All in the presentation

I'm a quick cook, if it's not ready in 5 minutes prep I just don't do it...but there are a few things I think can be important and I'm willing to spend a bit more time on them. When we were on our cruise (we're not rich, just wanted to do a big family thing before we got our new baby, went in January for $120 per person for 5 nights-I have money spending guilt so I wanted to clear that up quickly.) I learned 2 things that were important for our family.
One was that if it's already prepared we're more likely to eat it and the next was that presentation makes a big difference.
As you can see in the sidebar pics the first one is just a cup of fruit. But, it was skinny cut fruit and it was in a pretty cup. It was funny watching the kids eat it up. They were so excited and talked about it all night long.
One of our last meals was steak, potatoes, and veggies but it was on a nice plate with linens and stemmed glassware. Now there's no way I'm going to pull out all stops for every dinner but we did realize at home that the kids were more likely to try new things if we went "on a vacation" with our placemat maps and an ethnic food, or if we ate on the china. And ya know, if the china broke, well at least we got good use of it instead of keeping it in the cupboard all our lives.
We also use our bento boxes and tiffin boxes a lot because the kids love bite sized things, fanned fruit, and fruit and veggies with little silly toothpics in them.
The other thing, already prepared, is a big thing. If we can come home from shopping and immediately cut up fruit and veggies, cook up hamburger, and get things ready and bagged it just works better. We even do this with big bags of chips (put them right in serving sized baggies).
We also bought some serving sized anchor hocking glass cups so we could do serving sizes of fruits, puddings, salads etc. I found that we ate healthier but also that we ate better portion sizes.