Continuing with my posts over the last few weeks below on how 1) offering a ‘starter’, 2) offering smaller portions at the start of mealtimes and 3) leaving food out around mealtimes can help create happier mealtimes and expand our kids’ diets, my next thought is:

🍱 Offering Choice With A Taster Tray 🍱

Anyone else feeling as if you’re in the kitchen constantly over these summer holidays fighting off the locusts? - Sorry, I mean kids? 😂 I feel my meals are getting repetitive and my presentation a bit dull. So last night I served up their tea in a muffin tray and boy, I wish I could have filmed their reaction! Maybe you’ve already done this, but for the parents that haven’t, here are my thoughts.

💡 Ideas 💡

🧀 Put a mix of familiar and unfamiliar food in the tray with no pressure to try all of it. Put whatever you have in the fridge/cupboard! The less said the better and just let them get on with it. Put any uneaten food back into fridge or have for your own meal.

If you don’t have enough food to fill all 12 holes, then repeat with the same food in some of them.

What I love about these pictures is seeing my kids making their own choices, deciding exactly what to eat and how much and just taking a step back and enjoying watching them, letting them trust their own eating instincts to know when they have had enough.

😺 Blind taste test 😺

My twins came up with a ‘blind taste test’, which instantly took me back to my own childhood and doing this with my sisters, but I think we were a little crueller back in our day and made all sorts of concoctions for each other to try ha ha! We have lately been doing a bit of describing food at mealtimes and maybe the idea stemmed from that? Talking about what food is crunchy, soft, spicy etc. You can see from the photos how much delight was on their faces.
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Your kids may want to try this if they are old enough and willing, or you could suggest it? But I wouldn’t do it in any way to ‘trick’ them into trying new food, it would be to encourage them to use their senses even on the more familiar food and to simply have fun. You could even offer to do the blind test yourself which your child might find funny!

🙏 So....challenge for this week 🙏

To make your own taster trays. I think we could all do with a bit of inspiration over these summer holidays to get out of a rut so please send me your pictures!

#foodrut #tastertrays #fussyeatingideas