Thanks to the power of Google and being able to pester mom – we finally made homemade French Onion Soup last week.
To be honest, I’d never had the soup from scratch, but once I found an easy enough recipe, all I had to do was ask mom every few days until she finally caved in and agreed to make it with me.
Now, we did have to use an adjusted recipe due to new dietary restrictions at the house.
But, honestly, I couldn’t tell much difference between our finished product and the last bowl I had at Panera Bread.
It went well, I just have to curb mom’s overuse of garlic and force her to keep more in line with what the recipe says.
For example, the recipe called for 2.5 teaspoons of minced garlic and mom just dumped an entire tablespoon in instead!
While I’m a garlic lover as much as the next person, I could definitely tell it overpowered the soup for me.
Still, it was fun to try our hand at something new – I just don’t know what I’m going to do with the leftovers.
For a variety of health reasons across the board, we’ve been leaning more toward lean meats, more vegetables, and less refined sugars and carbohydrates.
While it started mostly as a recommendation from my doctor to help my leg heal faster, we’re going the distance to keep the whole household a little healthier.
Unfortunately, to embrace such lifestyle changes, we’ve had to overhaul a lot of our usual go-to dinner meals.
Pasta dishes are now few and far between unless they’re made with brown rice noodles and we’re substituting regular potatoes for sweet ones and butternut squash.
I’m still salty about losing my favorite instant ramen noodle stash, but, I’m just looking for alternatives instead.
Some of you might remember the “Great Jif Recall” earlier this year and how much mom hated it.
Well, she’s the only one that gets Jif now.
The rest of us have to make do with some all-natural style peanut butter that requires mixing before using.
I’m not a fan of the extra work to make myself a peanut butter sandwich, but the new spread works pretty well in cookies.
My sister Ashlee and I baked up about five dozen featuring the new peanut butter and honey instead of a lot of extra sugar and overall they turned out pretty delicious.
So much so that Mike has eaten the majority of the collection.
That just means when she comes down from thanksgiving we’ll have to make some more!
Thanksgiving will also be a new frontier when it comes to side dishes this year.
We’re swapping out healthier options over tried and true favorites and someone is bound to get upset, but, like I always say: “The family that suffers together stays together.”
And that’s starting to encompass challenging the age-old family food traditions.
I’m just not sure that my brother is ready to have baked sweet potatoes instead of his usual mashed Yukon potato mountain on his plate.
We’ll have to wait and see.
In the meantime, I hope you and yours have a wonderful get-together and stay safe and healthy!
