Tag: dinner tip

Thanksgiving Week Meal Plan

When you’re busy planning your family’s Thanksgiving gathering, the last thing on your mind are all the dinners in between. We’ve got a week’s worth of easy dinners all planned out so you don’t have to! With crockpot meals and dinners that go straight from your freezer to the oven, you can spend less time…

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One Pan Wonders in Your Baking Dish

Ever wanted to serve your Dream Dinners pan meal in something prettier than the foil pan you made it in? It can be easy to do if you follow these steps. Spray your rectangular baking pan Peel the foil pan away from the frozen dinner. Insert the dinner right into your baking dish. Bake as…

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A Few Tricks for Healthier Meals

It’s time for a new year… time to start your family eating healthy! A few small changes now can make a big difference in the years ahead!

How to Enjoy Dinner with the Young Kids

Whether you’ve just popped a Dream Dinners entrée into the oven or spent an hour or more cooking a meal from scratch, you want your family to enjoy their time together while eating.

Yet nothing’s more frustrating than having kids gulp down food in mere minutes, fuss through a meal or otherwise be uncooperative during dinnertime. It can be especially tough with babies, toddlers and preschoolers. Their hunger comes on its own schedule, not often in synch with the family meal. Juggling your own cooking tasks with their demanding needs can turn a daily event from calm to chaotic.

What’s a busy mom to do? Put a few strategies in place! We discovered a terrific article with ideas from moms all over the country at Parents.com. Written by Tricia O’Brien, it affirms everything we at Dream Dinners believe – that creating quality time around the table is one of the most important things you can do for your family.

So we are all at the Table Together; Now What?

My husband and I started making our children sit at the table throughout the meal by the time they were 2 ½. Even if they weren’t eating, our children knew they had to sit at the table until most (if not all of us) were done. But as our family grew to 6, we started realizing that even though we were all at the table together, it wasn’t always this blissful, happy family time we were hoping to have.

Practice makes Perfect!

The best way to help our kids get ready for the “real” world of business and social luncheons is to practice in the safety of their own homes. Try to make one or two meals a month more formal at home.

The Other Benefits of Eating Dinner Together as a Family

Over the years, there has been extensive research completed on the benefits of families eating together. For example, Research by The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA)* at Columbia University consistently finds that the more often children eat dinner with their family, the less likely they are to smoke, drink or use drugs.