Picky eaters find their match

Hey everyone! As I’m sure all mums out there know, cooking for a family is no easy feat. You want your children to be fed nutritious meals packed with the goodness they need to grow. But kids are typically fussy eaters—at least mine are! Getting them to eat a balanced diet of vegetables and quality protein is an ongoing challenge in our household.

When you have four kids like me, dinnertime becomes even more demanding. I’m not just catering to one kid’s taste buds; I’m catering to four. Unless I want to spend all night in the kitchen—which with caring for Oakley, looking after my other babies, and running an online business is quite honestly impossible—I need to find meals that they’ll all eat. I need to find quick, simple meals that even the pickiest eaters will devour in unison.

And I have an extra challenge when it comes to dinners: all the meals need to be dairy-free because Oakley has a milk protein allergy. But you know what? We’ve found a winner! Let me introduce you to our firm family favourite: sesame chicken. It checks all the Oakley-friendly boxes and manages to bring my whole gang to the dinner table without any complaints. It’s the kind of meal that’s hearty, filling, quick to make and, most importantly, kid-approved. Hey, even I like the taste of it!

The lineup of ingredients is straightforward: vegetable oil, eggs, cornflour, plain flour, salt, pepper, garlic salt, paprika, and chicken. I start by chopping the chicken into chunks and adding salt + the secret ingredients garlic & garlic granules. I always use prechopped garlic because (1) it saves time and (2) I can’t touch fresh garlic—there is no way I’m risking my nails for garlic! I then coat the chicken chunks in cornflour to help them go crunchy, followed by egg and seasoned flour for extra taste.

Humorously, the kids always rush into the kitchen like clockwork at the sight of flour and eggs, thinking I’m whipping up a cake. Romeo, my little kitchen assistant, takes charge of mixing. He’s not quite got the concept of keeping everything inside the bowl yet and manages to give every surface in my kitchen a generous dusting of flour. Sure, cleaning up afterwards is an ordeal, but we always giggle together at the time.

Anyway, I fry the flour-coated chicken on high heat for about seven minutes, then put it in a bowl lined with kitchen towel to soak up the excess oil. Now, let’s talk sauce! I make a sticky Asian-style sauce from sesame oil, pre-chopped garlic, white rice vinegar, honey, sweet chilli sauce (ditch this if your children can’t handle spice), ketchup, brown sugar, and soy sauce. The sauce is delicious! It’s the magic touch that ties everything together.

I pour the sticky mixture into the pan and let it bubble for a couple of minutes, then add the chicken chunks and coat them in the sauce. I serve it all over a bed of rice (I like doing mine in a little dome or square for presentation), sprinkle it with sesame seeds, and garnish with spring onions. Voila! The dinner table is set for a feast—and the whole thing only takes me around 20 minutes to prepare.

What I love about this meal is its power to bring everyone together—no more cooking four dinners to please each palate. Instead, we sit down as a family and have mealtime together. Oakley has a large cleft pallet, so eating solid food is tough, and he chokes a lot (we are on a liquid diet for now), but when I blend the meal with plant-based milk, he can even enjoy it.

So, there you have it – not just a recipe, but an easy meal that our whole family loves, and I’m sure yours will too. You can find a full breakdown of ingredients and a recipe video if you want to try it for your kids. Let me know how you get on. Until next time, happy cooking and even happier eating!