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.
It’s helpful to have a “rotation” of dishes that everyone is more or less on board with and cover the essential nutritional needs. Just large enough to give variety but not so large as to be unwieldy. Making enough to have leftovers for another night helps bring the planning stress down.
With picky eaters, you can’t give in to their demands, they eat what everyone else eats. However, I find that a little negotiation/bargaining helps them feel like they’re getting a win while they’re still eating what you give them. My kid the other day was like, I’ll eat the inner bits of the Brussels sprouts but I don’t like the outer bits. So, fine, they eat what was like 90% of the veggies and then there’s a small handful of outer leaves left.
I'm in a different situation to you - I don't like planning meals - but my solutions might be helpful to you.
I like having a set of meals and allowing people to pick from those on weekdays. There are a number of things you can do from only canned and frozen items, which means that you can make those menu items available for nearly all meals without needimlng to worry about when the food will be eaten. Before mealtime, I pick the ones I want to eat and then let the other people select from those items.
The big advantage is that you can sorta plan the meals in advance without having to get other people to commit to anything.
I find it a lot easier to give/take supplements than change diet. Obviously, I try to eat healthily, but if someone's picky giving them a gummy vitamin is the option with the least headache on your part.
I find it a lot easier to give/take supplements than change diet
Yeah, we're taking this rout. Honestly, I should probably be taking some kind of supplement as well.
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.
So we order groceries on Saturday evening. She is in charge of breakfast and lunches and incidentals, I am in charge of planning the dinner menu and my personal breakfast and lunch. I'm not sure if it's a perfect balance but it's sort of how it ended up.
When I plan for dinners, I pick 2-3, I let her pick 2-3 and then our oldest gets to pick something he wants(sometimes 2 meals if I can get under his ADHD). I will then figure out what we have in stock and what we need for each meal once I have them all in my calendar. I order as I go. This involves me checking if we need tortillas, then later if we need chickpeas, etc but I figured it is easier for me to get up several times to check the pantry than to try and remember all at once.
I will plan for at least 1 meal that will have leftovers because this makes it easier for her to plan lunch and also gives us the ability to use said leftovers for an easy "fend for self" evening. I generally try to make a soup on Sunday since it's soup season but I also like to plan for the occasional curry type dish that you can make a lot of for cheap. This assures a fridge full of leftovers, but it's easy to do this and go overboard and end up wasting food the next week. I am working on accounting for this. Save a "leftover friendly dish for later in the week, or like this week, I made a northern bean curry for my lunches so I can just pop it in the microwave whenever.
One major pitfall is picky kid syndrome, but we always have stuff on hand for peanut butter and jelly, and I try to keep a stockpile of canned pasta type stuff because my oldest loves that shit. You can easily swap either of these in on the fly, but I also aim for having the kids try to eat what is for dinner first.
For the 5 meals for a year part, I keep tabs on what everyone likes and always keep those staple meals on rotation. I'd rather cook food that my picky eaters will eat than try too many new things and no one wants to try. I'm hoping to move to whole food plant based, so I will need to figure out some stuff regarding that though.
How does the negotiation come about?
Oh, it's your typical "What do you want for dinner?", "Oh I don't know... what do you want for dinner?" trope. The part of the problem stems from my inability to retain what kind of food we even have in the house, even though I'm there when we buy it. Once it's behind an opaque door, it might as well not exist. The other part of the problem is that the question "What do you want for dinner?" registers as almost nothing to me most of the time. This might be a side effect of my medication (which suppresses apatite), but I have no desire for any kind of specific meal on any given day. I also never get "bored" of a meal, even if we've "had it a lot recently." I have a very hard time relating to these ideas, it just doesn't compute.
I need to know the schedule of things to feel safe, honestly. I need to know what I'm cooking tonight, tomorrow, and when to pull frozen meats out of the fridge.
Yeah, this is how I feel too. Most of the time, we're not cooking frozen things, but that is an expression of the problem because I'm not thinking ahead enough to actually pull frozen meats out. Thinking ahead, is not something my brain does well. If I have it written down, and I create a structure for myself to stop and actually plan ahead for the week / two weeks, I'd actually pull that stuff out. For my spouse, she can do all that in her head. I can't.
