We don't actually always eat at the table, but we do eat together. So, like, if the kids are playing with trains on the living room floor, fuck it, let's pull up some of the nesting tables, put everyone's food on it, and eat together while we talk and play trains. I do not have the energy to chivvy everyone to the table every night, our table is a goddamn cluttered mess anyway, and in general, we are not together enough to serve everyone a beautifully plated meal at the same time anyway.
So we all tumble through the door sometime between 5.30-6.00, one of us stays in the kitchen while the other gets the kids ' shoes and coats off and gets them settled doing something, anything, and then the kitchen person brings out drinks and plates as they are ready. This works for us for now, when the first kid bedtime is 7pm, so we don't even always have an hour between arriving home and starting bedtime. Eventually, I hope we can all, like, sit and eat the same food together, maybe at a table that the kids help clear. But for now? This works for us, and I think it's pretty good.
What worked for us was letting our ADHD 11 yr old be excused from the table as soon as he was done eating his main course, and allowing him to play then return to the table for dessert, so at least we started and finished together.
Nothing consistently saves anything in my house. That said, lately it’s been the Halloween candy. Last night I made a tofu bowl with Brussels sprouts (white rice, crispy tofu, Brussels sprouts, pickled onions, and a sweet and spicy Mayo-based sauce). I deconstructed the kids’ bowls, put ketchup on the table, and asked the kids to grab some Halloween candy to add to everyone’s plates. Just like that, they were happy to sit for a bit, and after a Twix or two, my son went back for more tofu(!) and my daughter was overheard saying, “My friends don’t like Brussels sprouts, but I love them!”
We let our toddler choose the music and cue it up on our cd player. We give him 4 choices. The recent ones: The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, and Mozart. Then we help him adjust the volume with the remote which sometimes involves him turning it on and off a few times. He loves it and we enjoy having music on while eating. It seems to lighten the mood and release some of the pressure.
Nov 11, 2022·edited Nov 11, 2022Liked by Virginia Sole-Smith
We have a newborn so not needing to eat with them yet (though having him chill while we eat is its own struggle) but soup! Soup is dinner. (for my parents it’s an appetizer.)
We make a big pot of something on the weekend and have enough for one or two meals in the fridge and one for the freezer so we can stock up on different kinds. So easy to heat up and eat with a cheese quesadilla or bread/butter/cheese.
I am a long time spinster (age 40, never lived with a romantic partner) with no kids, but I STRUGGLE with meals. I have some executive function challenges/depression challenges that led to me never really establishing good habits around meals and not thinking that was important until the last few years. I am a good cook and I love event cooking and cooking for people but I struggle with the day to day. I think buying prepared food is morally neutral, but it doesn't always fit my budget so I have a multi-pronged approach. 1) I order dinner delivery/pick up on Friday nights so delivery doesn't become my coveted forbidden item. 2) I keep bougie soup cans, frozen fancy breads, and individual frozen meals that I enjoy in my house at all times, so that if I accidentally get in a situation where I can't bring myself to prepare a meal I have a simple option without a delivery fee. I refer to these as my "budgetary harm reduction" meals. 3) I try to make my own frozen meals by making a casserole on the weekend, having one portion and putting the rest into the freezer individually portioned. If I happen to have extra time I might make TWO casseroles. I don't mind repetitive food, so this works for me! 4) I have to have set meal times now. For most of my adult life I haven't thought about food until I got hungry and then it was an emergency. Last year I started a medication that changes the way I feel hunger and I got into several situations were I felt like trash. So now I have an alarm that goes off telling me eat breakfast, lunch, and one to start preparing dinner, and it's helping a lot.
We don’t do this consistently enough, but the two things that have worked relatively well for our family are to (1) serve meals family style (rather than already plated) so that both kids (currently 4 and 6) can participate in choosing what and how much they want to eat and (2) making sure there is one thing that each kid will eat on the table, and not restricting how much of it they can have - sometimes this is fruit, crackers, yogurt, whatever. Giving them some agency seems to make life easier all around. Oh, and when I have the patience, letting them help prepare the food always results in more interest in eating it...but that’s not usually possibly for weeknights.
I’m not sure if I mentioned this on another week, but my new dinner trick is going beyond having each kid choose a meal for the week and now I have my 12yo also find the recipe, check the kitchen for ingredients, and put what we need on the shopping list. He doesn’t have to help cook (he’s a cheerful cleaner upper) but he can if he wants to. This week was a vegetable soup with feta and flatbread pizza with goat cheese! He loves tomato soup but not broth-and-pieces kinds of soups (sorry for that visual), but he loved it. Mainly they’re at an age where eating’s not so hard anymore but the mental load of planning is. (Also, freeze leftover soup in 1 or 2 cup containers, not by the quart, and then you can have it for lunch one time without committing to eating soup for days.)
