Yup, me and my brother weren’t picky eaters, either, and we even behaved well in restaurants (about the only place we behaved well). The old anecdotal exception thingy…
I’d just chalk it up to them being teenagers. I’m 18 and I just started getting into cooking big-time. I am even going to change my major next year from veterinary medicine to food science (possibly even bakery science, to narrow it down. I haven’t quite decided yet.)
Anyway, up until a few months ago I used to eat crap food all the time too. I practically lived off of Macaroni and Cheese and Taco John’s. I’m not sure what changed, but my eating habits are totally different now. I love fresh fruits and vegetables, love to cook -from scratch mind you, not that boxed crap- and have been trying to cut unnecessarily bad things out of my diet. I wish I lived at your house! I’d be in heaven.
Taking a lesson from my own adolescence, I too would dislike many of the meals my mother prepared for me, and she is, by all accounts, a fantastic and well-versed cook. Turns out, it had nothing to do with “good” or nutritious foods, as compared to junk food, but rather I simply prefer very simple meals, where I can tell by inspection what the components are.
Meat, potatoes, pasta, vegetables, seafood, etc. All good, provided they are all simply prepared, served predominately separately, and whole where possible. Sauces which incorporate a bit of everything and which can not be analyzed at a glance, served up with cut-up seafood, vegetables or what have you in a general mish-mash of some sort of creative food artistry? I’m on the phone to the pizza guy.
Yeah, my brother and I regularly shocked waiters when we were growing up by ordering (and eating) stuff like frogs’ legs 
I’m told that I fell in love with a lot of things that are supposed to be acquired tastes, like olives and spicy food, at first contact.
Funnily enough, I never liked stereotypical “kid food,” though, of the Kraft macaroni / hot dogs / peanut butter sandwiches on white bread variety. Bleah.
Well, yes. I am seriously poor because I married an enlisted navy guy for love, but my overall family is pretty set…my family has been in this country on my fathers side since the 1630s, and on my mothers side since the 1680s, and have a tradition of industry and military service [frex my dad was in the army from 39 to 69, then was president of the family business until grandfather decided to sell the mills and trademarks to Pendleton, so my father went to work and was a VP of a major chemical company that my brother and I ended up working for - ain’t nepotism great
] We had a day maid, and a live in cook/maid and we had a german nanny that my grandparents imported for my father and his brothers in 1923 that sort of got passed around the family until my youngest uncle’s daughters hit 12 and 14, then Marie was retired to a house in florida near that particular uncle. Marie finally died about 9 years ago and I seriously miss her. I learned much of my best german cooking from hanging out in the kitchen with her 
FWIW I used to get into discussions at the company I used to work for [and they refused to let me get my 6/66 cert because of my point of view :eek: ] because I happen to be an old time stock person - get voting stock, and use the dividends…leave the original investment alone and cultivate the company…not make the profit by buying and selling the stocks - that can seriously fuck a company I am due a fair amount of money and goods when my parents die, but they are both in their 80s, and luckily both sides of the family tend to live into the 90s so that wont happen any time soon=) but it wont apprecialbly change anything about the way mrAru and I live other than all our bills will be paid off, and we will probably each get a new car and clothing.
This pretty much describes me perfectly. I probably wouldn’t like the dish in the OP. I’m a fairly adventurous eater (there aren’t many types of vegetables or meats and such that I won’t eat, though I draw the line at anything slug-like) but I’ve never been a fan of “let’s see how many things we can cram into one dish” type foods. If I’m eating asparagus, I want to taste the asparagus. When it’s drowned in something with heavy sauces, or cooked with other much stronger foods, I can’t taste it any more so what’s the point? Light sauces like a lemon butter sauce or something such as stir fry are my favourites. I may have an overly sensitive taste though, even most mild foods are too spicey for me and I rarely even add salt, and never pepper, post-preparation to foods.
When I was a kid, my mom would occasionally cook the horrid abomination otherwise known as Stuffed Peppers. This is a gutted bell pepper stuffed with ground beef that has been mixed up with onions and tomatoes and rice and Bog knows what else. Even the smell it filled the house with as it cooked would make me want to run outside. But she never tried to force us to eat it, they never expected us to like something like that, and she’d take some leftover ground beef and make my siblings and I little hamburger patties or something else instead. They’d make us eat our green beans or potatos but they knew the difference between that and foods that taste good to adults whose taste buds have started to slough off.
