Giving up cooked dinners for DC.

[TheFairPrincess]

I have 3 young DC, eldest is 6. Previously they had packed lunches for school/preschool as DD was nervous of school dinners.

She had one as a quick fix this week due to a forgotten lunch box and enjoyed the experience, so now she'll be having hot school dinners.

Dinners at home are a bit of a nightmare at the moment. Fussy eating/genuinely different tastes means it's hard to cook balanced meals that everyone will eat. It's got to a point where I'm cooking multiple different meals. I'm wasting time, money and sanity on this. There are a couple of universally loved cooked dinners which I will do on the weekend.

I was thinking of getting the packed lunch bits I would normally get for school lunches and serving "packed lunches" for the kids dinner. Is this awful, or normal? The meals will be balanced nutritionally, but not hot.

Does anyone else do this? And if so, do you have any tips for branching out and still adding in challenging tastes eventually?

Yes! But I wouldn't stick to just what they'll definitely eat . I'd mix in 20% different fruit/veg/put a bit of your hot supper in the middle for them to try. So they're not stuck on the same limited foods forever!

Good idea, I think I will eventually start adding small elements of meals.

I've come up with a list of foods under each category to add to my shop so they are getting a wide variety, the only thing that's limited a bit is the veg as they only like carrot cucumber and pepper.

Our school lunches seem pretty good, and to be honest it's getting to the point for the evening meal at home where they're eating only their favourite (stodgy) bits or barely eating anything. I don't want to leave them hungry, my DD is so drained now she's started year one, I think it would be more relaxing for her to come home and eat something she genuinely enjoys after a busy day. Plus it's so much easier for me, I WFH and can prepare on my lunch break.

I’m going against the grain and saying a mix! Teatime is when I get my children trying new things and we practise using a knife and fork. My children sometimes choose sandwiches at school and the portions aren’t always big. I’d also worry it’s a slippery slope to them eating sandwiches every night. If it weren’t for weeknight teatimes my children wouldn’t be used to eating vegetables. If your children are already a bit fussy, when are you getting chance to practise eating a range of meals?

@1AngelicFruitCake

I see what you mean. I am hoping that as we pre choose the meals, it will be the school meal times where the variety and hot food eating will come in for a while. I do like the idea of adding a small bit of meals in, perhaps to replace the sandwich, and I am planning to mix it up too so there is room for experimentation.

I feel like kids naturally get less fussy as they get older, personally. And right now I honestly feel like I need to prioritise the fact that it sucks for all of us right now.

Soup is great.
Toasties.

Rice pudding made with pudding rice and milk, no sugar 1 small cup of rice/10 cups of milk with a nob of butter.
Gently poach and top with a teaspoon of good raspberry or strawberry jam.
Nutricious and tasty.

Eggs with toast.

Beans on toast topped with grated cheese.

Bread and butter pudding.

I do pancakes regularly but they have 3 times the eggs as normal and are filling and nutricious.

They do not need a second dinner, a tasty supper is just as good.

Cinnamon toast is also great.
6 eggs whipped up in a bowl with a couple of tablespoons of milk.
Dip bread completely in it and fry it in butter and top with a sprinkle of cinnamon mixed with caster sugar.

Filling, delicious and fast.

Things that would put me off;
Not getting the opportunity to use cutlery at home. I can tell when mine have a lot of school lunches in a row because they pick up bad habits.

Them being hungry on club nights. School portions aren't very big. I think my DC need a bigger meal on the days they do sports.

Lack of variety. Our school is still on a two week menu and the veg option is mostly peas or baked beans. IMO fussy eaters should still be exposed to a wide variety of foods.

We always had our main meal at lunchtime when I was little, followed by bread and jam for tea. Pretty sure that was considered totally normal in the seventies.

Iirc, it only stopped when my oldest sister at secondary school - so couldn't come home for lunch - stopped getting free school meals and started taking packed lunch.

On the pancake front, I have a DS who has real food issues relating to SEN.

It is hard to get nutrients and variety into him, so I use ground almonds (obviously if there are no allergies!) as well as flour to add the nutrients and fats. He will also eat chocolate pancakes so along with cocoa I will add some powerded vitamins OR (until he got wise to it) frozen spinach.

But I feel your pain with the fussy eating OP, it can be so demoralising. My Ds has sensory issues and will projectile vomit things back up again so he has a very conservative palate and a fear of trying new foods.

Ah they will eat brioche french toast with bacon and strawberries. Can add that to the list.

@3GreenPullups sorry to hear that :( sounds like you have some amazing workarounds though! I will definitely look into healthier pancakes they would go bananas for that :)

Oh dear @mafted those school lunches don't sound very high quality :( Our school fortunately seems pretty good at lunches and they also do fresh fruit and milk during the day. It sounds like it's a bit of a luck of the draw situation with school catering though.

