Dinner happens every day and it is always at the end of the day. You’re tired, the kids are tired, it’s the main meal of the day and you’re trying to keep everyone happy.

You have planned dinner, tried to catered for everyone’s taste buds but your kids respond with ‘Yuck, I don’t like that’ before they have tried it even though they ate the same dinner a week ago without any problems.  They demand other foods, sit and toy with dinner, take forever to eat one mouthful and then won’t eat anymore.

Coping with the ever present dinner battle that plays out every day can be very testing, frustrating and difficult.  You’re annoyed that they won’t eat the meal you slaved to cook, worried that they haven’t eaten enough and resort to bribes and threats to get them to eat one more bite.  It’s no wonder that many parents do not look forward to this time of the day. 

So searching for answers you consult books and websites.  They offer advice like;

• avoid distractions by turning off the television and putting toys away
• you are responsible for putting healthy food on the table and they are responsible for eating it
• do not use dessert as a bribe to finish their meal
• providing numerous kid friendly recipes

These sound great in theory but how good are they when they are put into practice and your picky eater still refuses to eat. 

This blog is designed to help you with tips, recipe ideas and innovative coping strategies from real life experiences of how I prevented the dinner battle with my children to give them a healthy, wide ranging diet of turning yuck into yum!

I won’t promise these solutions will work every time as we all know with parenting what worked one day will not work the next.  But you will have several practical strategies up your sleeve to work with.

The tips and solutions I blog about are designed to make dinner fun and use distraction to take the focus of eating the food by creating a relaxed and happy atmosphere so your children eat dinner without realising it, hence there is no fuss or Mexican stand off.

Hopefully it will also help you raise healthy eaters.  As dinner will be more relaxed with less struggle, your kids will begin to enjoy a wider variety of foods and be open to trying new foods.

Yuck to Yum provides more that just kid friendly recipes to cook for dinner. It offers mums a host of creative ideas to help make dinner fun by thinking like a kid.  These ideas also involve and educate children.

The key difference of our tips, recipes and strategies to other advice is the ‘how to’ approach which will offer time poor mums inspiration after a busy day. This inspiration will come from the easy recipes and unique concepts such as ‘creating a scene’, ‘hands on’ and ‘game time’.

I'm Nicole, mum to Brie Boy born in 2002 and Baby Bell born 2004 and wife to The Big Cheese.  We live in Sydney, Australia.  I’m passionate about about getting kids to explore food and to eat healthy foods.  We eat some 85, 000 meals in our lifetime so giving children a liking for a wide range of foods is as important as teaching them to read and write.

With my passion for food I am lucky enough to work for my sister’s business Gourmet Dinner Service, a home delivery service of gourmet prepared meals.  We received feedback from customers that they wanted kids meals as well as our adult meals as there was not a quality children’s meal on the market.

Starting with my experience as a mother I developed the current Gourmet Dinner Service Kids range.  I researched to discover exactly what mums want, distributed numerous test products for kid tastings, reviewed the results and introduced several varieties of GDS kids meals.

I knew that it was important to start my kids early to develop a like for a wide variety of foods.  However, it hasn’t been an easy path and to overcome what could have been a dinner battleground in my own house, I started making dinner fun and playful to encourage them to eat their greens and introduce new foods.

I thought if I wasn’t easy for me how were other mums doing it and I started talking to other mums and gradually the idea started forming that just kid friendly recipes were not enough. 

The idea of Yuck to Yum was born and using the ideas I used on my children I formed the concept behind Yuck to Yum.  I developed several recipes using this concept and a website was built.  With so many ideas and knowing so mums were still struggling the idea of this blog was born to compliment the website.

Since starting Yuck to Yum I have been approached by the editor of “Out & About with Kids” magazine and now write the nutrition pages using Yuck to Yum recipes and concepts.