Practical Healthy Family Meals + some food that’s just fun

Sitting down with our family to enjoy a healthy homemade meal brings me a sense of warmth and happiness. But that’s hard to do on your average weeknight.

I have three kids under five and am giving you what works for me, at least sometimes (i.e., these things are not typically thrown across the room or a leading cause of meltdowns).

This website focuses on recipes we have on rotation in our household. We do a lot of meals designed to appeal to the whole family, or vegetables designed to appeal to the kids. I’m frequently smuggling new cookbooks into our house to find (and tweak) new recipes, so I am always coming up with new favorites. Trying out (and constantly tweaking) new recipes keeps me feeling inspired so cooking dinner doesn’t start to feel like a chore.

The strength of Little Splats is that it is also a website that focuses on parenting-relevant books.

This means that when I read up on practical tricks about how to encourage toddlers to like new foods (for instance, pairing a vegetable with something sweet the first few times they try it) or about nutritional considerations in what you’re feeding kids, you’re going to be seeing this information popping up where relevant in recipes. You’ll also get the crosslinks so you can get the full dets (if you so desire.) I’ll also try to be upfront about my own experiences implementing the suggestions I come across.

I sometimes feel like my adult years are defined by efforts to overcome my natural laziness. I’ve had mixed success. But the laziness default does have the benefit of encouraging me to find shortcuts wherever available.

Basically, my approach to cooking as a young adult and now a mom has been to eliminate as many steps of questionable impact as possible. For instance, do you ever actually need to toss something in olive oil, or can you just spray it down with olive oil on the same baking sheet where you roast it and not toss it at all? (In my opinion, no tossing step is required, which is great, because I don’t like pulling my kids off of one another with oily hands.)

I’ve summarized some of my shortcuts and equipment that have come in handy in my own kitchen to speed up prep and clean up on the “in my kitchen page:”

As a general rule, I try to create healthy, practical, family-oriented recipes. I try to eliminate sugar, all purpose flour, and ultra-processed ingredients where I can – but only if results in a recipe that still tastes good and our kids enjoy.

Unsolicited family meals manifesto

We are trying to:

1.  Develop positive associations with healthy food;
2. Balance our consumption of vegetables/proteins/starches;
3.  Limit sugar;
4.  Avoid ultra processed foods, most of the time; and
5.  Preserve parental sanity by making the meal prep practical.

That said, there are still lots of dessert recipes on this website. We’re not savages.