to dread the hell of mealtimes in our house?

[ilovecake]

I worked out that lunch and dinner takes about an hour and a quarter to prepare, serve, feed and then clear up each! DD is 4 and DS 1 - DS makes the most enormous mess everywhere, throws it around, misses his mouth etc etc - and at the moment is not actually eating anything as he is teething. He won't take food from a spoon as wants to do it by himself. Plus there's the anticipation that sometimes neither of them will eat what I serve - so we have tears and strops (and that's just me). Anyone got any tips for making mealtimes less stressful or messy - I know this is a phase and it will eventually get better.

Really Good Bolognese Sauce

180g unsalted butter
6 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
180g unsmoked pancetta, finely chopped (use scissors)
3 small onions, finely chopped
3 carrots, finely chopped
3 celery stalks, finely chopped
3 cloves garlic, finely chopped
3 bay leaves
1.2kg lean (5% fat) minced beef
6 tablespoons concentrated tomato purée
450 ml Italian red wine
grated nutmeg
salt and freshly ground black pepper
450 ml meat stock (cube OK)
450 ml full fat milk

Heat the butter and oil in a very large heavy based saucepan and cook the pancetta for five minutes, stirring frequently.

Add the onion, and when it has begun to soften, add the carrot, celery, garlic and bay leaf. Cook for a further 15 minutes, stirring frequently.

Put in the minced beef and cook until it is medium brown in colour and nearly crisp, crumbling it in the pot with a wooden spoon. Do this over high heat so that the meat browns rather than stews.

Add the tomato paste and continue to cook over high heat for a further 2 minutes. Add the wine, nutmeg, salt and pepper and the stock. Bring to the boil and then turn the heat down very low so that the mixture will reduce very slowly. Set the lid askew over the pan and cook for 2.5 hours, adding a little milk from time to time. After 2.5 hours all the milk should have been used and the sauce should be thick and rich.

I generally serve this with penne rigate or tortiglioni as they are easy pastas for children to manage. Serve with lots of freshly grated parmesan.

This sauce freezes very well, all children love it, and my conscience is clear as it so full of good things

Juices most deifnately taste better freshly expressed...centrifugal or masticated....also, you know what'sin them....unless you go to a Juicebar you will not experience such nice Juice ever
Even vegetable Juices in the right combination wlll become gorgeous...of couse, there will some you don't like!
Smoothies also are often realy lovely...and I mena healthy smoothies...prepared from freshly expressed Juice as well as from blended down ones...
Avocado works well in many smoothies, too...now I really don't like to eat avocado but in a smoothies it's gorgeous

that sauce does sound delicious...do you like Prawns and Chilli peppers, as I have a lovely sauce for that

Couldn't agree more with the exasperation over mealtime mess! Some things at least are quick to prepare, though (for the baby who thinks she can handle a spoon): Frozen vegetables that take 2 minutes to cook (especially peas and corn) with some ham or turkey and toast cut in strips; omelets, with shredded ham and cheese and peas (optional); finger-friendly pasta (rotini, fusilli, penne etc.) w/little bit of pesto, cheese, and YES: peas! Or just cut up things in sticks and serve raw: zucchini, carrots, red pepper. The hard part is having appropriate meat around, I found, but use copious amounts of microwaveable meatballs, and then there is always cold cuts. (DS(5) now lives on salami, crackers, green apple and carrot sticks - it's been the stock lunch all summer. Probably not too healthy, but I guess there are worse things.)

We have also considered asking the neighbors to lend us a dog for cleaning up.

Delia Smith's recipe for Putanesca sauce is really very good. It is in her Summer book (I suspect you can google for it). It is intended for pasta but we sometimes have it with chicken with new potatoes and green beans or over good sausages with rice. Like Anna, I make a big batch (in a huge Le Creuset) and freeze it in small portions.

There is chilli in the putanesca - you might want to skip that with very little children.

Ahem, lunchtime recipe of your dreams:

Wholemeal pitta bread stuffed with cheese and microwaved until melted. Cut in two.
Half a cored apple, 3 dried apricots.
Can even be eaten in front of telly if you don't tell anyone on Mumsnet .

You have my sympathies.

My motto has become: Cooking for toddlers - a waste of bloody time!

Most nights I make the simplest food - eggy bread & baked beans, sausage & mash, baked potato & cheese; a lot of pasta dishes to be honest - macaroni cheese, pasta w/ chicken & veg etc, pasta w/ tuna - anything I can do fairly quickly. Toddlers are fussy, whimsical, messy, easily distractable (the list goes on...). When I'm feeling tired and know I have the whole bath time / bed time routine ahead of me, the last thing I feel like doing is whipping up a gourmet meal only to have my toddler spit it out / throw it at the walls / tell me its 'yuk'... which is why, in my humble opinion, it really isn't worth getting obssessed about working your way religiously through Annabel Karmel's entire repetoire. Cooking it and dishing it up quickly, then allowing them a generous (but fixed) amount of time to eat/mess/reject their food (I give my son about 20 mins, after which time I can pretty much judge if he is in an 'arsing around' kind of mood and I might as well start clearing away...) - that's what works for me.

