What healthy dinners do you regularly cook your kids?

[Trainors]

Ours are fussy eaters but I’m determined to start getting some more veg and less processed foods in their diet.

I’m looking for fairly simple ideas that fit into a busy working parents life and won’t be rejected by your typical child.

DS's favourite pasta sauce is one I batch cook and freeze. You can add chicken, tuna, meatballs, or bacon, or just stir it in to pasta as it is, or you can cook a load of fusilli and use half the sauce to make a pasta bake.

A tablespoon of vegetable oil
One onion
One carrot
One small (or half a large) sweet potato
One red pepper
Two or three garlic cloves or a couple of spoonfuls of garlic puree
Couple of tablespoons of tomato puree
Tablespoon of mixed herbs
Half a cup of red lentils
400g tin of tomatoes
400ml tin or carton of passata
Vegetable or chicken stock cube
A tablespoon of balsamic if you have it

Peel/chop/deseed all the veg etc. as needed and put into a largish pan with the oil. Gently sweat it all down together until the onion is softened and starting to go clear. Add the rest of the ingredients, simmer it together for about 30-40 minutes, let it cool slightly, then blitz it with a stick blender (or tip it into a jug blender but you'll probably have to do two batches). If it seems a bit acidic (depends on the tomatoes) add anywhere up to a tablespoon of brown sugar.

DS loves 'veggie pancakes' (you have a shoe in if they already like pancakes!)

Flour, eggs, milk and grated veggies (carrots/aubergines/courgettes) - then just fried like normal pancakes or made into waffles. Dip in favourite dips - I try and do a lot of Greek yoghurt/salsa/guac/hummus to avoid constant ketchup!

We eat a lot of traybakes - easy, simple and packed with goodness - and stir fry’s - quick and easy.

Chicken thigh traybake with bacon lardons (recipe is BBC good food). We do half the amount of lardons (they’re so unhealthy), add blanched asparagus to the tray ten mins before the end, add Mediterranean vegetables (frozen, which you can blast in the microwave etc).

Tonight is stir fry. Steak, cabbage, Brocolli, bean sprouts, spring onion, green beans, fresh noodles etc and a home made sauce (soy, oyster sauce, dark soy etc). Recipe is usually just steak, cabbage and noodles.

Tomorrow is pork tenderloin in the oven with potatoes, asparagus and cherry tomatoes. Again, we add the asparagus (a pack per person as it really doesn’t go far) to add more greens.

It’s all about what you add to a meal to make it healthy, rather than forcing a healthy meal (if that makes sense). Cook things you know your child does like (mine loves spicy food) and add extras to it. Really easy to do that in stir fry’s or tray bakes