Real Food on a Real Schedule: How Our Family Eats Nutritious Meals When Life Is Chaos
If your family calendar looks anything like ours, you probably laugh at the idea of a perfectly timed 6 p.m. dinner. Some nights we eat at 5. Some nights we eat closer to 9. And honestly? That’s just the reality of raising kids, working full-time, running a farm, and juggling dance, baseball, basketball, and walking show animals before the sun goes down.
What matters most isn’t the time on the clock.
We just eat together — whenever “together” happens that day.
And that one little choice has shaped a rhythm in our family that grounds us, even when everything else feels like chaos.
How We Make “Real Food” Work on Real-Life Days
Even though the schedule changes every single day, two things stay the same:
We keep meals simple and nutritious.
Everyone gets ownership — which takes the pressure off me.
On truly wild weeks, we lean into meal prep. If you haven’t grabbed our Cook Smarter, Not Longer recipe download yet, it’s full of the exact meals we batch on Sunday so we aren’t panic-cooking on Thursday night.
But most weeks, we rotate through the meals my kids and husband ask for again and again:
Air-fried chicken thighs with a sheet pan of veggies
(Toss everything in olive oil + seasoning, and dinner basically cooks itself.)Quick sautéed chicken tenders over salad
(Perfect for those “we have to leave in 12 minutes” evenings.)
They’re healthy. They’re filling. And more importantly, they’re doable on a Tuesday night when someone forgot their cleats and another kid suddenly remembers they have homework due tomorrow.
Snacks Keep Us Balanced — Literally
When dinner is at 5 p.m. or 9 p.m., we rely on what we call “blood sugar buddies.”
These aren’t fancy snacks.
Just real food that tides us over without crashing us:
A piece of fruit
A handful of nuts
A clean pantry snack
A small protein bite before bed when we eat early
It keeps everyone level — especially my kiddo who needs that extra support — and it prevents the kind of hanger that derails an evening.
Everyone Chooses One Meal a Week
This is my secret weapon.
Every Sunday, each person picks one meal for the week. They help prep it, too — which builds ownership and, yes, slowly teaches them that dinner doesn’t magically appear out of thin air.
It also means I'm not the only one thinking:
“What in the world am I supposed to make tonight?”
The kids love it.
My husband loves it.
And I love that it brings us together around food we all had a hand in creating.
Chaos or Not — We Eat Together
That’s the heart of it.
Some nights, we sit down sweaty from practice.
Some nights, we sit down exhausted from a long day on the farm.
But we sit.
We slow down.
We check in.
And that ritual — not the time, not the menu, not the schedule — is what keeps our family focused on real food and real connection, even in the middle of a packed, imperfect life.
If you’re trying to feed your own family well on a schedule that refuses to cooperate, please know this:
You’re not alone. And it doesn’t have to be fancy — it just has to be real.
