Please tell how you cook decent meals for your children when they don't like anything the same!

[Jemster]

I am tearing my hair out with trying to cook decent healthy meals for my family & am really looking for some help or advice.

I have ds 8 & dd 3.5 & they are both pretty fussy eaters. I've probably been a bit soft up until now & given in to their preferences but they are so limited that it's starting to worry me now that they aren't getting enough variety in their diet.

I drew up a huge list of meals to make into a meal plan but despite having lots of nice ideas I can't seem to make it work as whatever one likes the other one doesn't!! It's a nightmare. I'm sick of serving up things & them turning up their noses. The only thing they both like is pasta with sauce & they would probably happily eat that every day!

What should I do? Ideally I want to make one meal a day that all four of us can eat, not be faffing around with 2-3 different meals!

[BaldricksTurnip]

Mother of three reformed (and gradually reforming) boys ages 4,5 and 7 here. When they were really little I used to just feed them what I knew they would eat, albeit as healthy as possible with lots of chopped raw salad veg, cold meat/fish, pasta etc.

For the last 18 months or so I have gradually introduced 'adult meals' by either just serving just one meal for the entire family that there's a good chance they'll eat like spaghetti bolognese but I'll seperate out the components i.e a pile of meat and sauce, pile of cheese, pile of spaghetti. I make everything from scratch so I can make a curry say but eliminate the chilli or I can make burgers from good ingredients and control the salt content etc. I always put something on the plate I know they will definitely eat along with a new/challenging food and praise them massively and enthusiastically when they taste a new food despite reservations.

It has been so worth it though they now eat curries made from scratch, sauces with lumps of onion and celery etc in, fresh spices, garlic, ginger and so on.

Just keep plugging away it's so worth it and once the kids get that you mean it they will mess you around less