Family Feeding Tips and Products

One of my kids is vegetarian. We have a meal box subscription (HungryRoot) that has a lot of vegetarian options. I let me child scroll through the list of ingredients and pictures and choose three things they'll eat. When the box comes, we unpack it together and my child decides what order we have those meals. All of the meals are simple to make, so when we find ones we like, we'll often buy the ingredients on our own and they become part of our regular routine. The meal plan allows us to skip boxes, so we only get it when we know we'll have a busy week or are out of ideas.

Try making "build your own" meals. Put out a bunch of components and let each person pick and choose what they want. You're only making one meal, but it's customized for each person. We do build your own salads (greens and veggies, beans, chicken, cheese, croutons) or rice bowls (protein, rice, cheese, salsa, avocado, beans, mango) and these go over really well with my kids and their different food preferences. Picky eaters can enjoy their dinner "deconstructed" if they don't want their food touching.

My husband and I try to plan 3-4 meals for the coming week before the weekend is out, so we can make a plan for grocery shopping and actually cooking. We often invite the kids to each pick one meal for the week as well - they tend to eat it better when they've been involved in the planning in some way!

We have a binder of "greatest hits" recipes that we use almost exclusively for our family dinner rotation. My weekly meal planning involves picking recipes from the binder each weekend to meal plan for the week ahead, and I go to the grocery store once. I just have too many new recipe failures to bother wasting my time with trial and error on our busy weeknights. I'd rather cook something tried and true, and my kids would much rather eat something they already know they love. On the rare occasion that I cook something new and the family loves it, it gets printed out and added to the binder.

Pepperoni is our go-to and probably the ultimate kid-friendly pizza topping. I haven't met many kids who don't like it!

Sausage and mushroom is a fun one that my kids like. When we make this one at home, we cook crumbled Italian sausage and finely chopped mushrooms, then sprinkle them over the pie before baking.

Smoothies. But not ones made with too many seeds :)

Yogurt!

Cereal

Cheese quesadilla

Banana

Sweet Potatoes