Enjoy easy meals that the entire family can enjoy, including picky eaters. Meal planning is a great way to save money and time and it can actually help your fussy eaters enjoy family meals a lot more. Check out these top tips for meal planning as well as simple recipes to make meal time a happy time.
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Choosing recipes and planning meals that suit the whole family can be challenging, especially if there are picky eaters among the group. You don’t want to make separate meals, but neither do you want to make family dinners a source of fussing and arguments.
One of the biggest challenges to meal planning is when your food preferences don’t match those of the people you cook for. My husband says that I like frouffy food. That apparently isn’t his favorite.
When we got married, I had to completely rework my meal planning. The new foods I was discovering graced the pages of Bon Appetit or the menus of high-end Santa Barbara restaurants. The recipes of my childhood featured things that he was adamantly opposed to eating: anything with cream of soup in it.
While he might not have been a picky eater by definition, I did learn to make some small changes to how I planned meals so that everyone at the dinner table was happy.
Add children to the mix and you find that planning delicious meals that every family member enjoys can be a challenge. The good news is that enjoying delicious and easy dinners as a family can happen!
Why It’s Important to Meal Plan
It eases anxiety. You might not realize how important just having a meal plan can be for picky eaters. Knowing what’s going to be dished up at dinner time can help the person with the picky palate prepare for the meal and not be anxious wondering if it’s something they will like or not.
It helps reduce decision fatigue. If you have a plan for your meals you won’t be wondering every night what to serve. You don’t want to be a short-order cook, so having a meal plan can aid in decisions at the grocery store as well as in food preparation.
It saves money. If you have a list of meal prep ideas and great meals your family loves, you’ll be able to look for sales and tailor your grocery list for meals that you know will get eaten.
Meal Planning Strategies for Picky Eaters.
1. Make meals that everyone loves.
We waste less time and money and can enjoy our time at the table more when we prepare meals that everyone loves, familiar foods that your choosy eater has no problem enjoying.
Not sure what they like this week? Ask your people what they really love. This answer can change from time to time. That’s okay. Revisit the topic of favorite meal every season and refine your Grocery Staples Checklist to reflect current preferences.
The more you include your picky eaters in the meal planning, the more buy-in and agency they will experience.
2. Make meals that can be served as a buffet.
When you serve a buffet prep you allow kids and adults alike to choose exactly what they enjoy most.
Often I serve burritos, nachos, tacos, even pizza set up in a way where my people can customize their meals to suit their preferences. I get it my way, they get it theirs.
A pasta salad bar is perfect for busy nights. And a Snacky Dinner never disappoints.
Some of our favorite buffet meals include:
3. Make meals that challenge them.
It’s okay not to “love” every meal you eat, provided that it’s nourishing. It’s a good thing to plan an adventure meal for your family on a weekly or monthly basis. Yes, really. That’s the only way that we learn new flavors and expose ourselves to new foods.
Doing this at a restaurant often seems to help. Gramma’s house is even better. I don’t usually plan new recipes or different flavors as the main dish. Our biggest challenge (usually) is vegetables. I try to include several different vegetable options so they have options and can continue to try new things.
4. Plan weekly theme nights.
A meal plan can help your picky eater swallow what you’re dishing out. Using the same weekly meal plan ideas in rotation can really help them as they know to expect tacos each Tuesday and pizza each Friday.
There are lots of ways to implement the same weekly dinner menu ideas and theme night templates without it getting boring for the more adventurous eater.
5. Let them eat bread and jam.
One of my favorite children’s books is Bread and Jam for Frances by Russell Hoban. In the story, big sister Frances refuses to eat anything new. She insists that she only wants to eat bread and jam. So her parents let her. Until she’s absolutely sick of the stuff.
Surely, there are children and spouses who could eat the same old, same old every day, but I think eventually most people want a change. Be ready with some new and interesting foods to tempt them with and offer options.
Now that my picky eaters are in college, they are no longer picky. In fact, they have more adventurous taste buds than I do now! I think this is largely in part to making options available to them along the way.
Classic Kid Favorites
Hungry for some easy recipes to make your kids’ favorite foods homemade? We’ve got you covered:
Main Dishes
Easy Side Dish Recipes
?If the main dish isn’t super exciting for your picky eater, having some easy dishes on the side can make it a little easier.
