branching out at mealtime

I'm not a creative cook by any means.  Our menu varies little from week to week with basics like pizza with ceasar salad, pasta with meat and veggie sauce and chicken fingers with potato wedges showing up very regularly.  Veggies also vary little since my kids all have different tastes...Jillian loves cooked broccoli and Leah will only eat it raw with dip.  Both Leah and Kyle will eat cucumber and raw carrots while Jillian hates them but will eat a plateful of grape tomotoes with dip.  Basically raw veggies are preferred by the kids so I keep them on hand.  I just make whatever I want for veggies or throw a salad together on my plate.

But I want to start branching out more. Especially since Jillian and Leah are both quite open to trying new foods. It was only in the past year I realized how much Jillian loves shrimp...alfredo pasta with broccoli and shrimp is by far her current favourite meal so that also shows up in our regular rotation.

We were recently at a dinner party with a-maz-ing food (seriously, I want to invite myself to their house for dinner on a regular basis...actually I kind of did at the party and Keith just laughed because he thought I was joking). Jillian tried sushi there and kept coming back for more. It got me thinking that I really need to start doing some new things at home.

Then a sign...Jeff came home from work one day with chopsticks sent to him by one of his employees in China.  So I decided to do a chinese meal.  Well, sort of.  I have Kyle to consider which means I had to make something he would eat (think bland, and then take away any flavour still on the food).  Instead of doing regular orange chicken I opted to do breaded chicken nuggets that Kyle will eat, and make the sauce separately to add and kept some white rice out for him and made fried rice for the rest of us.  I did some breaded shrimp for my shrimp girl and some veggie spring rolls which I thought she would like (she did).  Some frozen mixed asian veggies to top it off and my kind-of-chinese-meal-that-is-mostly-north-americanized-but-we-ate-it-with-chopsticks-at-least dinner was ready.

The girls did really well with the chopsticks, I was impressed.  Kyle mostly used a fork but did enjoy stabbing the chicken nuggets with his chopsticks.  And of course it wouldn't be dinner in my house without least one sword fight (between Leah and Kyle).

I really liked the simple orange sauce, it worked well with the rice and chicken.  I made this sauce from blogchef with a few substitutions.  I used more orange juice and lemon juice and less water but kept the overall liquid amount the same, and I didn't have any rice vinegar on hand so I had to use white wine vinegar instead.

Now I have the urge to try new things but don't have any good ideas.  I'll start scouring the web, there are a lot of neat recipe blogs.  I'm also open to suggestions...feel free to let me know your favourite dish.