10 Real-Life Commandments for Cooking for Kids

Small Platesis where Epicurious dishes on cooking for families and kids.

You'd think it'd be easy for us. All day long my colleagueRhoda Booneand I think about food. We read cookbooks, discuss recipes, debate thebest way to cut cucumbers, and figure out how to makechicken tikka masala in less than 22 minutes。Yet every night when we go home to our families, we face the same time-honored dilemma every parent does: how to get a healthy, delicious meal that everybody likes on the table. Without going crazy.

The Kid-Friendly Recipe That Makes Weekday Meals a Breeze

So how do we do it? Well, we don't always—nobodyalwaysdoes. But on those nights we sit down to a dinner without much stress and/or whining, it's because we've kept these guiding principles in mind.

My children probably eat buttered noodles for dinner once a week. You know why? Because it's easy and fast, and they love it. Sometimes I put tomato sauce on it.Sometimes there are meatballs.但往往只是面条。用黄油。(和豌豆s, because nutrition.) Feeding kids can be a thankless chore and it's certainly never-ending, so if buttered noodles is what gets a home-cooked dinner on the table sometimes—okay, a lot of times—there's no shame in that.

That's why I'm all about thosepre-chopped bags of broccolithese days. Short-cuts like frozen vegetables, boxed broth, androtisserie chickensare totally legit—don't let any parent on the playground tell you otherwise.

Here's a rule that's easy to aspire to, but not always so easy to follow: everyone in the family eats the same meal. Of course, some people are blessed with children who happily chow down onescarole saladorspicy tofu with pickled mushrooms。If that's you, congrats—you've won at parenting and don't need any advice and please tell us everything you did so we can stop arguing with our children about whether or not chicken cacciatore is in fact "evil and disgusting."

For the rest of us, however—families whose kids only eat white foods or who, like my children, will happily scarf down sushi but won't go near a green salad—cooking one meal every night that pleases everyone can be a struggle. (With some exceptions—see this true story abouta chef who feeds his daughter macaroni and cheese for dinner.Every. Single. Day.)

But it's a struggle that we think is worth striving for. Cooking the same meal for everyone is quicker, less wasteful, and less likely to make you want to run out of the house screaming come 6pm. Fortunately, Rhoda has some genius tricks for making the one-meal ideal a little easier to achieve, which she'll be unveiling later this week.

我回去一个d forth about the amount of energy I'll put into "marketing" my children's meals to them—i.e. presenting the food in a Pinterest-friendly way that makes it more fun and exciting. I'm not above making the occasional smiley face out of fruit, adding a few drops of food coloring to their cream cheese ("It's Pink Bagel Day, you guys!"), or arranging cherry tomatoes and broccoli in a star pattern around their chicken. But this is not how they eat every meal, because a) that's just too time-consuming, and b) just no. Also, if every single meal were served in the shape of their first initial, it would take a lot of the specialness out of it.

All of which is to say: if you've got a supply of cookie cutters and you're not afraid to use them to create the occasional magical wonderland of a meal, that's great! Go for it, Picasso. But if you don't? Don't sweat it. It's just food.

Instead of trying to cook several complete meals every Sunday to keep everyone fed throughout the week,make a big batch of one easily customizable meal component, likemeatballsorcorn muffinsorsalmon burgers—or theseversatile beef-and-mushroom patties。Do that every weekend for a month and you'll have a freezer full of lunch and dinner fixings at the ready, thus cementing your reputation as an unflappable organizational genius.

The magic of the weekly meal plan is not unlike that of the streamlined capsule wardrobe: it takes all of the dithering and agonized decision-making out of the equation so you can justget things done。所花费的时间放在一起meal plan(i.e. deciding what you and your family will eat each day, making sure you have all needed groceries on hand, and—if you really have your act together—beginning to prep said meals) will be gained tenfold during the week when you're not making last-minute runs to the grocery store or staring into the fridge while filled with existential dread.

But, just as only wearing white button-down shirts and black straight-leg pants isn't for everyone, neither is meal-planning. Or, rather, neither is the sort of hyper-organized, idealized meal-planning that so many of us strive for yet never fully attain. Instead, Rhoda and I are big believers that any amount of pre-planning will pay off, whether it's just making a schedule of which adult cooks each night, having a regular meal rotation (on Mondays we eat pasta, on Tuesdays we have tacos, etc.), finding meals that will makeleftovers that can be repurposed later in the week, or even just setting up a weekly meal subscription service. But if meal planning starts to feel like an added task on your never-ending list, it's time to cross it off and come up with a different approach.

Minimuffins。Miniburgers。Minipancakes。Always a hit.

No, not literally. As great as tacos are, there's no way I'm eating them every night. But I will apply the many lessons I've learned from taco night, such as:

• Offera lot of variety.On taco night in my house I usually put out: rice, tortillas, spiced ground beef or pulled chicken, avocados, black beans, shredded cheese, sliced cherry tomatoes. Who doesn't like to sit down to a table full of lots of little bowls of delicious things?

• Let the kids serve themselves.I'm a big believer in giving kids as much control as is feasible when it comes to food—and avoiding power struggles whenever possible. On taco night, each child takes as much or as little as they like of each of the taco components, which in my house means that one kid doesn't touch the avocado and the other avoids the tortilla entirely, choosing to eat her taco as an un-taco. Although other dishes might not lend themselves as obviously to this buffet-style format, there's no real reason why a meal of grilled chicken and roasted asparagus and mashed potatoes can't be served the same way.

• Don't underestimate the power of cheese.Most kids really love cheese. Especially shredded cheese. Not only will a sprinkling of Parmesan or cheddar make plainer foods— like the aforementioned buttered noodles or steamed green beans or broccoli—taste better, but it also has the power to hide perceived imperfections in a dish, like a tiny speck of parsley or the microscopic remnants of tomato sauce on a piece of braised chicken.Sauce? I don't see any sauce? Who wants more cheese!??

I don't plead with my kids to eat the dinner I made. Instead, my husband and I have a rule: if they don't like what's served for dinner, they can have a piece of toast instead. We won't make them eat something they don't like, but we also won't cook a whole other meal. We put the toast on their plate alongside the offending food, and half of the time they end up eating some of the original meal anyway.

Our kids are going to eat a lot of meals with us over the course of their childhood. Not every meal will be a nutritional masterpiece, nor will kids always make the best choices about what they eat. (And sometimes, of course, neither will you: hello, Honey Nut Cheerios for dinner.) The idea is not necessarily to ensure the optimum consumption of vitamins, but to raise kids who have a healthy relationship with food. And who will know enough to serve buttered noodles to their own kids one day. Without shame.