Feeding the fam

This week has been rough getting back into the swing of real life after the glory that was the holidays. I've been trying to find my stride with prepping hard and supporting Gabe during this super high pressure time. (He's supposed to graduate with his MFA in 2 months and we still have a bunch of furniture that needs to be manufactured as well as negotiating terms for our St George Crepery). As I'm trying to figure our ways to lighten his load, I'm thinking I really need to take the bull by the horns and cook dinner & prepare lunches for him on a regular basis. To most, I realize that this is a, no duh!, moment. But for me and the dynamics of our family it has been a very difficult task to tackle. There are a few reasons I can easily name for this difficulty...Gabe is a foodie, and he can really cook. He only wants to eat good food. What I mean by good food is-obnoxiously long recipes, high maintainence cooking procedures, with absolutely no fat-free, lean meat, low carb alternatives. You can empathize with me that I have a hard time living up to this!? I don't know where or when he became this foodie, because he is the youngest of 9 children. I can guaran-damn-tee that his Mom wasn't making any gourmet faire!! I do know she cooked with a ton of butter and refined starches, so I can't even petition her help. Top it off with 2 kids that only want easy Mac and hot dogs. To say the least, it's a painful task to find recipes that please the entire crew! When we do find one everyone will eat, I still have to make my own variation to cater to my prep needs-but that's fine. As long as it works with my macros and is cooked long enough(no pink meat!!) then I can use enough condiments to make it edible. What I've learned works for our fam, is, cooking a lot of a crowd pleasing recipe that will feed us lunches for days. Tonight we made a fav that I've posted previously on my blog, and that's Bobby Flay's Balsamic Meatloaf. It has tons of veggies and it doesn't get old for an entire week with the many variations meatloaf lends itself to. Gabe got home earlier than planned so he ended up cooking BUT I did the hard work in shopping and cleaning it all up! Pen loves helping Daddy!! Check this recipe out, it's legit.

I guess this isn't the most appetizing pic but it's sort of unbelievable.