Making food for myself and meals for my family...

What foods are you avoiding?

Drop whatever your idea of "clean eating" is.
You need to set up your environment and your schedule in a way that maximizes your chances of success on your plan.
Cook for the two guys mostly the same food you cook for yourself. Maybe add extra side dishes for them.
Here is a recipe for pork chops:
http://www.thekitchn.com/how-to-cook-perfect-pork-chops-in-the-oven-cooking-lessons-from-the-kitchn-194257

StealthHealth wrote: »

But generally (as someone who preps most of the food in our house) I'd say to the others, eat what I prepare or make your own.

I'm of this persuasion too. I make the food, either they eat it or they can make their own.

Sometimes, I make variations of the same meals. Yesterday I made baked pasta with a meat sauce.

I cooked up the meat sauce and assembled their version with the meat sauce, pasta, and cheese. Then I threw spinach into the leftover meat sauce and chopped up eggplant. The version DH and I ate was a big pile of eggplant mixed up with the spinach and meat sauce and much less cheese.

Sometimes they get completely different meals. E.g., DH and I had a Cobb Salad and they had homemade pizza on Saturday.

Many times we also eat the same meals.

90% of the time, I am cooking two different meals, like you, one for me and one for my husband and son. The other 10% we eat the same protein. What I tend to do is batch cook for me over the weekend, portion it out and freeze it. Since I do this just about every weekend, I have a large variety to choose from. I make sure that I always have roasted vegetables and spaghetti squash on hand. Then, in the evening I only have to make their meal.

I do all the cooking for me, my DH who loves white carbs, and my 2 picky kids. What I do is make us all the same protein but maybe different sides. So I will eat pork chops and broccoli, my DH will eat pork chops, broccoli and rice, and my kids will eat mostly rice and a little pork.

Or I'll make shrimp pasta sauce. DH will eat pasta with shrimp and tomato sauce. Kids will eat plain pasta and I'll take a few plain shrimp out before adding to sauce. I'll make a spaghetti squash or zucchini noodles for me and have the shrimp sauce with it. Can do the same thing with curry or stir fry (remove the protein before adding sauce so kids will like it better).

On the rare occasion that I make something that I can't modify for the kids, we usually have some plain rotisserie chicken that they can have with some raw veggies and ranch, and they like that as a meal just fine.

Lizzy622 wrote: »

I made a chili with TVP (vegetable protein) that my husband thought was turkey. There are tons of dishes you can make that are "clean" and will satisfy the "dirty" eaters too.

This is the opposite of what I would consider clean. Replacing somethign natural wth something artificial?

we all eat the same food in this house (except my son as he has sensory issues)

i just eat less.

why make more work for yourself?

I am of the same mind as most other posters - I do not run a diner - you eat what I make or you make your own.

Why doesn't your husband just cook for him and your son and you cook for yourself?

I'm making a leap of faith here and assuming 'clean' just means wholesome and relatively unprocessed to you, and you are not participating in some kind of Gwyneth Paltrowesque elimination of all the foods. So if I'm correct in my assumption, I would not go out of my way to provide special snowflake food for an able bodied man and two children. Offer a special side they love maybe, which you might want to eschew, but not two entirely different meals. Unless you utterly enjoy undervaluing your labor in this family!

Agree with several of the above- I would not ever make two separate meals. Tonight it's salmon, broccolini and rice- Depending on how many calories I have left, I will fill up with rice.

Let them make their own meals. Why should you?