Welcome- What's this all about?

I will be using this space to document recipes, cooking pictures, our meal planning / execution as a growing family, and basically a place to collect and archive things relating to food I might want to reference later.  I decided to name it Eat, Eat, Repeat because it feels like the question of what are we going to eat is always coming up.  I married into a foodie family and over the last two decades have enjoyed many delicious, shared meals and I have been inspired to pass that on to my kids as well.  I genuinely enjoy cooking and baking and am most happy when I am running many miles and in a place to consume all the good food and treats with little detriment to my waistline.  We aim to balance indulgences with good nutrition, so in 2020 there has been a focus on whole foods and increasing our vegetable quantity in our diets.  I would say that Blue Apron and Sun Basket were a big inspiration for us to expand our cooking regimen in regards to trying new recipes and increasing the health content of dinnertime.  Unfortunately, after several years we learned that the meals were not as conducive to having young kids compared to when we were child-free adults.   Occasionally we would try to get back into Blue Apron but young kids really do require a lot after a full workday and we were scrambling to make the meals with little time to enjoy eating them before launching into a big kitchen cleanup and they still left us having to deal with lunches separately.  Somehow wailing babies just are not a good match with drawn out time in the kitchen.  With the birth of our second, we made the freezer meal prep happen and enjoyed the convenience of those but often found they were bland or I found that getting super motivated to make 10 meals was hard to repeat very often.  I still plan to occasionally prep a few tried and true freezer recipes, as they are very convenient and the ones that can be adapted to the instant pot are really helpful in a home with two working parents.  Our most recent method of tackling the age old question of what's for dinner is being satisfied by a menu planning service called Cook Smarts that someone introduced me to in December.  It has had a significant positive impact and solves many of the challenges of being a working family wanting to eat whole foods with a good rotation of dinner flavors.  I will share more about the service here but will only be able to include personal details about the cooking process since it's propriety information.  However, it's a very affordable service so if anyone wants to give it a try then I highly recommend checking it out and there is a free month trial period.  I pan to share my opinions of the meals, my personal pictures, and what changes or planned changes I would make.  There is also a link to see the ongoing list of meals I have made on the site:  Cook Smarts Meals I've Made, if you are curious.

If you are still reading this, then thanks!  Mostly I plan for this to be a blog for myself and my forgetful mind (and maybe my kids when they get older) but maybe if anyone else out there finds this information useful then that is great too!