We have the winner of the Lawry’s Dinnertising Kit! Congratulations to Sara! Be sure to check out my Garlic-Infused Rosemary & White Wine Tilapia Recipe using some of Lawry’s new marinades and salt blends and let me know if you try it out.

Remember, Lawry’s wants to help you make dinner exciting in your house. You can still make your own Dinnertisement for your family on Lawry’s Dinnertising site and have some fun with the kids. I just made another one for my family featuring a Chicken with Pico de Gallo recipe from Lawry’s! Click on the image below to see it.

Tonight’s dinner has the flavor of adventure!

To make your own, just follow these instructions.

Steps for creating a Dinnertisement:

1. Visit www.dinnertising.com
2. On the right hand side, click the sign that reads “Create Your Own Dinnertisement Now”
3. Click on the sign that reads “Choose a Recipe & Get Started!”
4. Click on the dishes to see a variety of recipes
5. Select the recipe you like best and then click the arrow that reads “Next Step”
6. Select the theme you like best and then click the arrow that reads “Next Step”
7. Upload your photo by clicking the sign that reads “Click to upload”
8. Enter your family name and click enter
9. Read the consent and click the arrow that reads “Yes, I Do Agree”
10. Watch the video and at the end of the Dinnertisement, click on the envelope to email the link to yourself, or post it on Facebook or Twitter.

Congrats again to Sara; enjoy your Lawry’s goodies!

Disclosure: This post is part of a paid campaign with Lawry’s.

***Be sure to scroll down for a fun giveaway!***

Last year a group of Orlando bloggers worked with Lawry’s to create a quick and easy dinner full of an appetizer, main entree, and side dish. I’m excited to work with Lawry’s again this year to create a recipe using their latest salt blends and marinade flavors: Mediterranean Herb Seasoned Salt, Fire Roasted Chile & Garlic, Roasted Garlic Salt, Santa Fe Chili Marinade and Mediterranean Herb and White Wine Marinade.

Along with the new flavors, Lawry’s offers a cute Dinnertising site, where you can create a fun customized video for your family with the idea of selling a recipe to them. It’s a nice way to add a little humor and fun into the dinnertime routine and get kids interacting with you. Lawry’s wants to make dinner exciting and hopes to help busy parents do that by providing an interactive and fun video-making experience. Here’s the Dinnertisement I made for my baby girl! Click on the image to see the video.

I decided to try out the Mediterranean Herb and White Wine Marinade along with the Roasted Garlic Salt to make a simple, and healthy fish dish for dinner. It was super easy to make and didn’t take very long. See recipe below.

Garlic-Infused Rosemary & White Wine Tilapia

Ingredients

• 4 Fillets Tilapia Fish
• Lawry’s Mediterranean Herb and White Wine Marinade
• Lawry’s Roasted Garlic Salt
• Fresh Rosemary

Steps

• Season the fish with Lawry’s Roasted Garlic Salt.
• Place fillets in a big bowl or plastic bag and cover well with Lawry’s Mediterranean Herb and White Wine Marinade.
• Let the fillets marinate for at least 30 minutes, but definitely no less.
• Once the fish fillets have marinated, make steam pockets using aluminum foil. Place 1 fillet per steam pocket, adding vegetables on top to your liking. I used asparagus and added a couple of stalks on top of each fillet, as pictured above.
• Bake in the oven at 350ºF for 45 minutes or until cooked thoroughly.

I suggest you serve the fish and vegetables alongside some white rice, to complete your meal. I’m sure your family will love it and how easy it is to make!

Hints and shortcuts for your meal:

• You can marinate the fish ahead of time using freezer-size bags and defrost the fish while you’re at work during the day or out running errands. When you get home, the fish will be already seasoned and ready to cook!
• To save even more time, you can easily use a bag of frozen vegetables to add to your steam pocket.
• Use instant rice packets or a rice cooker to free up some of your kitchen time. This is great because you don’t have to constantly keep an eye on the stove.
• You might want to try broiling instead of baking the fish!

Lawry’s Dinnertising Kit Giveaway

Want to try Lawry’s new marinade flavors and salt blends for yourself? I’ve got a Dinnertising Kit to give away, which includes the following:

• Rachael Ray Lasagna Lover Stoneware
• Two (2) Zak Designs Serving Spoons: Either happy or surprise spoons
• Lawry’s Marinades and Spice Blends: Mediterranean Herb Seasoned Salt, Fire Roasted Chile & Garlic, Roasted Garlic Salt, Santa Fe Chili Marinade and Mediterranean Herb and White Wine Marinade

How to Enter

Required entry: If you’d like to enter this giveaway for a Dinnertising Kit from Lawry’s, simply leave a comment below with the link to your own Dinnertisement video. It’s super easy to create one and only takes a few short steps!

