What worked for us was that I cooked one meal for the family, and we sat down as a family to eat every night. The dinner included a protein, a starch, a veggie and fruit after. I didn't make things that were extremely horrible or weird, so no liver (sorry if I've offended liver lovers), but I didn't especially cater to the kids, so it wasn't chicken nuggets, either. There was normally some inoffensive carb that the kids could eat, like rice or noodles. For whatever was served, you could eat it or not eat it. There were no alternatives, so you couldn't go get yogurt or something else.
We tried to make dinner time fun--it was time to sit and connect as a family, so we joked and talked about our day and generally made it pleasant and something to look forward to. We didn't get into power struggles and I didn't obsess if the kid only ate noodles. Our kids turned out to be pretty adventurous eaters as they got a little older.
Generally, once dinner was done there was no more eating. We started the bedtime routine, with baths and stories.
Maybe I was just lucky with our kids. However, I had a niece who was an extremely picky eater and terrible sleeper whose parents centered their lives around these issues. She stayed with us for several weeks when SIL had a family emergency. We got itemized lists and reams of instruction about her eating and sleeping rituals and how to cater to them, but we warned SIL and BIL that wasn't going to happen. We treated her like our own kids and after a few days of being in a snit that I wasn't whipping up a certain brand of Mac and Cheese when she didn't want chicken, she realized it wasn't happening and settled right in.
