I Get It From My Mom: Authentic Conversations Between a Mother and Her Daughters on Parenting and Growing Up

What’s for Dinner? (And Why It’s Always Complicated)

• Elissa Klein • Season 1 • Episode 19

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From breastfeeding battles and toddler food rebellions to school lunch fatigue and the eternal “what’s for dinner?” question, feeding a family is never just about food—it’s about love, control, tradition, and survival. In this episode, Elissa shares her war stories from the trenches of motherhood: leaking pumps, picky eaters, Pinterest lunch fails, family dinners, and the nightly short-order kitchen.

Along the way, she digs into the science behind kids’ nutrition, the emotional tightrope of body image, and the unexpected joy of teaching her daughters to cook. Because in the end, it’s not really about the peas or the pizza; it’s about the memories made around the table.

And if you’ve ever wished there was an easier way to answer “What’s for dinner?”—good news. Elissa and a friend are building Fork & Tell, a new app that helps families and friends share, organize, and pass down recipes that matter. Think of it as the recipe box reimagined for real life. Stay tuned: it might just save dinner.

Like a good meal, this episode is best when shared, so pass it along to a friend who’s ever faced the nightly dinner dilemma.

Welcome back to, I Get It from My mom, the podcast where we talk about the things parents and children should be talking about, but sometimes avoid. I'm Elissa host mom, grocery shopper for my family, and someone who has spent the last God knows how many adult years answering the same question every single day. What's for dinner? Today I'm flying solo again. No Ava, no Maggie, just me and my war stories from the trenches of feeding a family. And let me tell you, it's been a journey from breastfeeding battles to teenage DoorDash, bills that require a second mortgage where covering it all. Here's the thing about feeding kids. It's never really just about the food. It's about love, control, tradition, and somehow always running out of the, and somehow always running out of the one ingredient you definitely bought yesterday. Let's get into it. So let's start at the very beginning. I felt really strongly about breastfeeding, not in a judgmental way toward other moms, but for me personally, it felt important. It seemed like the reason female mammals in nature have breasts, and as someone whose tatas are on the rather large side, I felt they were likely intended to feed an army, so I wanted to give it my best shot. Honestly, the science behind, it's pretty incredible. Breast milk contains over 200 components, proteins, fats, antibodies, and amazingly, it changes composition throughout the day and as your baby grows, it's like having a personal nutritionist working 24 7 inside your body. But the reality of making it work, even for just six months with both girls, wasn't all that pretty. You constantly question how much they're getting since you can't truly measure what's coming out as a result, sometimes you feel like you're all boobs all day since you just assume every time the baby cries, they're hungry. There's the leaking, the nipple, cracking the dripping nurse milk down your stomach, having to walk away from friends and family to go to the other room to feed so you don't expose your nipples to your father-in-law. Then there was the pumping, the frozen milk, the crying over literal spilled milk, the bottles and nipple sizes, I can still recall the sound of my pump felt like a cow getting milked. Hopefully the technology is a little better today. I remember pumping and dumping at my sister's bachelorette party in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Yes. Dumping liquid gold because alcohol and breast milk don't mix, but a girl's just gotta have fun, right? My cousin, also a new mom, and I literally had a pump and dump after party in our hotel room that night. And here's where it gets complicated. Ava had reflux, not colic, but reflux and feeding became this whole production. She'd eat, then scream, then projectile, vomit everywhere we're talking. Outfit changes for both of us, sometimes multiple times a day. Poor baby and poor mommy. At six months with both girls, I transitioned to formula. Fed is best and so was my mental and physical health. With Ava, of course, we had to try multiple formulas before we found one that was pre-digested and agreed with her stomach. It was stinky on the way in and on the way out, but she tolerated it. Okay. Maggie was far easier in this transition, and frankly, with her, I just wasn't producing breast milk the way I had initially, so it was time to move on. So, while the research shows that breast milk has incredible benefits, formula fed babies grow up totally fine and what might be right for one mother may not be right for the other, and that's fine too. Anyone who judges you for how you feed your baby clearly has too much time on their hands and should probably get a hobby as for me. I'm glad I did it as mother Nature intended, but as you can tell, I was definitely not someone who was in love with it at all. Fast forward six months and we're entering the wonderful world of solid foods. The stage one, those single ingredient purees, rice, cereal, sweet potatoes, bananas. Both my kids liked the sweet stuff, the fruits, and hated the veggies. So all veggies somehow got mixed with fruits and I probably screwed my kids in their taste buds. I learned later, something fascinating about kids and tastes. Children have about 30,000 taste buds compared to our adult 10,000. That's why they're so sensitive to bitter flavors and vegetables. Their taste preferences are literally hardwired differently than ours. So it does take many exposures to foods to get a kid to like it. And I probably gave up way too easily. Ava as many do with the first child. I pureed and made my own baby food. That lasted maybe a few weeks tops, and then we just spent too much money on organic jarred stuff from the specialty grocery store. The combinations were not ones I would've cooked, but she and Maggie both ate them. I frankly remember lots of those Gerber puffs and lots of Cheerios stuck in the stroller and car seats at that age. And then the toddler phase was when my children