The other thing - because of the mental load of planning and keeping track of their safe foods, mainly - is I don’t worry about safe foods on the table anymore, and let them fix their own safe food. Leftover pasta, a sandwich, chips, whatever. This is 100% possible because they’re 9 and 12, not 3 and 5 anymore.
For me it's all about lowered expectations and letting my kids wiggle. I'll explain:
Lowered expectations: I'm a professional chef and mom to 7 yr old twins. Cooking falls to me in the division of household labor, and I'm fine with it. But because I am a person who cares about food a lot and gets a lot out of what I eat (excitement, variety, sense of accomplishment, pride) its been REALLY hard for me to adjust to having very normal kids who are very happy with spaghetti and a bag of frozen broccoli most nights of the week. I've had to find ways to have my food needs met in other places-taking myself to a solo lunch wherever I want to go, keeping fun foods and snacks for me, cooking for friends who appreciate it, and going out with my husband for foods my kids won't eat. It's helped so much because I used to put so much pressure on dinner but in actuality I eat all the time, so dinner doesn't have to matter so much. Naming my needs and meeting them in other ways has been a game changer.
In a practical sense, we eat repetitive meals that everyone mostly likes, and I'm slowly embracing convenience foods. Also-I was talking to my OT friend a couple years back about how the kids wouldn't sit still at the table and she said to try having them get their wiggles out before dinner, and it works like a charm. I send them outside to ride bikes, swing, or jump on the trampoline for 5-10 minutes and they really do sit better at the meal.
Long before people began buttering boards, "charcuterie" plates saved dinner in my house over and over again. Even with a kid who's now a pescatarian, chances are I always have crackers, cheese, vegetables, and some dips to put on a board. It always feels like a picnic, whether we eat it at the dining room table or in front of the TV. Prep and clean-up are easy. In my experience, kids like lots of little things, like the experience of selecting and assembling. Anyway, it makes everyone in my household happy.
Last night my partner and I saved dinner by having a Cheese Feast. I am lactose intolerant so we can only do this a few times a year, always when the kids are with their mom. We get 3 or 4 kinds of cheeses (mostly sheep, goat, or much aged cow), crackers, crusty bread, maybe a snackie veggie side, charcuterie for my partner, grab a nice bottle of wine from the basement, put music on and that’s dinner. My digestion survives by always making sure I have yogurt in the afternoon. Sometimes I’ll take a digestive enzyme at the start of dinner and a couple of activated charcoal capsules at the end. We can’t eat like this every night but it’s such a fun treat.
I don't have kids, but the thing that's saving me right now is keeping a list of every dinner I have the components to make on a whiteboard on the fridge, including anything I've batch made and stuck in the freezer, like soup or curries. Meal planning very, very light. I can still be in the mood for something or not, but I'm not rooting around the fridge wondering what I can cobble together when I'm hangry.
What's been saving me this season is FROZEN VEGETABLES! Why am I so late to frozen vegetables in the winter? They are cheaper than fresh this time of year, already washed and cut(thank you labor saving), and most so far have been delicious. Just steam, saute with a little butter and garlic and done! I am the primary cook/meal planner/grocery shopper to 3 adults, a teenager, and a toddler.
But what really saves dinner is my chest freezer! I've lived rurally for most of my adult life and so I stock pile things and buy things in bulk to reduce the amount of trips I have to make to dreaded places like Costco. We are really fortunate to have the money to buy in bulk, and access to great local farms, so I buy local meats from various farmers and then other staples from discount places like Grocery Outlet. I have ADHD w/ some autism spectrum traits (literally just diagnosed at age 40 earlier this year), so having access to foods I can put together quickly- meat, bulk rice, pastas, and now frozen vegetables, really helps me manage the labor of meal planning. Plus letting my family know-"tonight I'm gonna sit on the couch at eat and watch a show and y'all eat w/out me" which releases me from the tyranny of small talk and good manners that I both appreciate and feel stressed out by, that was ingrained in me from my southern, cook from scratch, cloth napkins, every single night upbringing. And my husband and MIL are both great about springing for take out several times a month when I let them know I need a break from cooking!