Also, as the mother of a formerly extremely fussy eater (fingers crossed, he seems to be growing out of this phase...) I can also say - the more relaxed you are about food, the less of a nightmare your child will be about food. I have genuinely, completely relaxed about my son's diet - if he eats it, fine, if not, no big deal - and slowly but surely it is working wonders with his attitude towards food and meal times. The last thing I would say, though, is - cut under 3's some slack. They generally find it difficult to sit still so are bound to be a bit nightmarish at the dinner table, plus they often seem able to survive on thin air - this is is so common with this age group - mostly they still thrive , though, and do eventually start to enjoy food.

Caroline - I love puttanesca sauce and had never thought of freezing it, I suppose because it's relatively quick to make (unlike all-morning-bolognese or tomato sauce). That's a very good idea

The freezer is your friend! Do a load of batch cooking every second Sunday or so, freeze it in portions in special little freezer bags and away you go. Freezing doesn't destroy any nutrients - in fact, it preserves them, so frozen homemade food is just as nutritious as fresh, same goes for frozen veg. I make curry, fishcakes, lamb casserole, chicken and squash pie, veggie shepherd's pie, vegetable soup, chicken casserole with sweet potatoes...all these can be grabbed out of the freezer, defrosted in the microwave and served with veg or salad within 10-15 minutes. That's lunch, and for supper we always have something quick like pasta, beans on toast, leftover Sunday dinner, omelette, soup etc. It takes a bit of organisation but it's well worth it and saves you time in the long run.

And I echo the comments about not stressing when they don't eat. If DS isn't hungry, I don't force him to eat but I don't have any junk in the house. (He's at that funny toddler stage when one day he eats everything, one day he eats nothing). So if he doesn't want his lunch he can have a banana and a piece of bread and butter later if he's hungry. No big deal.

Dear Krang, where can I get the recipe for chicken and squash pie? And the chicken and swet potato casserole. Thx.

lol@Issy. So true about the amount of interest your children show in dinner being in direct proportion to how little time you spend preparing it! Open a can of beans and toast some bread and they might eat it. Lovingly make a batch of cute little individual shepherd's pies and they will likely laugh in your face before throwing it at the nearest cream coloured home furnishing.

Poor you. I just never made any kind of fuss over any meal time ever in 23 years. My sister was here on Saturday, dreading lunch time, a huge thing for her, like ilcake, she spends time, children reject, even sick it up.
Instead I think they eat what they need. Just put something healthy in front of them ideally which takes 3 minutes at most to prepare and if they eat it fine, if not you're saving money on food bills. Children eat what they need anyone. Probably some 1 year olds only need breastmilk anyway or bits off the edge of your own plate.

The improtant thing is for it not to matter to you at all. I suspect women who work and are thinking about the next deal or at home but thinking about their political activities etc just can't make a fuss over meals because they've got more interesting things to think about. It is a rare under 5 who starves if food has been put before it in disinterested fashion. It doesn't matter if they don't eat but it matters hugely if meals are a battleground.

I love what Issy says. When I was a child our mealtimes were a nightmare of tearful mum/fussy siblings and I really try not to repeat it.

But my 3 dcs have different tastes and it's hard to accommodate them all in one meal. They're 5,7,9 years. I dread mealtimes, more for the manners than what they do/don't eat.

Non-use of cutlery, talking with mouth full, getting up and wandering around the room, dropping food, the list of windups goes on even without resentment that they don't appreciate the lovely meal I slaved over.

I pride myself on loving food, bake bread myself (dc1&2 insist on bought sliced stuff tho), have an allotment etc. Still hate feeding times. YET very occasionally we'll manage to have a civilised conversation about eachothers' day or plans for the next day etc. I only hope that these will increase in frequency.

I can't shake off this feeding/nurturing mum image which I fail at miserably. If someone offered me a pill to feed them instead I'd grab it!

I tend to give DD's cooked lunches and picnic type teas. Then at least if they have mananged a good breakfast, and lunch, teatime becomes alot easier as you don't have to start cooking, and you're not as frought if they don't want to eat as much as you would like.

They also have fruit, humzingers, and smoothies along the way, so reaching their "5 a day" is quite easy.

DD1 did go through a stage of only wanting carrot and sweetcorn for a long time, it completely stressed me out, but thankfully she is now a good little eater, favouries:- Seabass, olives, salmon,houmous, lamb, cabbage and brocolli.

DD2 is still tricky at tea and sometimes will only eat a few cherry tomatoes, but I'm trying to leave her to get on with it, and hoping she will follow by example when her appetite increases.

We have recently gone through the freezer throwing away batches of lovingly prepared, organic, extremely time consuming baby cubes, and lobbed most of them in the bin!

It's true that their appetite seems to shrink as the day goes by. I'll make a point of relaxing more over supper as they're always starving at breakfast

Thanks to you all for the great responses / ideas! It's refreshing to hear that not everyone thinks one should prepare recipes by Ms Karmel and others - its so hard not to feel crap if they eat the same stuff over and over - but I guess those who've come out the other side can see that as long as they are eating who cares! Some great normal ideas for coping with this - cheers very much.

Please do try the hot cheese pittas though, they will save your life! Pittas have long use-by dates so are great for emergencies.