became food critics. The chicken nuggets are too crispy. No wait. They're not crispy enough. This banana's too squishy. This sandwich is cut wrong. It's supposed to be triangles, not rectangles. And God forbid the crusts aren't cut off. Everything had to have its own section on the plate like we were running a tiny segregated cafeteria. But here's the one thing we got right in all of this, and I repeat the one. The only one thing we got right. We never allowed screen time during meals. We made sure we or someone sat with the girls and talked with them every time they ate. Even if we had dinner later than them, after we returned from work, we still had them sit with us to understand how a family dinner time went and to maybe try what we were having to eat or fruit or dessert while we talked about our days. We have never been perfectly healthy eaters and we definitely order in or eat out too much and enjoy too many carbs with our meals. But we tried to model good eating etiquette and behavior, and still to this day we do family dinner time as much as our schedules allow. So can we talk about one of the worst aspects of food and kids packing school lunches every single day forever. I started with the girls at two years old in preschool and continued until the end of high school. That's 16 years each of school lunches. I don't dare count how many meals that is or how many minutes I spent on it, but the math of it is outrageous. And I assure you, I am not a Pinterest worthy lunch making mom. There was some sort of protein plus a fruit and a chip of some sort. No fun drawings, very few love notes, no sandwiches, cut in heart shapes. Of course, the girls liked different things and they got more demanding as they got older. Once suddenly, Nutella and apples won't cut it, but they want yummy salads with chicken in it and dressing on the side. For some reason I made lunches in the morning, still do, rather than late at night. I don't like the idea of lunch sitting around in the fridge all evening and then you have to move the chips into it in the morning. Anyway, I don't know, but I still get up with Maggie every morning to make her lunch, and I'm not even frankly sure how much my kids ate all those years, but I know they refused. The school provided meals and therefore I fed them. During sports season, I often threw in an extra snack, just a bar of some sort. Again, who can handle this Every day? I was not going crazy. And we've been through every version of a lunchbox, lunch bag and Bento box, hot thermos and cold water bottles. We've been friendly to the environment and then gone through months of plastic sandwich bags. Frankly, I love the summers when they've been at camp and I didn't have to make lunch. And I look forward to the day when Maggie two goes to college and I don't have to make them anymore. And for the record, David and the girls have each volunteered to make lunches, but I know their commitments won't last. So I've taken on the duty begrudgingly, lovingly. But the real challenge, the boss Battle of Motherhood is dinner every single night forever. It starts simple enough, what do you want for dinner? But then they get older and develop preferences and opinions and dietary restrictions that seem to change based on the weather. Monday, I love spaghetti. Tuesday, I hate spaghetti. It's gross. Wednesday. Can we have spaghetti Thursday? Why'd you put sauce on it? It's not just one kid with multiple children, and my husband, who's a picky eater, i'm basically running a short order kitchen at times. I started meal planning like I was coordinating a military operation. Sunday afternoons with cookbooks, grocery lists, and a calendar trying to figure out how to feed my family without repeating the same five meals every week. Tuesday's, taco Tuesday. Of course, Wednesday's left overnight though let's be honest. It's really fend for yourself. Whatever's in the fridge. Thursday is some sort of chicken situation. Friday, maybe we'll have pasta or pizza'cause those are easy. But then they hit middle school and suddenly become food critics after the toddler food critic phase. This sauce tastes different. Why is this chicken dry? I like mac and cheese better at the local restaurant. Why can't you cook like Sophia's mom? Sorry. I wish I was my mom's generation that said I made this and you're gonna eat it or not eat it at all. But alas, I gave into their whims. The worst part, even when you don't cook, when you say, let's just order something, you still have to decide what to order. And if you suggest something, you get this look like you just ruined their lives with your dumpling suggestion. Now through all of this chaos, you're supposed to be teaching them about healthy eating and balanced nutrition. You're supposed to model good eating habits while simultaneously convincing them that vegetables won't actually kill them. Children need steady fuel from complex carbs, healthy fats for brain development, and protein for growth. Yeah, try explaining that to a five-year-old who's convinced that chicken nuggets are a vegetable because they're not red meat. The American Academy of Pediatrics makes it super helpful. Apparently kids are supposed to get five servings of fruits and vegetables every day. Five. Do you know how hard it is to get five servings into a kid who thinks ketchup is a vegetable? I tried everything. I hid vegetables and food, but they tasted the spinach through the strawberries, a banana. I let them dip their vegetables in ketchup. They wouldn't do it. I tried the, you have to try one bite rule, which led to the most dramatic ganging performances you've ever seen, and don't ask how many P airplanes I had coming at them. Here comes the airplane, the nutritious P airplane. It didn't work. Here's the thing about kids in healthy eating, they're watching everything you do. If you're stress eating cookies at 10:00 PM which we've all done, they notice if you skip meals because you're too busy making sure everyone else eats. They notice that too. So I had to learn to model the behavior I wanted to see. As I said, family dinners became sacred. No phones, no tv, just conversation and connection over food. I always made sure to serve vegetables and salad with the meals. I always made sure there was protein at every meal. Research shows that kids who eat regular