My kid (4) gets to pick their dessert every night, which kicks off dinner/gets them to the table nicely. (Dessert is served with dinner.) Anytime I'm not choosing a thing, it's less work!
Since the topic of the week was neurodivergent feeding and 2/3 of our family is autistic, some fun ND dinner strategies also include: making sure there's something crunchy on kiddo's plate (bonus if there are strong flavors and/or chewy things as well), putting spoon-foods like yogurt into a squeezy pouch for extra proprioceptive input, being suuuper flexible about utensil use unless a giant mess is being made and the grown-ups are getting stressed, and diving down Wikipedia rabbit holes in lieu of... whatever it is that NT people talk about at dinner. (We tried, briefly and disastrously, recounting highs and lows of the day, which I think is a beautiful idea and just flat out Does Not Work for the kiddo at all - being asked to recount anything about their day stresses them out. Adult cross-talk about our days makes kiddo feel excluded. So we rabbit hole.)
We also meal plan as a form of grown-up freedom (the thought of planning a meal day-of gives me hives), so we cook big, leftover-making meals on the weekends while kiddo has TV time, quick get-it-on-the-table meals on Monday and Tuesday (sheet pan meals & frozen Trader Joe's meals are a lifesaver here), and then Tuesday night is kitchen date night where my wife and I cook a meal together to reheat on Wednesday. Then leftovers and takeout for the rest of the week. So by Tuesday night, we're done cooking. I know different things work well for different families, but that's what's making meals work for us right now.
I'm child-free, and I share a home with my spouse and my parents. We eat in the living room every night, whether the TV is on or not. Everyone gets to be a little more physically comfortable. This really, really helps with dinnertime social stress. I have pivoted towards meals that don't have to be plated in any real way. Lots of soups and stews that can be kept warm or reheated, since none of us are generally ready to eat at the same time. I think the pandemic really changed how I felt about meals, and cooking. I want to cook more complicated things, and then eat them more quietly.
My son, who is neurodivergent (ADHD/Autism), often prefers to eat his meal at the kitchen island rather than at the dining room table. He also doesn’t like food that’s mixed up, and he doesn’t like meat, so I usually just put some pasta/rice/dinner rolls/etc. on his plate with veggies or fruit that he does like and some shredded up cheese. I’ve only gotten through half of yesterdays podcast and it’s already been SO helpful!
We don't actually always eat at the table, but we do eat together. So, like, if the kids are playing with trains on the living room floor, fuck it, let's pull up some of the nesting tables, put everyone's food on it, and eat together while we talk and play trains. I do not have the energy to chivvy everyone to the table every night, our table is a goddamn cluttered mess anyway, and in general, we are not together enough to serve everyone a beautifully plated meal at the same time anyway.
So we all tumble through the door sometime between 5.30-6.00, one of us stays in the kitchen while the other gets the kids ' shoes and coats off and gets them settled doing something, anything, and then the kitchen person brings out drinks and plates as they are ready. This works for us for now, when the first kid bedtime is 7pm, so we don't even always have an hour between arriving home and starting bedtime. Eventually, I hope we can all, like, sit and eat the same food together, maybe at a table that the kids help clear. But for now? This works for us, and I think it's pretty good.
What worked for us was letting our ADHD 11 yr old be excused from the table as soon as he was done eating his main course, and allowing him to play then return to the table for dessert, so at least we started and finished together.
Nothing consistently saves anything in my house. That said, lately it’s been the Halloween candy. Last night I made a tofu bowl with Brussels sprouts (white rice, crispy tofu, Brussels sprouts, pickled onions, and a sweet and spicy Mayo-based sauce). I deconstructed the kids’ bowls, put ketchup on the table, and asked the kids to grab some Halloween candy to add to everyone’s plates. Just like that, they were happy to sit for a bit, and after a Twix or two, my son went back for more tofu(!) and my daughter was overheard saying, “My friends don’t like Brussels sprouts, but I love them!”
We let our toddler choose the music and cue it up on our cd player. We give him 4 choices. The recent ones: The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, and Mozart. Then we help him adjust the volume with the remote which sometimes involves him turning it on and off a few times. He loves it and we enjoy having music on while eating. It seems to lighten the mood and release some of the pressure.
We have a newborn so not needing to eat with them yet (though having him chill while we eat is its own struggle) but soup! Soup is dinner. (for my parents it’s an appetizer.)
We make a big pot of something on the weekend and have enough for one or two meals in the fridge and one for the freezer so we can stock up on different kinds. So easy to heat up and eat with a cheese quesadilla or bread/butter/cheese.