I think the OP is being a little unreasonable. By that age the kids are going to know what they like. It may not be that all they really want is junk food, but that you’re just not trying to find a compromise between something you like AND something they like – you’re just trying to fob your favourite dishes on to them and call them uncouth for not immediately wolfing it down. When I was 17 I would’ve loved a pizza for dinner, but I also liked roast beef in mushroom sauce with a nice side of new potatos and maybe some brocolli and cheese. I definetly wouldn’t have wanted the dish mentioned in the OP (now I might be willing to taste it, but probably still wouldn’t enjoy it.)
Another picky eater chiming in. I am about to graduate from college, and I still don’t eat that well.
When I was younger my parents tried very hard to get me to clear my plate. For about the last 7 or 8 years, though, it’s more “we know what you don’t like, we’ll make it anyway, and you’ll find something else”. This has worked quite well. I don’t eat well at college, either, so its not my parents. I get a lot of mother figures at the cafeteria that I work at, too, because I always order the same three things. Day in, day out, for all three years I’ve worked/ate at that one cafeteria. Which is good, I guess, because it shows they care.
Mostly I eat chicken fingers/chicken patty or a cold sandwich. With baked chips. (or sadly, bakery cookies). Over and over and over and … you get the hint. I quite think I would starve otherwise. Nothing else even looks remotely good on the hot line.
But I must admit, about once a month, when my body suddenly and oddly begs for a salad (just salad, no dressing, or anything else), it tastes SO GOOD… but I only get that feeling about once a month.
I’m 20 pounds overweight/above “healthy” (BMI index). Too much fried food/cookies/not enough veggies. sigh.
/S
If it helps to encourage you at all, let me tell you what happened in my family. My parents were determined to make their kids into good eaters. Every night they prepared one meat dish, one strach, and one vegetable. No leaving the table until you’d eaten at least half a serving of each. And no, they never once in my life prepared something different for me just because I didn’t feel like eating what they had prepared first.
Well, during our high school years it sure looked like they had failed. My brother and I ate pizza in the school cafeteria every day, and had burgers or other fast food for dinner whenever we could get them. And we both became overweight during that period.
But after we departed for college, something changed. Don’t ask me what. But for whatever reason the wise approach to diet that our parents had tried to hammer into us for the first eighteen years suddenly succeeded. We have both been good eaters (i.e. no fast food, processed food only on rare occasions, and lots vegetables every day) ever since then. And that’s a stretch of five years. So hang in there. Your efforts will eventually produce results, and your children will thank you for it for the rest of their lives.
Oh, and one last point. Why do high school kids like pizza that tastes like cardboard? Because they see and hear fifty TV and radio ads a week telling them to eat cardboard pizza. If the asparagus industry put more money on youth-targeted advertising, teenagers across the country would voluntarily gorge themselves on several cans of asparagus per day. That’s how the teenage mind works.
I think the main reason is that paella is a very picky dish in itself. It has a lot of ingredients, and you aren’t guarranteed to like any of them. Paella is also very salty (at least, the way I have had it), so if you don’t like salt then you are SOL. And even if you do… there is no way I would touch the asparagus. I have very specific rules about green vegetables. If it is baked, green, and not artificially dyed, I won’t eat it (the exception being spinach and peas.) Many people I know, ranging from ages three to 45, dislike asperagus.
Growing up, I hated sauce. I still dislike sauce, but will eat most foods that aren’t excessively lathered in it. Since my family is Italian, that posed a very big problem. (Especially when we ordered pizza. :p) Finally, my dad decided he wasn’t going to make any alternative dishes and that if I didn’t like what was at the table, I had to at least try it. The result? Well, I will never be able to look at string beans and vinager in the same way again, but there are many foods I may never have tried if I was not forced to.
Still, I agree with those who said you should ask your kids what they like. If there’s a specific request, I would reccomend making it for dinner. If the response is more along the lines of “I dunno. Something edible, I guess. Maybe some KFC?” Then I would suggest asking them to try the food before dissing it, if they can’t come up with a good reason. (A good reason would be, “I’m sure that is delicious, but I can’t stand [insert ingredient here].”
Also, just eating mac & cheese and greasy chicken is not healthy for you at all. In fact, it is disgusting. Diets need variation, so serve the Kraft as a side dish to steak or something suitably appealing to you. If You mix and match your meals and theirs, there’s probably a happy medium somewhere.
Also, my sister spent her high school years living off Kraft and chicken cutlets, and if you aren’t the type who sheds weight easilty, the result is not pretty. Even normal sized portions, if eaten every other day, can put on the pounds. She’s learned how to make other foods by now, but the weight is still with her, four years later.
Personally, I refused to eat macaroni and cheese and PB&J for most of my childhood. Bagels and cream cheese couldn’t have been much healthier though. 
And I love a good slice of cold, greasy white pizza, it makes me feel young. (Which I am…)