Danish families with children are living with time scarcity and resort to the coping strategy of meal planning, when dealing with the question of what to have for dinner. During meal planning families experience issues such as lack of participation and motivation from children, pickiness, and the feeling of being overwhelmed by existing solutions for finding new dishes. Therefore, families are cooking convenience food, even though it goes against family values such as eating healthy and varied food. Analysis of existing research, showed that the field of discovering new dishes is limited within HCI and that the existing research focuses
on how to output dishes, from recommendation systems, based on digital user preferences as input. As tangible user interfaces (TUIs) have proved to be engaging for children, the focus was therefore to create a TUI. From several iterations of concept development a single concept “Put a gaffel in it” was selected and evaluated through a field study with two families for one week. Qualitative and quantitative data was collected throughout the study in three different sessions as semi-structured interviews, along with a dairy for self-reported data. The data concluded that the TUI “Put a gaffel in it” can facilitate the process of discovering new dishes by; (1) making all family members participate (2) making an exciting and less overwhelming process, (3) minimize conflicts regarding preferences, (4) providing a new dish based on the chosen ingredients to families in order to potentially expand their meal base.