did a freezer meal session. We had four tables out and at three of the "stations" we posted a teen from each family along with the instructions and ingredients for three different dishes. Then at the last table we stationed the parents and our youngest girls to make freezer burritos. In less than two hours we had 6 meals each and two bags of homemade frozen burritos for each family! It was so fun to do it together and great to end with that many freezer meals!

We have done another meal party with this same family. It was our No Fear Dinner. We started this tradition when our kids were little. For New Year's Eve we would pick some crazy foods from the grocery store that they had never tried so that we could meet the New Year with "no fear". It was a challenge to our kids and ended up making them less picky! This idea got us in the Family Fun My Great Idea Book too! As the years went, we did it less and less with our two youngest and so we decided to try it again but this time turn it into a competition between families. We invited a family over and told them to bring potluck foods that their family would eat but maybe our family would think were strange. The goal was to stump the other family. We gave each child a point value. The youngest girls had the most points and less and less per older child until the parents got the least points. Every person in the family that would try a food dish got points for their family. G (8 years old) is our most picky child having played this game the least. However, she was coached all day to "take one for the team" by her older siblings. So there she was on the night of the party delighted to tell us that she had eaten "a ball of tight leaves"(or a brussell sprout) like she had just run a marathon! I was proud of her! The other family turned out to be great ones to do this with because they had lived in Hawaii and had eaten interesting things. My son, A, who is in Mexico is eating Menudo and so we served that as one of our dishes. That turned out to be the dish that did us all in. Our son laughed about that because he has eaten it so much he thinks it is fine. Of course he was also the one who play the "no fear" dinners the most...