Kid Friendly Recipes | yucktoyum.com

Kid Friendly Recipes I have put together quick and easy dinner recipes that incorporate several strategies to help prevent the dinner battle. These recipes offer you more than just ingredients and method.

These recipes and strategies will help provide you with inspiration and confidence to encourage your child to eat healthy meals.

These recipes will not make your child will eat dinner every night but it will introduce them to the concept of dinner being enjoyable and eating a variety of foods with the notion that dinner is a happy mealtime experience.

Be realistic and understand that what worked one day with children is probably not going to work the next but you already know this as a parent.

Recipes that are still in the development stage are listed on this blog. Please feel free to try them and let me know if they pass the ‘kid test’. Recipes that have passed the ‘kid test’ have been posted to the ‘Yuck To Yum’ website in a much prettier format with a much better photo and are printer friendly.

Below I have listed the strategies that make up a ‘Yuck To Yum’ recipe.

What makes food fun?
A study in mid 2006 by an American strategic marketing company who focuses exclusively on children 2-12 years and their parents found the following characteristics make food fun to eat;

Finger foods
Dipping and scooping
Add-ins
Fillings and icings
Silly shapes and cool colours
Portability

Each recipe has been design around one or two of these characteristics.

In another post I will discuss how to incorporate these characteristics into your own cooking.

Thinking Like a Kid
Each recipe is separated into 4 ‘fun’ sections;

Creating a Scene
Kids eat with their eyes so you need to make dinner visually appealing. That’s why kids often sit down to dinner and go yuck without trying it. Each recipe has photos and instructions.

Game Time
My favourite because its fun to be a kid again and great if you are short on time. Kids are always playing games so make eating dinner a game. Each recipe has a game you can play.

Hands On
Food isn’t as scary if they have helped prepare it and by helping to prepare the meal they are more likely to be more receptive to eating it. Kids take ownership when they have had a hand in making it and it gives them a sense of pride. Each recipe has a list of tasks kids can do to assist you to make dinner.

Funny Names
Each recipe has a funny name like ‘Dipsticks’ or ‘Run Chicken Run’ makes dinner more like fun and it takes away any misconceptions or presumptions that that will instantly turn them off. What sounds more appealing a lamb curry or Hoodoo Voodoo?

Hiding vegetables
Few mums can boast that their kids loves greens so rather than battling with your kids, take the clever way and disguise them so your kids never know they are eating them. The recipes give you ways to hide vegetables in each meal.

I will discuss the debate of hiding vegetables that has arisen since the publication of “The Sneaky Chef” and “Deceptively Delicious” in another post.

One Meal
In a survey I conducted of 200 mums 50% of them cooked two meals each night. That’s a lot of cooking. I suspect this is quite common in most households at least two nights a week. Most mums cook two meals because;

Kids won’t eat what you eat
They only eat certain things
You need something spicer
You eat at different times

The recipes are structured so that you only have to cook one meal for the family and I give you serving suggestions of how to spice it up for adults and also how to serve it in two sittings when you need to eat later than the kids.

Time + ease of preparation
As a mum I know your time is precious and you don’t have time to be cooking all afternoon. They are easy recipes and only take approx 30 minutes.

These are simple dinner recipes using ‘staples’ and a few other ingredients. There are only a few steps to get dinner onto the table.

A couple of the recipes are ‘no cooking’ and I give you tips about ingredients, shortcuts and things I learnt when testing the meals on kids.