Thanks for your comment!
The part of the problem stems from my inability to retain what kind of food we even have in the house, even though I'm there when we buy it. Once it's behind an opaque door, it might as well not exist.
Are you all deciding what's for dinner before or after the shopping? We usually figure out a plan for the week, take inventory of the stuff we already have, and then make a list for what we need. Usually the items for each meal end up on the list next to each other, and that helps me contextualize these items as "the broccoli for the stir fry" or "the diced tomatoes for the chili", if that makes sense.
The other part of the problem is that the question "What do you want for dinner?" registers as almost nothing to me most of the time. This might be a side effect of my medication (which suppresses apatite), but I have no desire for any kind of specific meal on any given day.
The other benefit of having the plan set before the shopping for me is that it has already been decided, and we kinda stick to it in a democratic centralist sort of way. There might be some pivots ("the bok choi is getting a little sad, so let's bump the noodle bowl up to tonight") but we try to hold to the plan unless the week gets thrown off by other circumstances.
What does your spreadsheet look like? Trying to mentally visualise how it would work
There is a sheet for meals, one for ingredients, and one that relates meals to ingredients
Edit - I wrote a comment on the cross post about a spreadsheet and I thought this was replying to that
I run a spreadsheet with dishes and try to pick ones that we haven't had within the last few weeks. I plan to cook 5 meals a week, with one being a large meal shared across two days (like chili or spaghetti sauce or something). I've got probably 30 recipes that we cycle through, with new ones added every once in a while.
I just took the opportunity to set up a recipe manager (Recipya for anyone curious) that I hope can help with this. Having to answer "What's for dinner" is hard when I can't even recall recipes I've made and enjoyed.
I do groceries once a week, so I plan meals into my grocery spreadsheet at that time. Idk how I'd survive if I just tried to keep it loose - I'd buy way too much or too little or stuff would rot.
I handle dinners and groceries, so there hasn't been any real negotiation to do things this way, it's just how things fell.
That really feels like the natural outcome of being the primary cook, is you also become the primary grocer too.
you also become the primary grocer too.
Once things settle into place you can get away with a pretty quick pick-up orders, no more wandering the halls of the supermarket for hours
I think it will, it can scrape websites in various ways to add recipes to it, which really sets the barrier to entry very low.
I try to block out dinners for the week as "one night" and "two night" meals to make sense of what I'll be making and what keeps nicely as leftovers in the refrigerator. A typical week for me is 3 two-night meals, and takeout for a night to give me a break. We have to adjust this "schedule" to fit our week accordingly to make things as easy as possible (e.g. adjusting so a leftover night happens when my partner has a late work meeting, so she can eat quick and go).
From there, I try to keep a rotation of meals that everyone (partner and pre-schooler) generally like and are easy enough to make on a weeknight with minimal preparation. I'll usually keep a weekend dinner slot to test out new recipes - figure out how long it takes me to cook them, how labor intensive is it, how do the pickier eaters like it. When something works super well with my daughter, we'll try to iterate on dishes with some similar flavors: she likes
(emojis there for slur filter italian word) e pasta, so we try a minestrone. The minestrone goes over well, so we try a tomato and cabbage smoked paprika stew with tortelini.Sometimes our daughter is just fussy with a new food, and if it's with a new two-night meal we'll just keep something on hand to pivot with for the second night.
I know this might not totally help with the negotiation part for you, but compartmentalizing these things might make one big task (planning/negotiating meals for a whole week) into a few smaller, more manageable tasks.
One suggestion, maybe plan easy/low-effort meals so that, in the event that the kid decides they're picky today, you aren't so emotionally invested in whether they eat it or not. For us that's a lot of roasted vegetables, rice dishes, and things you can dip in tzatziki (since tzatziki is our panacea for getting the toddler to eat). Speaking from experience, I get a lot more upset when I've put a ton of work into something that the kid subsequently throws on the ground or ignores (we're in early toddlerhood, still learning good table behavior) than if it was just a quick thing I whipped up. At the moment this does mean we are leaning into more snack-y meals instead of 'proper' courses, but it saves a lot of stress.
You can't really control what they will want to eat, but you can set yourself up to handle it better and to think more clearly about the options you have to manage the situation as it develops.
