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 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.