Ask Leanne: Meals for adults and children

I get asked a lot of questions. And sometimes those questions follow a pattern—like how do I feed my family the same meal my husband and I want to eat when there’s children, toddlers and babies involved.

Just got that one today as a matter of fact!

Dear Leanne,

My question is how to make dinner for 11 months old baby, 3 1/2 years boy and 5 years boy, my hubby and myself with a paleo diet for 1 week in a row?

Thanks in advance,

Juliana

Hi Juliana,

Feed everyone basically the same thing with certain exceptions of course–you will need to mash things for the 11 month old and lots of finger food.

So let’s look at a paleo dinner of say, tacos using lettuce wraps.

The 11 month old can handle the cooked ground beef and cut up avocado and eat it with his or her fingers off of their high chair. Your 3 year old and 5 year old can have the same thing–your 3 year old may use a bowl with a spoon while your 5 year old practices his or her fork skills with that same food on a plate (or keep it the same for the 5 and 3 year old).

For all 3, I would give them some sweet potato to make a meal out of it.

For your husband and you, I’d go to town with all the fixings–big lettuce leaves, ground beef in the middle, salsa, avocado, cilantro, red onion–whatever floats your boat.

It just makes sense to cook once and add something that’s a little more kid friendly rather than make several different meals–talk about burn out!

I hope that helps Juliana! You’re right in the middle of it all–I know how tough it can be with toddlers, babies and a husband and trying to get them all fed at once!

You might want to try Dinner Answers–there’s a TON of paleo meals to choose from that you can do exactly what I was talking about, here’s a link: http://savingdinner.com/s

PS—Dinner Answers will help you develop your own personal strategy for feeding your family and meeting their exact needs. It’s all right there in the easy to use Dinner Answers—you can create a menu, push the grocery list to your phone (or your spouse’s!) and use that as your macro for getting dinner on the table night after night.

Leanne Ely is a NYT bestselling author and the creator of SavingDinner.com, the original menu planning website, bringing families back to the dinner table for over 15 years.