I am a long time spinster (age 40, never lived with a romantic partner) with no kids, but I STRUGGLE with meals. I have some executive function challenges/depression challenges that led to me never really establishing good habits around meals and not thinking that was important until the last few years. I am a good cook and I love event cooking and cooking for people but I struggle with the day to day. I think buying prepared food is morally neutral, but it doesn't always fit my budget so I have a multi-pronged approach. 1) I order dinner delivery/pick up on Friday nights so delivery doesn't become my coveted forbidden item. 2) I keep bougie soup cans, frozen fancy breads, and individual frozen meals that I enjoy in my house at all times, so that if I accidentally get in a situation where I can't bring myself to prepare a meal I have a simple option without a delivery fee. I refer to these as my "budgetary harm reduction" meals. 3) I try to make my own frozen meals by making a casserole on the weekend, having one portion and putting the rest into the freezer individually portioned. If I happen to have extra time I might make TWO casseroles. I don't mind repetitive food, so this works for me! 4) I have to have set meal times now. For most of my adult life I haven't thought about food until I got hungry and then it was an emergency. Last year I started a medication that changes the way I feel hunger and I got into several situations were I felt like trash. So now I have an alarm that goes off telling me eat breakfast, lunch, and one to start preparing dinner, and it's helping a lot.
We don’t do this consistently enough, but the two things that have worked relatively well for our family are to (1) serve meals family style (rather than already plated) so that both kids (currently 4 and 6) can participate in choosing what and how much they want to eat and (2) making sure there is one thing that each kid will eat on the table, and not restricting how much of it they can have - sometimes this is fruit, crackers, yogurt, whatever. Giving them some agency seems to make life easier all around. Oh, and when I have the patience, letting them help prepare the food always results in more interest in eating it...but that’s not usually possibly for weeknights.
I’m not sure if I mentioned this on another week, but my new dinner trick is going beyond having each kid choose a meal for the week and now I have my 12yo also find the recipe, check the kitchen for ingredients, and put what we need on the shopping list. He doesn’t have to help cook (he’s a cheerful cleaner upper) but he can if he wants to. This week was a vegetable soup with feta and flatbread pizza with goat cheese! He loves tomato soup but not broth-and-pieces kinds of soups (sorry for that visual), but he loved it. Mainly they’re at an age where eating’s not so hard anymore but the mental load of planning is. (Also, freeze leftover soup in 1 or 2 cup containers, not by the quart, and then you can have it for lunch one time without committing to eating soup for days.)
The other thing - because of the mental load of planning and keeping track of their safe foods, mainly - is I don’t worry about safe foods on the table anymore, and let them fix their own safe food. Leftover pasta, a sandwich, chips, whatever. This is 100% possible because they’re 9 and 12, not 3 and 5 anymore.
For me it's all about lowered expectations and letting my kids wiggle. I'll explain:
Lowered expectations: I'm a professional chef and mom to 7 yr old twins. Cooking falls to me in the division of household labor, and I'm fine with it. But because I am a person who cares about food a lot and gets a lot out of what I eat (excitement, variety, sense of accomplishment, pride) its been REALLY hard for me to adjust to having very normal kids who are very happy with spaghetti and a bag of frozen broccoli most nights of the week. I've had to find ways to have my food needs met in other places-taking myself to a solo lunch wherever I want to go, keeping fun foods and snacks for me, cooking for friends who appreciate it, and going out with my husband for foods my kids won't eat. It's helped so much because I used to put so much pressure on dinner but in actuality I eat all the time, so dinner doesn't have to matter so much. Naming my needs and meeting them in other ways has been a game changer.
In a practical sense, we eat repetitive meals that everyone mostly likes, and I'm slowly embracing convenience foods. Also-I was talking to my OT friend a couple years back about how the kids wouldn't sit still at the table and she said to try having them get their wiggles out before dinner, and it works like a charm. I send them outside to ride bikes, swing, or jump on the trampoline for 5-10 minutes and they really do sit better at the meal.
Long before people began buttering boards, "charcuterie" plates saved dinner in my house over and over again. Even with a kid who's now a pescatarian, chances are I always have crackers, cheese, vegetables, and some dips to put on a board. It always feels like a picnic, whether we eat it at the dining room table or in front of the TV. Prep and clean-up are easy. In my experience, kids like lots of little things, like the experience of selecting and assembling. Anyway, it makes everyone in my household happy.
