Skip to main content

What's for Lunch Wednesday: Quesadillas


Can someone better at photography than I am please explain why my sour cream is glowing? I promise it wasn't really glowing.

Black bean and cheddar quesadillas on whole wheat tortillas, served with salsa and sour cream. Beans were cooked as described here. Everything else was store-bought. This was more than enough for the four-year-old, the 18-month-old and the spare toddler. The container is Ziploc brand.

I don't pack many lunches these days. Older is only in school half-days and I'm at home during the day. Wednesdays are my only consistent lunch-packing days, as that's the lunchtime playgroup day. The lunches at playgroup vary widely, from nutritionally balanced to "Here, eat some raisins and goldfish." Honestly if I weren't posting lunches here I'd probably serve ravioli every week, and it's possible that the fruit wouldn't always be part of the plan. It's not that I don't serve my kids a variety of foods, it's that I don't always have great planning skills. (And by "great" I mean "baseline adequate.")

Long term, no one meal matters all that much. It's important to get kids in the habit of eating healthful foods every day, and it's important to offer a variety of foods, even if you think the kids won't eat them. The only way "strange" becomes "familiar" is through repetition. But it doesn't matter if any one meal, or even any one day, is balanced and complete. A varied diet over the course of a week will balance itself out. (So long as varied here means a variety of wholesome foods, not a variety of pretzels and oreos.)

The plan was to have quesadillas for dinner last night. But I didn't get the black beans cooking early enough to pull that off. (Yes, I should know this about myself and keep some cooked beans in the freezer for emergencies, but I don't. See above re: "baseline adequate.") So the boys had ravioli and veggies for dinner and I made up quesadillas after bedtime so that I wouldn't have to deal with lunch today. It worked out well since I had a spare toddler at my house today, and trying to sort out lunches on top of sorting out toddlers might have been beyond me.

Don't forget to check out the other lunches this week.
Bento Lunch

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Butter(less) Chickpeas

On Monday morning I got a call from a client, warning that my services would be needed soon. The threat of labor makes me pretty efficient. I filled and ran the dishwasher, cleaned the sink, took the boys grocery shopping, got the groceries put away, fed the boys lunch, emptied the dishwasher, made snack and dinner for the boys, filled the dogs' water, cleaned the dog' ears, and put the flowers in the vase. I spent the rest of Monday at the birth, watching a skilled nurse-midwife facilitate the VBAC my client wanted despite circumstances that might have sent some providers running for the operating room. It was a great birth, the baby was perfect and I'm glad I was there to witness it. But it meant that I didn't get to bed until 2:00 in the morning. When I say that I am a morning person, I do not mean 2:00 in the morning. A mere five hours later the sun was up and my children were up and my husband was getting ready to leave for work. I had a follow-up scheduled for...

Making Christmas

Years ago, when my parents married, my mother asked my father what he would like her to make for Christmas. He asked for Julekake, a Scandinavian Christmas bread. It was common in the bakeries in my father's childhood Chicago, but it was more difficult to find in the small Army towns where my father was posted, so my mother found a recipe, and baked her own. We ate it with eggs or bacon or sausage every Christmas breakfast of my childhood. My mother baked simple round loaves studded with raisins and candied cherries. When I grew up I swapped out dried cherries for the candied ones. I baked it in the oven of my boyfriend's apartment before I went to share Christmas with his family, inhaled the scent of them to make it Christmas when the traditions around me were not my own. I've discovered that the fruit is not mandatory, though I'd never leave it out. A braid is traditional, and I'll make a braided loaf when I have time, though for gift giving I ...

Brown-Butter Buttercream Birthday Cake

Brown-Butter Swiss Meringue Buttercream I have come here today to confess to Almighty God and to you my brothers and sisters that I have sinned.  In full knowledge of the importance of birthday cakes , I did willfully try to get away with making a pound cake for a friend's birthday because I didn't want to be bothered with frosting a layer cake. My feet were only set back on the path to righteousness by a stern rebuke from my friend's husband. (Okay, not a stern rebuke, but "statement of my friend's mild preference" seems sort of anti-climactic, doesn't it?) And, as it turned out, a different friend of mine had spurred a thread about brown butter over on Facebook and I had filed away the phrase "brown-butter buttercream" for future use. So I decided that if I was going to frost a cake I was going to do it with style. The first step is to brown the butter, which is a simple matter so long as you're willing to hang around the kitc...