Steps to creating a Dinnertisement:

1. Visit www.dinnertising.com
2. On the right hand side, click the sign that reads “Create Your Own Dinnertisement Now”
3. Click on the sign that reads “Choose a Recipe & Get Started!”
4. Click on the dishes to see a variety of recipes
5. Select the recipe you like best and then click the arrow that reads “Next Step”
6. Select the theme you like best and then click the arrow that reads “Next Step”
7. Upload your photo by clicking the sign that reads “Click to upload”
8. Enter your family name and click enter
9. Read the consent and click the arrow that reads “Yes, I Do Agree”
10. Watch the video and at the end of the Dinnertisement, click on the envelope to email the link to yourself.
11. Copy and paste the link to your Dinnertisement in the comments section to be entered to win the Lawry’s Dinnertising Kit Giveaway!

Extra entries (optional):
Each of the following will count as 1 extra entry. You’ll need to leave a separate comment for each entry.

1. Follow @modernmami on Twitter.
2. Tweet the following (1 time only): What’s for dinner tonight? Make a dinnertisement for your family & enter to win Lawry’s goodies! http://bit.ly/lawrysgv #giveaway #lawrysmoms
3. Receive post updates by subscribing to our RSS feed. You can do so either via email or through a RSS reader. Leave a comment saying you did so or are already a subscriber.
4. Write a blog post on your own blog sharing the details of this giveaway. Be sure to include a link back to this post. Leave a comment with your post link.

All entries must be in by Friday, June 1, 2012 at 11:59 pm EST. You must be 18 or older and a U.S. resident. No purchase necessary. Remember to leave a separate comment for each entry. The winner will be chosen using Random.org and will be notified via email. (Please be sure to provide a valid email address with your entry.) Winner will have 48 hours to respond and claim prize, otherwise a new winner will be chosen.

Disclosure: This post is part of a paid campaign with Lawry’s.

Do you plan meals for your family? I know many women that create menu plans for their household – some plan out weekly menu plans, others go as far as to organize a monthly menu plan. They all speak of the benefits of planning meals in advance, which include easier grocery shopping, saving money, and eating healthier.

I have tried in the past to create a weekly dinner menu and used my Google calendar to lay out each day’s meal. When I planned our family’s meals a week or two at a time, I found a few things to be true:

• Grocery shopping was easier and faster. I was able to quickly make a shopping list based on the meals we had planned and could better stick to grocery shopping every two weeks to coincide with pay days. Very rarely did we have to make grocery store runs in the middle of the week, which often times ended up going over budget.
• No more “What’s for dinner?” debates. Not only did I avoid the daily struggle of thinking about dinner, which can sometimes be a point of frustration for many women, but my husband was also informed well ahead of time. He could easily look at the printed calendar on our fridge and know what the menu was for that day.
• Dinner responsibilities became easier to share. My husband can cook just fine and actually cooks certain meats better than I do. But, he’s the first to admit that when it comes to thinking of side dishes to complete the meal, he needs help. Having the dinner menu planned in advance resulted in him initiating the cooking process sometimes because he didn’t have to think about what to make, he already knew.
• We ate better. Not all of our meals were super fresh or healthy, but they were all home-made. Regardless of whether or not we took shortcuts by using pre-packaged foods, we were still able to control what we put into our meals, how much of it, and in the end, this created better meals for us than if we were to order out.
• We saved money. It’s true that just by planning a dinner menu, we were able to control our spending and many times saved on the food budget. There was much less eating out, more buying in bulk, and less grocery store trips. It was easier to keep an eye on the money we spent on food.

As I write this out, I can’t think of why we ever stopped planning our meals. I definitely plan to work on getting back into it and will hopefully start this weekend by creating a dinner menu for next week. The benefits of meal planning are sure to help our household’s balance and peace of mind.

Do you meal plan? If so, share with us in the comments about how you plan your family’s meals. Do you create a weekly dinner menu, two weeks at a time, or a monthly meal plan? How often do you grocery shop? What other benefits not mentioned have you found from meal planning?

