What do your weekly meals look like for you and your fam? I generally enjoy cooking, what I don't enjoy is the negotiations that come with cooking, and with kids, it's even worse. I'm also the kind of person that could eat the same 5 dishes for a year without much fuss or question. That's the ADHD lodged in my brain for you.
The negotiation, or even the anticipation of negotiations, makes me agitated. If I could, I'd be a food dictator, but that's not how living with people works. It's annoying enough to me that I often push it to the back of my mind and just "figure it out" on the fly. That's not conducive to making good choices, though, only convenient choices.
If I'm going to do most of the cooking, I'll want a schedule of meals, so I can both plan, anticipate, and head-off any objections. I struggle with being assertive on this point, and I'm told often, "We don't need to do that much planning." Which, as someone with ADHD into my late 30s, I know is not true, and I do need that much planning if not more. Structure is something I need, and the kids at this age obviously thrive off structure as well.
So anyway, how do you tackle this? I need to get this sorted out for myself, but also for my kiddos. Kiddo 1 just had an annual checkup and is low on iron, and is growing increasingly picky about food. Kiddo 2 is still in that "I'll try anything in front of me." phase, and getting this sorted out now hopefully means I can avoid the pickiness down the line.
I'm going to cross post this in !neurodiverse@hexbear.net & !food@hexbear.net as I think it has some clear overlap.
I want to try and help - not as a parent and not necessarily as a neurodiverse person since I didn't look too far into it, but I have definitely eaten food a few times in my life.
I would conjecture that, if you can't override their whims and they insist on being picky, then you'd need a lot of options to be adaptable. That means you'd need a lot of things that are easy to prepare on the fly. You could cook a lot diverse meals and freeze them. You could make extra portions of popular meals when you do make them and freeze those too. As you build up a catalogue of frozen burritos, gyoza, nuggets, soups, etc. then, when you do a weekly meal prep and they don't want it, you can offer them other options that only require you to take it out of the freezer and put it into the oven. AND THEN YOUR ASS COULD FREEZE THE PORTION OF THAT MEAL PREP THEY DIDN'T WANT. I have no idea what kind of budget you'd need to vacuum seal stuff, but as I looked at ideas on tiktok it seemed like freezerheads like them.