We’ve all been there. One minute your child is scoffing everything from papaya to porridge, the next they are blank point refusing your gourmet dishes.

If you find yourself with a picky eater child, it’s easy to find yourself making the same meals for kids every day on repeat. So, if you’re suffering from groundhog day eating and tired of serving up the same yellow food every day, there’s a number of great healthy meals for picky kids available. An easy kid friendly dinner recipe we recently stumbled across comes courtesy of Gwyneth Paltrow.

Wellbeing eating for families

Fans of Gwyneth may already know her Goop website. A wellbeing melting pot of new-age inspiration that offers healthy dinner ideas as well as lifestyle products and vetted wellness. The kitchen goddess and advocate of clean eating recipes, delighted us with a new healthy take-away option from Goop Kitchen – the latest service from her Goop empire. Sadly, unless you’re living in Los Angeles (or willing to fly 11 hours once lockdown is over!), the dish is unavailable to us Brits.

Which got us thinking… why don’t we recreate her plate and share it with our followers. So we did just that!

Recreating Gwyneth’s healthy dinner idea

As featured on her Instagram page (@Instagram/gwynethpaltrow), the Oscar winner, posted the latest healthy take-away dish served up by Goop in the plastic packaging. Explaining the dish as ‘#goopcleancertified food’ the delivery-only concept celebrates a clean eating menu. It already looks very promising with a smattering of healthy food for fussy eaters.

The image above posted on Gwyneth Paltrow's website shows six foods without a description, but these appear to be:

• Herb mayonnaise chicken
• Avocado sprinkled with seasoning
• Antipasti
• Pickles, peppers, gherkins and jalapenos
• Cherry tomatoes in olive oil
• Pickled red onion­
• And a side of lettuce

Inspired by this, our healthy family meal has been slightly tweaked to suit a younger audience with less spice and more flavour. We particularly like the picky plate style, allowing little ones to sample a little bit of everything, making it a fantastic healthy meal for picky eaters for lunch time, picnics, or just as a side snack plate.

Here we’ve rustled up our version using our fun kids plate - the Vroom-Vroom Car plate

• Herb mayo chicken
• Avocado sprinkled with Italian seasoning
• Pickled cucumber antipasti
• Chopped olives and gherkins
• Cherry tomatoes in olive oil
• Red pepper slices
• And a side of lettuce (for the hamster)!

What is clean eating?

Before you roll your sleeves up to prepare your healthy family meal, it’s worth understanding a bit more about the clean eating recipes, that the Hollywood star advocates.

So what is clean eating all about? The lifestyle diet is based on the belief of consuming whole foods and avoiding foods that are processed, which includes convenience foods. There are variations, but the emphasis remains on fresh, whole foods as close to their natural state as possible. If you believe that the best kids meals are the ones that include a lots of fruit, veg and unprocessed meats, then you’re already on the right path, as many of these feature in the clean eating food list. Those committed to the diet also tend to avoid foods that include sugars, added preservatives and unhealthy fats as well, which means paying attention to the labels.

As a final point, clean eating also involves opting for meats that come from ethically raised animals, making organic produce a popular choice.

Since launching the business in 2008, Goop has gone on to great success with everything from wellness summits to Netflix shows. The website has a number of inspiring food and healthy dinner ideas for families.

For healthy family meal inspiration or clean eating receipes follow @goop, and be sure to read our guide to fussy eaters in full here.