@1AngelicFruitCake

I’m going against the grain and saying a mix! Teatime is when I get my children trying new things and we practise using a knife and fork. My children sometimes choose sandwiches at school and the portions aren’t always big. I’d also worry it’s a slippery slope to them eating sandwiches every night. If it weren’t for weeknight teatimes my children wouldn’t be used to eating vegetables. If your children are already a bit fussy, when are you getting chance to practise eating a range of meals?

Yeah I agree with this. Obviously I guess it's the same as having the packed lunch/hot meal the other way round in some aspects, but in others I'd be worried if you already have fussy eaters that it just lets that become even more ingrained to the point they might only accept sandwiches at home eventually.

Only saying this as my SD is very fussy and I know if we did this she would start refusing to have anything else except a sandwich at home and it would be difficult to come back from.

A mix is a good compromise though :)

Well a little lunch can always be given for after school sports days.

Oh I forgot, make a big pot of tomato based pasta sauce, packed with lots of vegetables and pureed.
Freeze lots of little bags of this and add to freshly cooked pasta, topped with cheese, for a fast nutricious supper.

Nothing wrong with a fish finger either.
My children all love fish and were started off with fish fingers when they were tots.

Fish finger sandwich was a hit lunch here when they were 3 years old.

That’s what we did when ours had school dinners. That was their main meal. They then had more of a lunch meal at tea time at home.

Unfortunately mine aren’t a fan of school meals so we’ve changed back but it was a lot easier!

I wouldn't. School dinners aren't that great, plus as they get a bit older the portion sizes mean they're not kept very full. They need a proper meal I think - if you do this now when are you going to get them to stop fussing and having you act like a short order cook?

My children’s main complaint was that the school dinners didn’t fill them up. They seemed to get the same amount of food in reception and year six which didn’t make sense to me

I would do this put probably do oven chips or a pizza to go with it.

So the OP said she’d give them a balanced (though cold) dinner, and your suggestion is to add processed fast food to it?!!

@Magicstars

I don’t get the thing about needing a daily ‘hot meal’- where does that come from? I’ve heard others saying it but no understanding of the justification esp if it’s warm outside. I think a nutritious cold/ packed tea is a great idea, esp if DC will eat it & it makes life easier. My DC love that kind of thing, we often have ‘picky bits’. I put in some raw carrots & cucumber, houmous, sarnies with whole meal bread/ Pitta, pistachios- sorted.

Agree - people are really oddly insistent that there should be one (and only one) 'hot meal' a day - people are aghast if people have a hot lunch (even if same/fewer calories than a sandwich) and a hot dinner, and even more horrified if they're both cold. There's a really strong idea that hot food is heavier/more filling/more calorific than cold, which is clearly nonsense as it depends on the foodstuffs in the meal, not its heat.

Wouldn't have worked for me because most of the time my children came home hungry from school and usually lived off the jacket potatoes. At least at home I knew they were getting veg and a decent meal in them.

Tbf I don't think this will be permanent, I was thinking doing it until my middle boy was in Y3, when they are all older and a bit more sensible I'm sure we'll be able to branch out, it's just the constant messing around with different foods not being eaten, bland alternatives, bedtime snacks because they're still hungry, etc..

I don't use food as a discipline tool either so there's no "you must eat x if you want to eat y". I had disordered eating when younger and have a difficult relationship with food so that's a big nono for me. Eating sensibly and healthily is priority number 1 in this house. And the meals they're eating now are just not ideal because they are picking at them.

@earthyfire to be fair though a cold meal can still be decent in size and quantity. It's just a case of tuning it to suit what your DC will eat :)

I don’t see anything wrong with sandwiches, crudités, dip and yoghurt/fruit for dinner - or variations thereof - especially if you mix it up a lot and limit the pre-packaged “treats”.

If they eat grilled cheese they might well eat melted cheese on a tortilla, which could become a pizza type thing or quesadillas.

Likewise if you can get them eating a variety of dips (yoghurt, bean and vegetable based), then some of these could later form the basis of pasta sauces or sandwich fillings.

I also like the idea of homemade rice pudding as the treat element, I used to make banana and cinnamon rice pudding when they were tiny! Can batch cook things like that too.

I don’t know why more people don’t do this tbh. Most of us only do one hot meal a day as adults.

Why make life hard for yourself.

Yes it's a good plan. We did this. Then you can have a proper grown ups dinner later. At some point they will get curious about it and want to join in.
We didn't start having week-night family sit down evening meals until eldest DD was in yr 6!