Family-Friendly Food and Meal Ideas

Practical Tips From Parents of Picky Eaters

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.

There are a handful of meals that our picky eaters will eat pretty consistently, so we always plan to make 2-3 of those in a week, so we know they will eat something. Making enough to have leftovers is helpful, too (if your picky eater will eat leftovers!), so they have another option when they inevitably refuse to eat some of our other meals.

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Tips for Meal Planning for a Family

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.

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