Somehow, every week I was buying several new bags of snacks at the grocery store. Typically, I’d be getting potato chips, which is what my family’s current addiction seemed to be. This was definitely becoming a problem. It was a drain on our wallets and awful for our health.

I noticed my husband and I specifically starting to gain weight around our middles. I could only imagine what that would look like on a scale or a blood work up. My mind went right to my children after that. I didn’t want to set them up for failure and put them on a path to being unhealthy.

I decided to scour the internet and see what I could do to remedy this problem by potentially finding recipes to make these bad boys at home. I was surprised to find that there were a lot of recipes out there for making homemade chips. Apparently there were a lot of other people who have been faced with this problem.

All I needed was a food processor to really get them going. There was no way I was going to attempt slicing potatoes as thin as they needed to be. I valued my fingers way more than that. So I asked a health conscious friend if she had any recommendations on what I should get. She suggested the Cuisinart DFP-14BCWNY Food Processor from Kitchen Works Inc. I didn’t hesitate to purchase it.

Once it arrived, I got all of the ingredients that I needed. I decided to experiment with olive oil and avocado oil just to see what came out better. I soaked the potatoes after slicing them in the food processor to remove some of the starch. I brushed my first batch with olive oil, salted them and put them in the air fryer. While they cooled, I brushed the other batch with the avocado oil and salted them as well.

They both came out great. It seemed that my husband and daughter preferred the olive oil, whereas my son and I both liked the avocado oil chips better. That was no problem since swapping out the oils was pretty easy.

The kids thought it would be fun next to experiment with different dips to make with the chips. That was fun, and gave them some creative freedom too. We made a homemade onion dip and a chipotle dip as well.

It all went over pretty well, surprisingly so. I figured I’d be dealing with more of a fight with them since healthy things never taste as good as the processed stuff. Luckily, no one seemed to mind. That was a big win for me.

Now it’s become a weekly family tradition of compiling some recipes for different chips and dips, narrowing it down, and sometimes even having to take a vote if we all can’t agree. Of course, whatever recipe lost would get added to the top of the list for the following week. We try to be as fair as possible.

It’s nice because after dinner on a Thursday night, instead of my kids running off to their rooms or sitting on their phones, they hang out to help us come up with ideas. We laugh a lot, and aside from it teaching them to help make decisions, we really have great family bonding time.

It’s such an awesome thing overall. My family is spending more time together and we don’t have to force it. Additionally, we are all putting healthier things into our bodies and my husband and I have lost that extra weight that was creeping into our middles. I’m thankful that I can do this with my Cuisinart food processor and that my kids are on a path to healthier eating.