“What’s for dinner?” This question follows us every day, and everywhere. Even during our stay in Florence while my son, Alessio, is taking a design class, I still have to figure out what’s for dinner.
Wonderful restaurants surround us, but we can’t eat out every night. So I am still cooking dinner most days—for myself and the pickiest of my three children.
Although I have plenty of ideas, I came across a cookbook in the kitchen here, and I decided to have Alessio flip through it to see what he thought looked good for dinner.
I did this when my kids were little too. I handed them cookbooks and different colored sticky notes, one for each child, and asked them to mark the recipes that looked good—and not just the desserts!
This simple exercise worked wonders and helped me build what I still call our Family Menu, which is proving to be handy once again. (It also encouraged my kids to practice reading.) When something looked good to them, they learned to check the recipe for “culprits,” like mushrooms or too much spinach, before it earned their sticky note.
The next test for a recipe to get on the Family Menu was the vote. When I made something new, the kids voted on it at dinner using a “Thumbs Up” verdict.
Thumb Up—I Love it! This goes on the Menu.
Thumb Up Tilted to the Side—It’s not my favorite, but it’s pretty good. You can put it on the Menu.
Thumb to the Side—Neutral. You can put it on the menu, and I will eat it, but I’m not excited about it.
Thumb Down to the Side—I don't care for this, but I will eat it if I have to. Please don't serve it often. These dishes were either ones that I loved and felt would expand my children’s palates, or they were healthy and I felt we needed to have them on the Menu.
Thumb Down—No Way. You can make it, but I am not going to eat it. If I liked the dish, I tucked these recipes away for now, thinking I’d try again later.
If you struggle to come up with dinner ideas that please the whole family, show your kids some cookbooks or recipe sites and have them suggest what looks good. Then vote and add the winners—and the neutrals—to your Family Menu.
You can use these ideas to get input from anyone in your family!
If you read my upcoming book, you will also learn how to use a “family-approved” ingredient to prompt a multitude of dinner ideas.
