Kid Friendly Homemade Macaroni and Cheese

We have been trying to get away from Kraft macaroni and cheese, so for the last year I've been trying different recipes to try and find a homemade one that our children would like.  Buddy is pretty easy to please and likes almost all of the recipes I have tried.  Princess on the other hand loves her Kraft macaroni and cheese.  We have had a very hard time finding a recipe that she would eat. 
Tonight was a complete success.  She tried a bite and said "Mommy, this is my favorite one you've made."  With a big smile on her face.  It gave me a huge sense of accomplishment after a year of failure.  And to make it even better it is a very easy recipe that takes about the same time to make as the Kraft macaroni and cheese.

The recipe:
1. Make the macaroni as you would usually.
2. While the macaroni is cooking melt 2 tablespoons of butter in a small pan.
3. Mix in one can of Campbells Condensed Cheddar Cheese soup.
4. Add 6 slices of American Cheese.  (Next time I might try a few more)  I used Land of Lakes American Cheese made with 2% milk and added 3 slices at a time and once those were melted added the next. 
5. Mix cheese sauce with drained macaroni and serve.

Breakfast To Go

Considering we have small children, I honestly can't believe I didn't think of this solution sooner.  Not because they have breakfast on the go but because they like the milk boxes.  We have been looking for healthier options to make sure the Colonel is getting enough to eat on the truck.  Here is the simple solution we came up with for breakfast. 

The Colonel has been taking them for several weeks now.  I wasn't sure it would work since the closest flavor we could find to plain regular milk was vanilla.  The Colonel says it just tastes like sugary milk.  I bought some bowl Tupperware containers with lids that screw on (I think they leak less than the ones that pop on and off) to put the cereal into.  This is a huge money saver for us and I can give him more variety this way, as opposed to buying the prepackaged bowls.  One milk box is enough for one bowl of cereal. 
What are your favorite healthy breakfast options for the truck?

Delicious Homemade Strawberry Fruit Rollup

I found this delicious fruit rollup recipe by Fifteen Spatulas on pinterest.  With only 3 ingredients (strawberries, sugar, fresh squeezed lemon juice), it is soooo much better for my kids than the store bought ones.  I love that they are made with real fruit!  Buddy doesn't care for the store bought ones but he absolutely loves these.  They are one of his favorite treats.  Princess likes her store bought ones, but she gets just as excited about these treats.
Since they are somewhat on the time consuming side to make, I've experimented with making a bigger batch.  I found that for the best tasting fruit rollups it is best to only make a double batch at a time.  When making a double batch, I simply cook them on the stove for 20 minutes instead of 10-15.

Healthier Options?

Right now we are beginning to try to find healthier options for the Colonel to take on the truck.  He has a cooler and no way to heat up food.  We are also looking for good ways for him to exercise even when the truck is in a not so safe area.  How do you/r truckers maintain a healthier lifestyle?

Lessons Learned from Our First Garden

One of the things we did this year to try to help keep grocery costs down was to have a garden.  This was a great learning experience for our children as well.  Princess and Buddy both learned how to water the garden and each got to pick a few things, while Princess also learned to help weed.
This was our first time having a garden.  It was not a horrendous first try but we did learn a lot through the course of it and things to do differently next year.

