Fussy Eaters

This is not the topic I was going to write about today but I thought I'd share my thoughts with you about a FUSSY EATER I have living in my house. For those of you who know my little blog, you'll know that I have four children aged 9, 5, 4 and 2. God has blessed me with babies who've slept well, feed well, had no teething issues and who've all been relatively healthy. However, for the last nine months I've been battling with my 2 year old at every meal.

We've had days when all he's eaten is two pieces of bread with peanut butter, there's been days when he's refused dinner so he's gone to bed without eating. We've gone to the doctors numerous times, visited a Paediatrician and even written down everything that's gone into his mouth. His weight has gone up, then gone down but still it's a battle to get him to eat three meals and two snacks a day. One thing I've noticed during the last nine months is he'll line up to eat meals that aren't healthy BUT once meat and three vegetables is put on his plate he'll walk away from the table.

Now this is not to say that we eat take out everyday of the week, in fact we haven't have eaten one meal from the Golden Arches since January 1st and we've ordered a pizza once because the meal I made burnt. If I want to have takeaway I'll make my own pizza's, hamburgers or fish 'n' chips and these meals go down a treat. However, this is the only time I'm guaranteed that my 2 year old will eat his meal and ask for more. So you can imagine that I've tried a few ways to hide vegetables in his favourite meals and I'm also trying new ways to make meals.

I recently purchased Jo Whitton's 'Quirky Cooking' cookbook as it's filled with allergy friendly recipes for the entire family. Now Jo has a blog called Quirky Cooking and she shares more recipes on her blog that aren't even in her book. One thing Jo asked her readers was to share pictures of the foods you've made to #quirkycookbook so that she can see what people are making and saying about her recipes. So I quickly took a few pictures and I added them to Instagram (my user name is oneplusoneequalssix) for Jo to see. Both meals I made were eaten by everyone except our 2 year old.

As you can imagine when I served up dinner the following night and again it wasn't eaten I knew I had to come up with something that would allow him to get all the nutrition he needed from the meal. My 5 year old is participating in a Junior Master Chef class at the moment and she had made Fried Rice so I decided to use this to accompany the 'Spicy BBQ Chicken' from Jo's book. The following morning I tried to get my fussy eater to have some of the rice but as you can guess he wasn't having it and that's when I had a brilliant idea.

I turned his 'Spicy BBQ Chicken and Fried Rice' into Spicy BBQ Chicken Pancakes or Savoury Pancakes which he loved so much that he ate the remaining pancakes for lunch. Now this method does take a bit of extra work but if I can do this every couple of days he'll get his daily serve of vegetables, some protein and he'll also be participating in family time while we're all sitting at the dining table.

I'd love to hear what you've done to help a fussy eater eat with everyone else, especially as I think he might get sick of pancakes soon. I did think of muffins but he's not a huge fan of my muffins as we'd have mini quiches that looked like muffins the previous night. I'm hoping that this fussy eating doesn't go on for too much longer.

Megan