This is not so much a recipe as it is a strategy for dealing with picky eaters. There are so many food bloggers doing incredibly inventive food styling today; their work would draw even the most finicky eaters to the table. I love to look at these gorgeous works of art, but I don’t think I would have had the time or temperament to do much of it myself when my kids were small. They would go through phases that made me crazy: one would only eat pasta with butter for dinner, then she switched to cheese agnolotti, and over time moved on to cocktail shrimp, chicken soup, cucumber and avocado sushi, and cheese sandwiches. There is a children’s book called The Teeny Tiny Woman (found on Amazon here), and they loved both the repetition and the inherent teeny-ness of everything in the story, so in an effort to get our kids to try other foods, I made the one thing that I knew they couldn’t resist: tiny food. I cut broccoli into the smallest flowerets, made orzo instead of fusilli pasta, and rolled meatballs the size of cotton balls.

Breakfasts are easy to downsize. Strips of bacon can be cut into smaller pieces before cooking, sausage rolled into quarter-sized patties, and pancakes the size of a silver dollar are an old favorite. Quail eggs were a sensation for the girls, not just because the shells are so beautiful and wild-looking, but because a little fried or hard-boiled egg is too cute to resist – even to a kid who would never dream of eating a hen’s egg. (Note: quail egg shells are more elastic and difficult to crack than a hen’s egg, so tap the shell lightly all around its diameter and open carefully to keep the yolk intact.) Once they tasted the foods they’d been resisting, their food choices became much more varied and healthy – without them even realizing it. Here are a few more ideas, if you’re looking for inspiration: