2011 Food Storage -- Breakfast Menu

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For January's assignment, Fernando and I decided to enlist Thomas' help.  More than that, Thomas is doing most of the work!  We are marking hours, making notes, and keeping records for this portion of his Home Economics course for high school.  What a wonderful thing it is to be able to gain real-life experience in a real-life situation and count it toward a diploma.  Coming from the "public school mentality"--meaning I am a graduate of that institution--I'm still amazed that I can record Thomas' experience and count it for school.  "School" and "homework" were mostly separate from my "real life" situations outside of that building.  But school should be life.  After all, every learning experience comprises our education.

Off my soapbox and on to my progress report.  :)

Thomas and I came up with 14 breakfasts.  We decided to choose 14, since we wanted to include more than seven.  This way, instead of repeating a week's worth of meals, we'll be repeating every two weeks.  Here is our two-week schedule of breakfasts:

Sunday -- breakfast biscuits
Monday -- granola
Tuesday -- cinnamon muffins
Wednesday --pancakes
Thursday -- corn grits and toast
Friday -- waffles
Saturday -- oatmeal with dried fruit

Sunday -- breakfast biscuits
Monday -- granola
Tuesday -- cinnamon muffins
Wednesday -- pancakes
Thursday -- seed and nut cereal
Friday -- cold oat cereal
Saturday -- toast

Sunday's through Wednesday's meals will be the same; the next three days will change up a bit.  We think this will give us a little leeway in what we're eating, plus a few of those meals aren't the boys' favorites, so they'll have to endure them only once every two weeks.  ;)  Personally, I would be happy eating oatmeal every morning for three months!

I created a chart on the computer in which each breakfast meal is listed.  Thomas has been busy filling in every ingredient in those meals, and this week he will be focusing on multiplying out those ingredients by 13 or by 26 (depending on if it's a weekly meal or a bi-weekly meal).

We're focusing on breakfasts first, then next week we'll hit the dinner menu.  We're doing it this way chiefly because we had made out--then lost--our two-week dinner menu list.  Ugh.  So we'll restart the dinner meal process as soon as we're done with breakfast planning.

For our family, lunch usually consists of leftovers or sandwiches, so we'll handle that one last.  We can't always count on leftovers, though, so we'll have to get creative with this meal.  I'm still trying to think of lunch ideas besides tuna sandwiches and PBJs.  Any ideas that don't involve fresh fruits/vegetables?  Please help me out here!  :)

We had a wonderful character-building episode as Thomas was trying to figure out how much dried milk should be used in place of real milk in one of the recipes.  He knew that 1/3 dried = one cup regular, but we were doubling the recipe and there was a weird amount.  I tried to show him my math, but he got frustrated, sat for a minute and thought, then told me how much he should type in the box.

I said, "No, no, you have to do it this way."  Then I paused and remembered my right-brain student.  I told him, "Let me show you how I figured it out, then you show me your math and we'll see what happens."

I spent five minutes explaining, step by step, what I did.  He didn't understand, but then in under a minute, he showed me what he did.  He arrived at the same number I did, and we both had a good laugh about how differently our brains function.  The Lord is helping us to work together, which makes me happy.

Thomas the incredible math whiz

Thank You, Lord, for Thomas and his right-brain amazing-ness!

Back to life,
Christine

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