More Meal Planning Ideas

• Sample Weekly Dinner Menu (my own dinner ideas that work in our house)
• Menu Planning Basics
• Spring Monthly Menu Plan
• Sample Menu Plan from Frugal Upstate
• Monthly Menus from Once a Month Mom

Late last year, General Mills launched its first Spanish-language application for the iPad, providing more than 900 Latin-inspired recipes completely in Spanish. The app, Qué Rica Vida Recetario, is free and includes a variety of recipes, from appetizers to desserts. The Qué Rica Vida brand is General Mills’ Hispanic marketing platform, providing a Spanish-language web site and free magazine for consumers. You may remember I mentioned Qué Rica Vida last year after our introduction to the brand and highlighted them as a brand that gets it when it comes to marketing to Latinas and engaging Latina bloggers. Since their launch event in Miami, they have continued to support our digital Latina community and have been both personal sponsors to many bloggers, including myself, as well as conference and event sponsors; they sponsored both the Blogalicious 2010 conference and the ­¡Parranda! party I co-hosted during the conference.

The recipes provided in the app are all in Spanish, but you can find many of the same recipes in English on the Qué Rica Vida web site. What I like about the app is that you can search not just by category, but also by ingredient. The app also provides a conversion tool in case you need to figure out how to go from pounds to ounces or cups, etc. A fun aspect is that you can share each recipe via Facebook directly from the app, which is good for sharing with your friends and especially good for food bloggers to share with their communities. I’ve been playing around with the app for a few months now and wanted to share with you a few recipes that are quick and easy to make. This is important to me, because though I enjoy cooking, I don’t necessarily want to be in the kitchen for hours cooking just one meal. I grew up eating rice nearly every day, but I equally love pasta dishes. It helps that I find pasta dishes are just as easy and fast to cook as rice.

The following are a few pasta recipes from the Qué Rica Vida Recetario app that will give you a break from the traditional spaghetti meal. For the English versions, just click on each recipe’s name and choose to view it in English.

Espagueti con Pollo en Salsa de Chile Poblano (Spaghetti and Chicken in Poblano Sauce)

Ingredientes:

Modo de preparación:

Pasta Ramen con Carne y Verduras (Ramen Stir Fry)

Ingredientes:

Modo de preparación:

Fideos con Chipotle (Vermicelli with Chipotle Sauce)

Ingredientes:

Modo de preparación:

Do you have staple dishes that you often cook because they are quick to make?

Disclosure: Qué Rica Vida sponsored me to attend the Blogalicious 2010 conference.

All recipes courtesy of General Mills/Qué Rica Vida. © 2011 ®/™ General Mills

As a working mother, I need shortcuts wherever I can get them.

Dinner is often a challenge for us busy moms, and this holds true for me as well.

I work 8 hours a day outside the home, which leaves a small window in the evening for me to pick up baby girl, spend some time with her (don’t forget time with the husband also!), and cook dinner. Some days I wish dinner was just sitting there waiting for me; I mean, I get hungry too!

So, I take shortcuts. I try my best to plan ahead, both by planning a monthly menu and by cooking ahead if I can.

This week has been a particularly good week for us when it comes to dinner. I’ve actually stuck with our planned menu and have not ordered out.

Sample One Week Dinner Menu

Now, I don’t pretend that this is the healthiest menu, but we are eating and the food is home-made. I’m not spending money on take-out and it’s manageable for our busy schedule. It works.

1. Sunday: Turkey Chili – I cooked this in my new slow cooker and didn’t have to do much with it once it was started, which allowed for me to work on other things around the house.
2. Monday: Ground Beef & White Rice – I was off on Monday for the MLK holiday, so I was able to cook from scratch. The ground beef is cooked with tomato sauce/paste (think of picadillo) and I made extra meat for later in the week. The white rice I cooked in a rice cooker, but you could easily take your own shortcut by using Minute Rice. And if you wanted to be extra healthy, you could substitute with brown rice. (There’s shortcuts for brown rice too!)
3. Tuesday: Leftovers - I had a dental appointment after work on Tuesday, so I got home later than normal. Luckily, we had plenty of chili and some white rice leftover. Voila! Dinner served.
4. Wednesday: Tacos with Knorr Rice Sides pack – I used the extra ground beef I cooked on Monday to make tacos. All I had to do was chop up some lettuce and tomatoes, warm up the tortillas, and assemble. I made a pack of Knorr Rice Sides Chicken as a side dish.
5. Thursday: Chicken Fettucine Alfredo – Sounds fancy, huh? This dish is *full* of shortcuts. I buy a bag of chicken cutlets, which don’t really require defrosting. I use a box of Fettucine pasta and a can of Ragu Classic Alfredo sauce. (What, you thought I made my own?) Since, the chicken doesn’t need defrosting, I just put it in the pan as soon as I get home. I usually add a can of peas & carrots to the chicken when I add the alfredo sauce. Serve over the fettucine.
6. Friday: Hot dogs & Fries – Fridays are our slack days. So, we normally eat something very easy. This week, we’ll be making some hot dogs and baking some fries in the oven.
7. Saturday: Pork Chops with Yellow Rice – Since it’s Saturday, I should theoretically have more time to cook. You can cook pork chops however you’d like: in the oven, on the stove or on the grill. Yellow rice is one of my favorites. It’s easy to cook and you can add whatever you like to it, making for many delicious variations. I’ll be making rice with corn this week, but sometimes I use beans or other vegetables. Shortcuts for yellow rice can be found via Goya, if you’d like.

