How we adapted the Swedish Candy-Saturday tradition of Lördagsgodis

Happy Friday Everyone!

We made it another week! And if you are a busy family who feels like you are running from point A to point B all week long (just like me) then you know that simply getting here deserves a celebration!

What is Lördagsgodis?

Last Friday I told you about our family’s Candy Friday tradition. It was after reading this post that a good friend of mine, who spent time living in Sweden, sent me an article about Lördagsgodis. This is the Swedish tradition of allowing kids to buy and eat sweets on Saturday.

Lördagsgodis is a tradition that was originally started by the Swedish government to help reduce the rates of dental carries/cavities in children. The way the story goes is that after doing some (what by today’s standards would be considered unethical) studies on children in mental hospital in the 1940s, the government discovered that eating concentrated amounts of sweets once per week instead of a small amount every day reduced the rates of cavities.

Another benefit of Lördagsgodis, that I read about, was that it helps children learn about money because the children use their allowance to purchase what the want. Up until now, this isn’t how my family has been doing it, but after learning about Lördagsgodis I think we are going to make that change.

Benefits of Candy Friday

For our family the benefits of candy Friday are:

1. Anytime my kids ask for a treat midweek, I can defer them to their candy friday window
2. It helps stop me and my kids from impulse purchasing candy, because we have a scheduled time to do it
3. Because my kids eat so much candy on Friday – I barely need to worry about dinner, since they don’t typically eat it!

Tonight’s Inspiration Ingredient: Moldy Cheese

On Thursday night my husband discovered that we had a critical need to eat cheddar cheese and lots of it – because our brick of cheese was starting to go moldy. Fortunately, thanks to great resources such as StillTasty.com – we know that we can still safely eat that cheese, but we are motivated to eat it up!

This meant that our menu’s inspiration ingredient was our moldy cheese! Though I will give you the caveat that we cut away the mold (1 inch removed as per Stilltasty!) but consumed the rest.

Our dinner

Tonight’s menu was a build your own nacho bar. To do this we make:

1. Oven-melted cheesy nachos
2. Diced orange peppers
3. Diced, de-seeded jalapenos
4. Green onions
5. Salsa and Sour cream
6. Any leftover’s from lunch

We do a “build your own” style so that my kids can pick and choose what they want to have from what is offered. This way they still have autonomy over what foods get put on their plate. Honestly, if it weren’t for them, I would just load up the nachos and melt the peppers, onions etc together, but… sometimes I am willing to make sacrifices for my kids!

We have made nachos before were I give each person (adults and kids) a cake pan and they get to load it up the way they want and then I bake it – but tonight I just did one big pan in the oven and then allowed them to dress it up once it was on the table.

What did they eat?

I forgot to take before pictures – since we all just so happily sat down to our nacho spread. But I remembered to snap a few after pictures (before I proceeded to eat the rest of the chips off their plates!)

Both boys grabbed some nachos without toppings. You can see my younger son’s candies too, which he also ate. My older son choose a slurpee for Candy Friday and it was already gone by the time we had dinner.

After this photo was taken, as my husband and I were finishing up and talking about our day, my older son came back to the table and had another plate of nachos with all the toppings (jalapeno’s included) and said he really liked it.

But are nacho’s healthy enough to serve for dinner?

Maybe you are wondering if nacho’s are healthy enough to serve for dinner. Maybe you think of nachos as more of an appetizer. Even before kids I have loved having a plate of nachos for dinner. The ingredient possibilities are endless – sometimes I add beans or ground beef, sometimes I make a 7-layer dip or guacamole, you get the idea. There are lots of add-ons you could do to round it out to make it a full meal that you feel good about. They can also be on the table in less than 20 minutes!

The other thing would be to compare it to any dinner that you might pick up on the way home. So I decided to do that:

That is a fairly comparable nutrient profile and I didn’t cherry pick (I just thought about what I might grab for take out if I wanted to get something close by that I know my kids like to eat). And I hope that after reading my blog you know that I think its totally OK if you sometimes serve McDonald’s Cheeseburgers or Pizza Hut Pizza. But I also hope that this table helps you see that sometimes foods that are less healthy that you make at home aren’t really any different than foods that you might pick up on your way home.

I would also guess that the meal made at home is significantly cheaper than McDonald’s or Pizza.

So what?

Another week for my family is in the bag and last night’s dinner was a hit. There might be more nutritious foods I could serve, but would they be as fun or as fast? I don’t think so.

Lördagsgodis is the Swedish tradition of having kids purchase candies for themselves using their allowance on Saturdays and it was started as a way to help reduce cavities! Who knew!

So my family is going to keep going with Candy Friday, but I think I am going to put the money in my kids hands moving forward so that they can start learning about the financial implications of the choices they make.

What’s your families fast and fun meal? Do you ever have nachos for dinner? What’s your favourite toppings? Leave me a comment or send me an email. I would love to hear from you. Thanks for reading!