Struggling With Dinner for the Kids? We Got You Covered!

As parents of multiple children, one of the biggest challenges we have is coming up with dinners that we know everyone will enjoy and actually eat.

Dinners have really proven to be a challenge for us as Emily and the triplets go through stages of being picky eaters. It is also now a struggle to get them to sit down and stay seated while they are eating.

I enjoy cooking and I love trying new things, but I sometimes forget that kids aren’t always open to trying new foods. I cannot tell you how many dinners I have made, thinking it will be a hit and everyone will love it, just to have everyone pick it apart and cry (Yes! Crying actual tears!) because they don’t want to eat it!

As much as I want to try making something new for the kids, I know it is better to stick with something simple, not overly complicated and that I know they will like. If I had to pin point one meal, I know will always be a hit and everyone will enjoy, it would be PASTA!

If I stop and think way back to when Emily and the triplets started eating solid foods, there was never a time they refused pasta. It was and still is our go to meal for dinner and even lunches!

Emily, Jackson, Olivia and Levi love pasta and when we have a pasta dish on the table, we know dinner will be eaten, which makes our new partnership that much more exciting!

We are so happy and excited to share with you that we have partnered with Catelli and will be working with them over the next year! We knew it would be such a great fit for us to partner with Catelli because of how much pasta has been a staple in our house over the years!

Throughout the year, we will be sharing some of our favourite pasta recipes, information on the many great pasta collections Catelli offers and the variety of pasta out there for you to enjoy! We hope you are excited for our partnership with Catelli and will see just how versatile and simple pasta can be!

Catelli is all about #RealFeelsGood and realizing that how you choose to parent is the right way for you! They want to stop the anxiety and fear that parents have when they feel they are not measuring up to the pressures and standards that seem to be set all around. Catelli wants to encourage everyone to be real and to share their #RealFeelsGood stories because we need to stop comparing ourselves to others and know we are all doing the best we can! In fact, according to a recent poll commissioned by Catelli, being real about parenting on your own terms can feel good: 88% of Ontarians actually feel better when they focus on what works best for their family versus comparing themselves with others.

Their messaging resonates with us because it is so easy to look at everyone else around you and feel as though you are not doing a good enough job. In this day and age with social media, you only get a glimpse into someone’s life and everything may not always be how it seems. We think it is important to not compare yourself and your parenting with others because every family and situation is different. As parents of four kids, there are going to be times where we aren’t perfect and we make mistakes, but we will also have the times where we could not be more proud of how well we handled parenting. That’s what real is and #RealFeelsGood!

As we mentioned above, Emily and the triplets love pasta and knowing that gives us an advantage at dinner time! We can plan our meals out for the week and make sure to have pasta dishes for multiple dinners. We can also adjust our level of creativity for each meal and pick out our top recipes.

We love that you can change a pasta recipe so easily, just by adding an extra ingredient, switching the type of pasta you use or the type of sauce you use and even the way you cook the pasta. The possibilities are endless when it comes to being creative with your pasta meals!

Three of our go to pasta dinners include basic spaghetti noodle with a tomato meat sauce, tuna pasta with fusilli noodles mixed with mayo and chicken alfredo pasta with fettuccine noodles. What is so great about all three meals, is that they can be transformed to meet the preferences of your kids. If your kids prefer spaghetti noodles over fusilli noodles, it is so simple to just change the noodle you use.

We know that it can be a challenge feeding kids and we know that every parent wants to provide healthy meals that their kids will eat. We want to show you that dinners don’t have to be complicated and you don’t need to spend hours in the kitchen every day creating meals your kids will love. With Catelli pasta, we know that we will be able to share great recipes that you can add to your list of meals for your kids.

We truly are excited to partner with Catelli and to kick off our partnership, Dan and I thought it would be fun to have a little Mom vs Dad cook-off with our special ingredient: Catelli Pasta!

Take a look below and find out whose pasta dish won over Emily, Jackson, Olivia and Levi!

To learn more about Catelli and their products, as well as their #RealFeelsGood messaging, you can visit www.realfeelsgood.ca. We also want to encourage you to share your real life stories about what works best for you as parents and be sure to use #RealFeelsGood. We will be keeping an eye out and cannot wait to read them all!