• Keeping the Bugs Away  - In the course of about a 2 day span our plants went from being absolutely gorgeous to being just about completely eaten by bugs.  Of course it was the middle of the week so I couldn't just run out to the local gardening store to buy something to fix the problem.  I looked on pinterest to find a solution, ran it by our family garden experts and gave it a try.  2 tablespoons of dish soap to a gallon of water (put water in first then soap otherwise it gets all sudsy) worked miracles.  At least until we were gone for a week visiting family.  Plus it just washes off the vegetables which makes me feel better about my family eating them.
• Plant More Bug Deterring Plants - Going to try to remember to plant things like marigolds and geraniums with our vegetables to see if that also helps with the bug issue.
• Plant the Tomatoes on the Balcony - The tomato plants produced a little but did not do so hot.  They were doing great and then looked very sickly almost over night.  We seemed to have luck with the upside down plant hangers on our balcony the year before so next year we plan to plant our tomatoes that way.
• Try Growing Our Own Strawberries on the Balcony - Supposedly they aren't that hard to grow and we go through a lot of them because of a recipe I will share in a later post.  Worth a try.
• Don't Bother with the Squash and Pumpkin Plants - They were the first ones to get eaten by bugs, died quickly and hardly produced anything.  So next year we will just buy those veggies.
• The Best Plants We Planted with the Most Yield (so far) - Green Beans, Swiss Chard, and Cucumbers.  We are still waiting to see what the green pepper plants and carrots do.  Although, I would plant a lot more carrot seeds as not many actually sprouted.
• Keep the Flowers -  Princess loved that she could plant some flowers.  We had 2 sunflowers that grew successfully for her as well as some smaller flowers a neighbor gave us.  We think it's great to get our kids excited about watching things grow!

I absolutely love that we get to eat things that we grew ourselves that are not covered in all kinds of pesticides or came from who knows where.  

Keeping it Cool

For myself and the children it has been a much easier journey to cleaner eating than for our trucker (even though one of my children is a picky eater and prefers junk food like her daddy).  He had a fridge but through the course of one of the wonders of truck driving the company got the idea that his truck needed to be recovered.  The trucker that recovered the truck stole an important expensive piece to making the fridge work on the truck.  Fortunately the Colonel has friends in the terminal so they did not give out his truck and just about everything was still in it.  It's just not in our budget to replace that piece, so for Father's Day I found a cooler for half price.  The fridge is a much better option for healthy eating, as keeping the cooler cool can be a challenge.

So far our best solution has been to wash out about 5 water bottles, fill them 3/4 full with Brita filtered water and freeze them.  This cools his food for about 2 days depending on how many times he opens the cooler.  Then for those weeks he runs out of water, he can drink these water bottles.  It's not the best option, but it does allow for healthier eating for a few days.  What ways have you found as a trucker/family of a trucker to help keep your trucker healthier? 

Why We are Switching to Cleaner Eating

There are a number of reasons we decided to give clean eating a try.  We found out about it when I tried to lose some weight using a book called 40 Days to Fit.  The method in the book did not work for me, but I really liked the idea of getting a lot of the chemicals and dyes out of our diet.  Especially if doing so would improve energy and all the other claims the book made.  So we decided to take baby steps in this direction.
The Colonel and I have roughly about 30 pounds each to lose (him a little more than me but we are starting easy).  He always complains of being totally exhausted and how just about everything is extremely sore.  I keep up with my kids very well, but it does get tiring.  Our children are a big part of why we are doing this.  Our youngest lost a lot of weight in his first year (he dropped from above the 80% percentile down to the 7th).  I had quite the battle with the doctors, as they kept trying to tell me that because the Colonel and I are both average people he was fine.  I knew something was not right.  He had very bad acid reflux on top of a sensitive system.  Even though I was concerned about his weight, I was more concerned about his nutrition and whether he was getting enough to keep him developing.  Since boys tend to be effected more by dyes and things, I figured that by cleaning up our eating he would get the increased nutrition and less harmed by dyes.  Our daughter needed more fiber in her diet and cutting out the dyes, etc. could only benefit her as well.  Overall, clean eating seems to be the one diet that would meet all of our family needs, as well as the best method to teach our children about taking care of their bodies.  After all children learn by example.  But clean eating is more than just a diet, it is a lifestyle and a whole approach to food.  As my dad always says, "We eat to live, not live to eat."
For us as a family we are taking this process very slowly.  We have found for us that too many changes too quickly sets us up for failure.  We also are not completely cutting out a lot of things.  Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, for example, happens to be my daughter's favorite.  Instead of having it be a staple in our house, we now might purchase it once every couple of months.  I make macaroni and cheese from scratch the majority of the time.