Fill the Bread Basket
While every family may have different standards for eating requirements at the dinner table, I find that offering lots of options, especially things you know everyone enjoys, makes it easier for the pickiest eaters to deal with foods that might not be their favorites.
Favorite Desserts
Having a sweet treat at the end of the meal can be a satisfying way to end a meal with picky eaters.
Tell us what you think!
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This post was originally published on February 8, 2014. It has been updated for content and clarity.
Elizabeth
Hi Jessica,
My son (who is a week off three) is what I would have considered a very picky eater not that long ago. I always dished him up our dinner first, but if he didn’t eat enough to get him through the night – then his dinner would finish with a plate of plain porridge! This went on for months, but eventually he got bored and started eating more and more off his plate. He is a lot better now, although sometimes we still have to resort to the porridge again… However he is now, in our house, considered old enough to go to bed hungry if he decides not to eat dinner – both my children have tonight, after refusing to eat Chicken Fried Rice, a dish they have scoffed down in the past *sigh*! I just wanted to pop in and thank you for this series, Menu Planning is my nemesis; life is so much sweeter for it, yet I still struggle to organise myself enough to do it regularly!
Jessica Fisher
So glad to hear it’s been helpful. Hang in there, mama. Here’s to better eating tomorrow. 🙂
Jo Cormack
I know my philosophy might seem hard-line, but I advise parents to serve up whatever it is THEY want the family to be eating so that their children get continuous, repeated exposures to a really wide variety of textures and flavours. You acknowledge the value of challenging picky eaters’ palates, but I feel that to do so only on a weekly or monthly basis is nowhere near enough. Predominantly serving up food that you know will be acceptable to picky eaters will make the problem worse.
I am a huge fan of Rusell Hoban, but I would also advise steering well clear of the bread & jam! let children’s natural appetite direct their eating choices.
Jessica Fisher
I was being a little tongue-in-cheek about the bread and jam. 😉
I think the idea of guiding your family’s food culture is super important. Thanks for making that point.
Sandi
I wasn’t allowed to be picky growing up and thankfully neither the hubs nor the kid were picky. Hubs is gone now, and kid is a teen. When he was young, it was a ‘tough, eat it anyway’ type thing. Since he’s legally considered an adult now, I am more accommodating. Things he truly doesn’t like, I try to eat when he is not around. Things I know aren’t his favorites are often paired with something he super likes. He is very much a creature of habit, and would definitely eat the same couple of things every day of his life if I was ok with that. Happily for his nutritional balance, I am not at all ok with that much repetition. 🙂
cherie
I have to say, as a child [and a picky child at that] Bread and Jam for Frances was one of my favorite books. My youngest also loves it and put a finger on why we both adored it so – those elaborate lunches, with little baskets of cherries, a tiny shaker of salt, a small pot of this and a that and another thing! So elegant! So adorable!
We love it.
In fact, she has a laptop lunchbox we sometimes use for what we call ‘frances lunches’ . . . in fact she had a frances lunch today at home – a scoop of tuna salad, with a cute little poppy seed roll toasted and buttered, a small cup of banana yogurt with a pink spoon, a few carrots and a small arrangement of pepper strips . . .
Heaven
I do have to say though, I also never did the separate thing like frances got – frankly my son, 13, would still eat pasta for every meal every day happily and never tire of it – I guarantee. Pizza? ditto for all my kids. And I see oh so many parents who are still making chicken nuggets or mac n cheese at every meal for the one child who literally eats nothing else
Not how I wanted to parent – not judging them but no way LOL
Donn
Great post. My teens aren’t as picky as they used to be (thank God for that…) but when they were little I “deconstructed” a lot of meals and let them eat the parts that they favored with a deal that they at least try some of the other parts. This worked well. They got fed, I got what I wanted and their horizons were expanded a little bit. I was a picky eater as a child too (still am about some things) and the worst thing my parents would say to me was that I had to eat something. Really made me resistant to try things for quite awhile. Give choices within reason (like deconstruction of a meal…I don’t make special food just for one kid) and let them decide. Worked for us! Now I can’t keep enough food in the house for two teens! LOL