I aspired to be one of those moms who made everything from scratch. Instagram had my number and kept showing me recipes for spinach muffins and 3-ingredient banana pancakes. But I also knew myself (or more accurately, my work schedule), and I wasn’t going to have time to make breakfast every morning.
So I started thinking about options I could buy at the grocery store. Frozen waffles seemed obvious. I’d never met a kid who didn’t like a frozen waffle. They can be ready in 30 seconds for those mornings when kids wake up hangry (you know those mornings…). And they basically never go bad. You can keep them in your freezer almost forever, right?!
But as I started looking for my go-to brand, I realized that there were a couple of problems. First, I didn’t even recognize a lot of the ingredients being used and had to start Googling what they were. Not a good sign! Second, the ingredients I did recognize were refined flours, refined sugars, and not much else. In other words, these frozen waffles weren’t exactly overflowing with protein, fiber, vitamins, or minerals.
As desperate as I was for the convenience, I just couldn’t stomach feeding my daughter the frozen waffles I was finding on grocery shelves. I decided that with just a little advanced planning and a mini waffle iron, I could probably handle making a batch of waffles every weekend to store in my freezer and feed to my daughter during the week.
So I opened my pantry and my fridge and started putting ingredients into my blender. Whole carrots, zucchinis, apples, and bananas for fruits and veggies. Whole grain wheat flour for fiber. Almonds, peanuts, and eggs with bright orange yolks for protein. Maple syrup, vanilla extract, cinnamon, and sea salt for real flavor.
And guess what. My daughter loved my waffles. She devoured them almost every day for a year. And perhaps just as importantly, I loved my waffles! Not only the bites I snuck off of her high chair tray (I’m definitely not above that) but also how easy it was for me to get her a nourishing meal to start the day. But perhaps the greatest gift of all was the extra 30 minutes it gave me each morning to catch up on sleep, get a little exercise, blow dry my hair (what a foreign concept!), or simply spend some extra quality time with my baby girl..
In a world where parents feel pressure to do it all, it was the ultimate real win-win. And I had a nagging feeling that I probably wasn’t the only mom out there seeking permission to feed her kid the damn frozen waffle.
And so the Evergreen story began.