family meals have better nutrition, higher self-esteem, and lower rates of eating disorders later in life. Even if that food was spaghetti for the fifth time this month. And here's what saved my sanity and actually worked. Them involved in the kitchen From an early age, I always exposed both girls to cooking, not because I had some grand plan and not because they were all that helpful. It was to kill time, keep them active, and they were curious about what I was doing. VE actually fell in love with cooking. She's the one who will experiment with flavors, try new techniques, watch cooking shows for fun. And Maggie's a good baker. She loves the precision of measuring the science of how ingredients work together to create something delicious. And frankly, she loves the taste of chocolate. When they help make something, even if their help was just stirring the sauce twice and making an enormous mess, they were more likely to eat it. There's something about ownership that changes the whole dynamic. And we talk about, yeah, food while we cooked, but more importantly, we talk about their day, their friends, their worries. The kitchen became the space where we connected over more than just food. And now Ava's excited to finally have a college apartment this year and cook much better than cafeterias and dorm rooms. And both girls often send me pictures of the meals they make when I have other plans. Maggie often makes the dessert with her friends. Ava and her friends often focus on the pasta. So let's move on to the harder conversations. What do you do when your child is struggling with their weight? Either over or under. How do you address it without creating food issues or body image problems? My children have a time struggled. We all have, and it's heartbreaking. Your first worry isn't even their health. It's a concern that they look different and kids can be so cruel about that. Then how do you talk to a 9-year-old about healthy eating without making them feel bad about their body? And how do you encourage better choices without creating shame about food? So we focus on health, not appearance. Let's eat foods that give us energy for sports practice. Let's make sure we're getting strong bones with calcium, we talk about food as fuel, not as good or bad. And on the flip side, I had a friend dealing with kids who were underweight, who wouldn't eat enough, who were picky. The point of malnutrition, the judgment goes both ways and it's all heartbreaking. And with teenage girls, it's really complicated. Suddenly, it's not just about nutrition, it's about social influences, body image, and peer pressure around food. You can hear 13 year olds having conversations that belong in a diet clinic, not a middle school cafeteria. The truth is, every kid is different and every body is different. Our job isn't to create perfect eaters. Kudos to you if you have. It's to create humans who have a healthy relationship with food and their bodies. So to that point, I'm gonna make a little plug here. If you're at the stage like me, where you wanna set your kid up for success and pass down your family recipes, or if you're ever struggling with what am I gonna make tonight? So you text a friend or family member to say What's on your menu? I need to get inspired. And if you've ever needed to crowdsource easy, weaken I ideas without judgment, then you're gonna love what I'm working on. I'm working on an app called Fork and Tell that's designed to help families do exactly this. The app is meant to help solve that daily. What should we eat? Question while also helping you log and share those meaningful family recipes. Fork And Tell is a digital platform that lets you collect and share recipes within your private circle. Think a space where your best friend's go-to salmon lives, or your sister-in-law's pasta recipe, or your grandmother's chicken soup recipe that you can now pass down to your own children. It's all in one place, organized, searchable, and real life tested. It's like a group chat, met a recipe px. We're trying to create something that bridges the gap between the practical, what am I making for dinner tonight? And the meaningful, how do I keep these food traditions alive for my kids? Because here's what I've learned. Food isn't just fuel, it's connection, it's culture. It's the way we show love and create memories. That's when you realize that all those years of fighting about vegetables, all those packed lunches and all those family dinners where you felt like a short order cook, it actually worked. They learned they were watching. They do know how to feed themselves nutritious meals, even if they choose not to sometimes. So stay tuned. Fork and Tell is coming soon, and it might just save dinner or at least keep you from making that same damn lemon chicken again. So now that my kids are older, they are not at all that picky, although David, my husband, and he actually remained. So that said, one kid prefers meat, one fish, one likes a cream sauce, the other, a tomato based sauce. One likes things crisp in the oven, the other prefers things not so bait. It's never ending. The truth about feeding a family is that it's not really about the food, it's about love. It's about family dinners where you argue about homework and laugh about the day. Disasters, it's about teaching them that food brings people together. That cooking is an act of love and that sharing a meal is sacred it's about all those packed lunches with little notes tucked inside. It's about birthday cakes. That didn't turn out quite right, but were made with all your heart. Oh God, I should show you pictures of those. It's about teaching them that home isn't just a place, it's wherever someone you love is willing to make you a snack. So to all the moms out there in the trenches of meal planning and grocery shopping and packing lunches, and answering the internal question, what's for dinner? You're not just feeding their bodies, you're feeding their souls. You're creating memories, and you're building traditions. You taught them how to care for themselves and others. Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go figure out what's for dinner tonight. Thanks for listening to I Get It From My Mom. Until next time, keep feeding your families and yourself with love, patience, and maybe a little wine with dinner.