Last night my partner and I saved dinner by having a Cheese Feast. I am lactose intolerant so we can only do this a few times a year, always when the kids are with their mom. We get 3 or 4 kinds of cheeses (mostly sheep, goat, or much aged cow), crackers, crusty bread, maybe a snackie veggie side, charcuterie for my partner, grab a nice bottle of wine from the basement, put music on and that’s dinner. My digestion survives by always making sure I have yogurt in the afternoon. Sometimes I’ll take a digestive enzyme at the start of dinner and a couple of activated charcoal capsules at the end. We can’t eat like this every night but it’s such a fun treat.
I don't have kids, but the thing that's saving me right now is keeping a list of every dinner I have the components to make on a whiteboard on the fridge, including anything I've batch made and stuck in the freezer, like soup or curries. Meal planning very, very light. I can still be in the mood for something or not, but I'm not rooting around the fridge wondering what I can cobble together when I'm hangry.
What's been saving me this season is FROZEN VEGETABLES! Why am I so late to frozen vegetables in the winter? They are cheaper than fresh this time of year, already washed and cut(thank you labor saving), and most so far have been delicious. Just steam, saute with a little butter and garlic and done! I am the primary cook/meal planner/grocery shopper to 3 adults, a teenager, and a toddler.
But what really saves dinner is my chest freezer! I've lived rurally for most of my adult life and so I stock pile things and buy things in bulk to reduce the amount of trips I have to make to dreaded places like Costco. We are really fortunate to have the money to buy in bulk, and access to great local farms, so I buy local meats from various farmers and then other staples from discount places like Grocery Outlet. I have ADHD w/ some autism spectrum traits (literally just diagnosed at age 40 earlier this year), so having access to foods I can put together quickly- meat, bulk rice, pastas, and now frozen vegetables, really helps me manage the labor of meal planning. Plus letting my family know-"tonight I'm gonna sit on the couch at eat and watch a show and y'all eat w/out me" which releases me from the tyranny of small talk and good manners that I both appreciate and feel stressed out by, that was ingrained in me from my southern, cook from scratch, cloth napkins, every single night upbringing. And my husband and MIL are both great about springing for take out several times a month when I let them know I need a break from cooking!
My kid (4) gets to pick their dessert every night, which kicks off dinner/gets them to the table nicely. (Dessert is served with dinner.) Anytime I'm not choosing a thing, it's less work!
Since the topic of the week was neurodivergent feeding and 2/3 of our family is autistic, some fun ND dinner strategies also include: making sure there's something crunchy on kiddo's plate (bonus if there are strong flavors and/or chewy things as well), putting spoon-foods like yogurt into a squeezy pouch for extra proprioceptive input, being suuuper flexible about utensil use unless a giant mess is being made and the grown-ups are getting stressed, and diving down Wikipedia rabbit holes in lieu of... whatever it is that NT people talk about at dinner. (We tried, briefly and disastrously, recounting highs and lows of the day, which I think is a beautiful idea and just flat out Does Not Work for the kiddo at all - being asked to recount anything about their day stresses them out. Adult cross-talk about our days makes kiddo feel excluded. So we rabbit hole.)
We also meal plan as a form of grown-up freedom (the thought of planning a meal day-of gives me hives), so we cook big, leftover-making meals on the weekends while kiddo has TV time, quick get-it-on-the-table meals on Monday and Tuesday (sheet pan meals & frozen Trader Joe's meals are a lifesaver here), and then Tuesday night is kitchen date night where my wife and I cook a meal together to reheat on Wednesday. Then leftovers and takeout for the rest of the week. So by Tuesday night, we're done cooking. I know different things work well for different families, but that's what's making meals work for us right now.
I'm child-free, and I share a home with my spouse and my parents. We eat in the living room every night, whether the TV is on or not. Everyone gets to be a little more physically comfortable. This really, really helps with dinnertime social stress. I have pivoted towards meals that don't have to be plated in any real way. Lots of soups and stews that can be kept warm or reheated, since none of us are generally ready to eat at the same time. I think the pandemic really changed how I felt about meals, and cooking. I want to cook more complicated things, and then eat them more quietly.
My son, who is neurodivergent (ADHD/Autism), often prefers to eat his meal at the kitchen island rather than at the dining room table. He also doesn’t like food that’s mixed up, and he doesn’t like meat, so I usually just put some pasta/rice/dinner rolls/etc. on his plate with veggies or fruit that he does like and some shredded up cheese. I’ve only gotten through half of yesterdays podcast and it’s already been SO helpful!