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.
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.