Family Feeding Tips and Products

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.

Have your kids look at cook books or online recipes, write grocery lists, go shopping with you, let them pick out any produce item that they want to try. When kids are involved they are more apt to eat!

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.

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!

Yogurt!

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

Cereal

Cheese quesadilla

Banana

Sweet Potatoes

Peas and diced up onions for texture. Or, broccoli florets.

In a separate pan, saute onions, warm up Cream of Mushroom and add canned tuna. Mix this back into your cheddar macaroni and cheese for a "tuna casserole."

Sandwiches and/or quesadillas!

Annie's Mac and Cheese with peas thrown in during the last minute of cooking has never let us down!