If this is not the best place to post this topic, please let me know.
Blake, I understand what you are going through as I had one picky eater. (Luckily my other child eats everything.)

My girls are 15 and 12 now, so I can tell you it does get easier. Still, like your kids, they are not fans of spaghetti and meatballs. But, sometimes, it is just the form factor that the kids do not like. I think the long spaghetti noodles are hard for younger kids to master and they do not feel like breaking up the meatballs. So, what I did was boil up a different type of pasta, like elbow noodles or rotini, use hamburger instead of meatballs, and then add the sauce to the whole thing at the end. The same exact ingredients, but when you serve it as beef-a-roni, they love it!

I had a bagel left over in the freezer from when the in-laws came to visit. No one wanted it because they insisted they hated cinnamon raisin bagels. I got the idea to slice it up and put it in the oven. When it came out of the oven, everyone immediately scarfed up the bagel chips off of the cookie sheet.

You have to pick your battles and the one battle we chose was to get the kids to eat broccoli when they were young. It was a challenge for two nights but we got the broccoli into them. Now they love broccoli and eat it every day. When they were little, I made a lot of buttered noodles (Smart Balance) with broccoli. Sometimes kids don't like tomato sauce but will eat pasta with butter or butter substitute.

Another thing we found by accident is that the kids like roasted chicken. My husband bought one from the store once and the kids loved it. We serve that every Sunday for lunch. I use the leftovers during the week for chicken salad or pot pie. Sometimes I use it for chicken quesadillas. I make just about everything from scratch to avoid extra salt. You are right, there is a ton of stuff on the internet to feed kids. That is how I learned.

Oven fries are easy to make. Kids also like to dip things. For example, if they like hummus or salad dressing, all you need are carrots, cauliflower, snowpeas or sugar snap peas. Peppers might be too strong for their tastes but you never know. Try different dipping sauces to go with the vegetables.

Remember that their stomachs are the size of their fists. If you get some hummus, a few vegetables and fruit into them, they probably got enough. If they are snackers, that might make if harder to find things they like. True hunger makes a lot of things taste good.

Oh - I almost forgot about pancakes. It is super easy to mix up your own pancake mix and keep it in a plastic container. You can hide pumpkin and zucchini in pancakes. Slowly increase the amount of vegetables so they don't notice. I leave out the sugar in my homemade pancake mix since I know they will drown it in syrup. However, I used to let them put a few sprinkles on their pancakes and tried to police the syrup. Your kids might enjoy that. I don't need to do the sprinkles anymore as they are older and they love pumpkin pancakes.

Salmon is very easy to bake in the oven. I make the leftovers into salmon burgers. If I think of anything useful, I'll post again.

I did remember one more thing: my best tools were a crockpot and a bread machine when the kids were little. If you can come up with 5 crockpot meals that the kids like, you are all set.

HI Blake and anyone else interested in kid's nutrition

Daniel is great about eating veggies, we're very fortunate. When he was 2 we started with the 2-bite rule. He didn't have to finish anything, but he had to take 2 bites of it. When he was 3, it became the 3-bite rule, and he's 6 now, so it's 6-bites. We find that once he starts eating, he forgets about counting bites, and he finishes his food. Sometimes, if we help him with the fork, he'll eat it all, but he doesn't want to do it himself. So, we get food in that way too. I don't insist that he finish dinner, if he's full, he's full. But, he knows that if he doesn't finish, he doesn't get something else instead. He also doesn't get dessert. I don't think he's missed a meal yet, but he knows that I'm serious about it, so if he's hungry he eats, even if it's not his favorite meal. Sometimes we rename the veggies. He loves broccoli, but will not eat zucchini. Instead, we tell him that it is green squash. It gets eaten, oddly enough. We hide spinach in smoothies, and he now eats salad with dinner just like we do. We started with what he liked. His salad was cucumbers and chickpeas and sometimes olives. It took about 50 tries with tomatoes with the 2-bite rule, but now he likes tomatoes. We started slow with lettuce.

Sometimes giving kids a choice is helpful, and letting them help shop. For dessert, I'll offer an apple OR an orange, and he gets to pick. Summer we have more choices of course, and you guys in FLA should have lots more variety of produce than what we have in NY right now. If Daniel picks out the clementines, he's more apt to eat them. When possible I let him help me cook. I don't let him near a knife or the stove, but if he can wash the produce or mix stuff, he's very excited, and of course if he's involved in making the meal, he's more apt to want to eat it.

Hope that is helpful.

Audrey

This is absolutely fantastic advice, got 2 little ones myself. Thanks again!