Make my kids eat!!

My-male-counterpart-who-is-currently-unnamed-due-to-his-request-to-not-be-known-as-"Man"-on-my-blog and I are foodies.  We love to eat.  We love to cook.  Believe it or not, we even love to grocery shop.  Which makes it that much more frustrating when the girls refuse to eat.  If they occasionally turned down a specific food it would be irritating but acceptable.  But our youngest flat out refuses to eat unless she gets EXACTLY what she wants on her plate.  If there's one more pea than she requested it's cause for a meltdown.  Last night was an exceptionally bad one.  The girls requested chicken, so Man made homemade chicken tenders (small strips of chicken he breaded with a concoction similar to Shake 'N Bake) for them and sauteed chicken for us, along with homemade sweet potato fries (a favorite around our house) and cantaloupe (our middle child's favorite).  Needless to say, our middle child was in seventh heaven.  She gobbled everything down and asked for more cantaloupe and of course we happily obliged.  Our oldest child devoured the chicken and begged for more, which we told her she could have as soon as she tried the sweet potatoes and cantaloupe.  Meltdown.  Thankfully, she's old enough that a meltdown means more of a shut down than an actual temper tantrum, but it still made for quite a bit of tension at the table.  Our youngest, on the other hand, was full on bawling about having to eat the chicken.  Thankfully she scarfed down the melon, but refused to touch anything else on her plate.  My male counterpart asked her to take one bite and the tears started flowing.  And it only got worse from there.  Both girls carried on for more than an hour.  My male counterpart, our middle child and I were done eating and I was almost done with the dishes and our oldest and youngest were still at the table, refusing to eat.  I gave them a deadline to be done by a certain time or no dessert.  Both girls fussed and cried but after a bit our oldest brought me her plate and went to throw her napkin away.  Unfortunately, her plate had one lone sweet potato fry on it (which she told me she forgot about.  Sorry, kid, not buying it).  I asked to see her napkin, since she has been known to hide food in her napkin and she half unfolded it.  I was still busy so I didn't pay as much attention as I should have.  We let her have dessert and when I went to clean up from that I found the one, lone piece of cantaloupe my male counterpart had required her to eat in the garbage.  Our youngest child dragged it out so long she didn't get dessert and went straight to bed when my male counterpart finally got tired of telling her to eat.  By that point she had been at the dinner table for nearly two hours, through everyone else's dinner and dessert, plus two clean up times and a family meeting.  While I know that it's perfectly normal for kids to be picky, this girl has taken it to a whole new level.  Between our oldest child lieing about finishing her food and our youngest child taking two hours to eat half a meal, dinner time has become more like torture.  Somehow, I can't help but find the irony in the fact that I finally have my furry babies' feedings down only to have a whole new round of foodie frustrations.