Introducing my very first guest blogger!

I am excited to host my very first guest blogger Shauna from  It's a Vinyl Thing!!!   Shauna's sister started It's a Vinyl Thing and Shauna "guest posts" there all the time! Don't forget to head on over and enter their Grand Re-opening contest.  Shauna is a busy Mom of 3 kids and offered to give me some wicked breakfast ideas!  So without any further ado........

Basic Morning Meal Plan by Shauna

My kids like to eat...a LOT! Fortunately, they got their dad’s metabolism to help them with that. Unfortunately, that means a lot of our monthly budget goes to feeding them! We used to go through a Costco size box of Cheerios in just 2-3 days feeding just 3 children. That’s insane, right? It was my life.

I decided last year that the kids could no longer have cereal during the week before school...cereal was eating us out of house and home. They could only have cereal on the weekends. After almost a year of this, the kids have gotten to the point where most of the time, even on weekends, cereal is wasted. They don’t like the taste or texture of it anymore. Two weeks ago, the middle child told me I should just stop buying it when I, yet again, had a fit over the bowls of soggy cereal left on the table. She said they would just continue with our other breakfast foods. Now, this does mean a little more work for me every day...but it is worth it to know that they are actually full when they leave the house in the morning.

It used to be that I would get up at 6:00 am and scramble around trying to find something to make. Do we have enough eggs? Is there anything to make muffins with? It seemed like I was only doing meal plans for supper, and, since cereal is no longer an option, I needed to change that. Thankfully, my kids are okay with routine breakfast plans so I created a weekly meal plan for breakfast as an outline to follow. The chart below shows how we roll in our house…some days have more than one choice and so we just choose one depending on the week. I love having a basic breakfast menu to follow; we add things like fruit and milk to drink to round things out.

Notes & Recipes:
German Pancakes: The recipe is really simple. Preheat oven to 400 degrees - this is really important. The oven has to be hot. Combine 9 eggs with 1.5 cups of flour, 1.5 cups of milk and 1 tsp salt in a blender. Whizz it all for about 2 minutes. Line a 9x13 pan with parchment paper and melt the butter in the preheated oven. Swirl it over the parchment paper and then pour the batter into the pan. Pop it in the oven and bake it for 22-25 minutes. The pancake will puff up nicely. My kids like to fight over the bumps and lumps. We usually top this with a 100% fruit juice concentrate that we thicken into syrup.


Pancakes:
I like to make up 6 bags of mix at a time and store them in the fridge so it is easy to mix the pancakes up. I’m not a fan of store bought pancake mix...especially when it so easy to do it myself! Doing it this way, also lets me add some fresh ground whole wheat flour to the mix.

Into each gallon-sized Ziplock bag, add 1 cup whole wheat flour, 1 cup white flour, dash of salt, 2 tbsp sugar & 2 tbsp baking powder. Seal and knead to mix together. Store in the fridge or freezer if using fresh whole wheat flour.

When mixing it, dump the contents of the bag into a bowl, add 2 cups of milk, 2 eggs, 4 tbsp oil and 1 tsp vanilla. Stir until just mixed but not until smooth. Cook on a preheated griddle over medium heat. This makes around 10-12 good sized pancakes.

We have also tried oatmeal pancakes, power pancakes, and pumpkin pancakes. We look forward to trying out other versions of pancakes as well. We alternate between maple syrup and fruit juice syrup too.

Muffins
I found this great site (Super Healthy Kids) that I love to read and she has a recipe for muffin mix. I tend to make up a bag of it and then use it to make blueberry muffins. (I use her recipe for raspberry muffins but substitute blueberries and I leave off the topping.) Using a mix saves a lot of time in the morning too. I keep a gallon size Ziplock in the fridge with this in it too.

We will alternate with any relatively healthy muffin recipe too. One of our favourites is Banana Chocolate Chip Muffins.

Blender Wheat Pancakes
This is another easy recipe. This one, also from Super Healthy Kids, is very similar to our recipe so I’ll just link up there. We like to top these with sliced fresh strawberries and real maple syrup. It’s a nice Sunday treat!

Thanks Meal Planning Mama for letting me share my breakfast plans here.


WOW great ideas!  Thank you Shauna!!!!!!