You can see that the recurring theme is to use shortcuts to create quick and easy meals for your family.

How do you manage your weekly dinner menu as a busy mom?

[top photo source]

Picadillo Image via Wikipedia

Calendar Image via SugarcubeDesign

As a working mother, I need shortcuts wherever I can get them.

Dinner is often a challenge for us busy moms, and this holds true for me as well.

I work 8 hours a day outside the home, which leaves a small window in the evening for me to pick up baby girl, spend some time with her (don’t forget time with the husband also!), and cook dinner. Some days I wish dinner was just sitting there waiting for me; I mean, I get hungry too!

So, I take shortcuts. I try my best to plan ahead, both by planning a monthly menu and by cooking ahead if I can.

This week has been a particularly good week for us when it comes to dinner. I’ve actually stuck with our planned menu and have not ordered out.

Sample One Week Menu

Now, I don’t pretend that this is the healthiest menu, but we are eating and the food is home-made. I’m not spending money on take-out and it’s manageable for our busy schedule. It works.

1. Sunday: Turkey Chili – I cooked this in my new slow cooker and didn’t have to do much with it once it was started, which allowed for me to work on other things around the house.
2. Monday: Ground Beef & White Rice – I was off on Monday for the MLK holiday, so I was able to cook from scratch. The ground beef is cooked with tomato sauce/paste (think of picadillo) and I made extra meat for later in the week. The white rice I cooked in a rice cooker, but you could easily take your own shortcut by using Minute Rice. And if you wanted to be extra healthy, you could substitute with brown rice. (There’s shortcuts for brown rice too!)
3. Tuesday: Leftovers - I had a dental appointment after work on Tuesday, so I got home later than normal. Luckily, we had plenty of chili and some white rice leftover. Voila! Dinner served.
4. Wednesday: Tacos with Knorr Rice Sides pack – I used the extra ground beef I cooked on Monday to make tacos. All I had to do was chop up some lettuce and tomatoes, warm up the tortillas, and assemble. I made a pack of Knorr Rice Sides Chicken as a side dish.
5. Thursday: Chicken Fettucine Alfredo – Sounds fancy, huh? This dish is *full* of shortcuts. I buy a bag of chicken cutlets, which don’t really require defrosting. I use a box of Fettucine pasta and a can of Ragu Classic Alfredo sauce. (What, you thought I made my own?) Since, the chicken doesn’t need defrosting, I just put it in the pan as soon as I get home. I usually add a can of peas & carrots to the chicken when I add the alfredo sauce. Serve over the fettucine.
6. Friday: Hot dogs & Fries – Fridays are our slack days. So, we normally eat something very easy. This week, we’ll be making some hot dogs and baking some fries in the oven.
7. Saturday: Pork Chops with Yellow Rice – Since it’s Saturday, I should theoretically have more time to cook. You can cook pork chops however you’d like: in the oven, on the stove or on the grill. Yellow rice is one of my favorites. It’s easy to cook and you can add whatever you like to it, making for many delicious variations. I’ll be making rice with corn this week, but sometimes I use beans or other vegetables. Shortcuts for yellow rice can be found via Goya, if you’d like.

You can see that the recurring theme is to use shortcuts to create quick and easy meals for your family. It’s what this Modern Mami has found to work.

How do you manage your weekly menu as a busy mom?

Picadillo Image via Wikipedia

Calendar Image via SugarcubeDesign