cheap/ healthy snacks

valk_scot

I don't encourage elaborate snacks. I feed them all pretty well at meal times and imho cold meat and tins of tuna are ingredients, not snack food. Also cakes, crisps, sweets and biscuits are for treats, not snacks for every day. We have bread, basic spreads like peanut butter and HM jam, cereal, milk and fruit availible all the time. I do make a lot of soup and if someone comes in late and cold they can have a bowl of soup and bread. Soup is almost free food here (got an allotment and we have a chicken most weeks, so plenty of stock and veg) and I make the bread, fruit isn't expensive fruit but plain apples and bananas. I doubt the actual cost of extra snack stuff is more than £5 a week though I admit I've never sat and costed it out.

lostinrates

PasturesNew wrote: »

When I was growing up, we didn't have this "snacks" culture. We had two meals/day, school dinners or lunch in the middle of the day - and then an evening meal about 6pm. Occasionally, but rarely, in the winter we might have a tin of soup and some toast between the four of us..

There is snacking and ''snacking'' IMO. Eating last at 4:30-5pm if you go to bed later than 10pm could well leave you hungry. Its a long time between 5pm and say....6:30am the next day.

My mother had soup left because she wasn't home when I got home an sometimes wasn't for a few hours. It could be 7-8 and a half hours between my/sisters school lunch and supper at home and when you are at home tired from work it makes sense to eat, get some energy and do prep. Better a bowl of soup and prep, for example, than crisps in front of the tv/computer.

In fact, with out regular intake of good nutrition its more likely to be lolling in front of tv than prep!

Quenastoise

DH is a terrible snacker and eats out of boredom so I have turned into the snack police. I don't buy biscuits and sugary treats. He gets grapes when I go to Aldi and fresh fruit where they are affordable. I love Dairylea dippers but only buy them from Tesco when they are half price (the offer comes up fairly regularly) and hide the stock in the garage (I sound really mean now, don't I ? )

I have recently discovered Aldi's "rice slims" (thin caramel-flavoured rice cakes), low fat, no artificial nasties and 99p for 100g.

pigpen

We go through 3 or 4 loaves of bread a day and maybe 6+ pints of milk..

Snacks are sandwiches of cheese or ham or jam or lemon curd or toast or cereal or fruit... I buy heaps and heaps of all of these

Alwaysthebusybee

Hi Cooking Mama,

I too find healthy snacks a lot more expensive than the cheaper not so healthy ones. My husband has breakfast of toast and then 2 cooked meals a day and still finds room for snacking.

Your girls seem very healthy having a lot of fruit snacks and rather than changing their good habits I would suggest trying to find the snacks from cheaper sources (if possible) - Aldi and Lidl are very cheap on fruit and vegetables and the quality of them are very good. I would suggest trying to trim your budget from other meals or maybe from toiletries budget.

I find a large bowl of vegetable soup with a bread roll before dinner usually holds the hunger at bay until the dinner is ready - I very rarely have supper but sometimes my husband has toast or cereal. I find eating later usually stops the late night snacking.

I hope you find a combination that works for you - the grocery challenge and weezls webpage a good source of ideas for cheaper meal alternatives.

Buddingblonde

It sounds like they are eating healthily but possibly not enough at breakfast and lunch to stop the munchies.

Kimitatsu

I have two hollow legged boys ( I really dont know where they put it to be honest) so:

Breakfast - I cook bacon, eggs and beans (eggs are our own so that makes it cheaper)

Lunch they take wraps or sarnies or leftovers, with lots of fruit and veg, yoghurt, large carton of juice, and a biscuit.

Snack after school - they always come home ravenous whatever so they are allowed a packet of crisps and fruit and/or one of Nigellas breakfast bars

For snacks I cook flapjacks with fruit, the afore mentioned breakfast bars with lots of nuts and seeds in, they take nuts as a snack for sports with them, basically anything that has protein in it, or slow release carbs because otherwise they will eat the biscuit tin empty.

My eldest drinks about 2 pints of milk a day but he is growing so fast that the doctor tells me that there is nothing wrong with it - they dont drink squash really, juice or water.

Look at Approved Foods, I save a fortune! They have differing things in all the time but I buy a lot of baking stuff from them, and short dated can mean anything from just about to go out of date to 6 months plus!

LolaLemon

id recommend changing to foods that contain more oats, bbc2 had the easy baked food tonight and thier was a really easy recipe on their for flapjacks, you can add fruit to them to make them more appealing...
also check out the cbeebies website, they have 2 cooking shows, 1 - big cook little cook, has fun ideas for presenting them, but on the show its an awful waste as they dont portion it for one person if you get me... the other, i can cook, gives the recipe for a few people, which i find good for trying out a new recipe, then if we like it i can double up the quantities to batch cook.

also, for the crisp fiends, make their own, just use root veg, like parsnips, sweet potatoes, carrots, etc.. slice to desired thickness, i do about £1 coin thickness, put in a sandwich bag, add flavour and then add 1 teaspoonfull of olive oil, give a good shake to evenly coat the veg, then tip onto baking tray and cook for between 10-15 mins at 180^

for flavour i have
paprika powder - 1 tablespoon plus a little to sprinkle on when on the baking tray
chilli flakes
salt and peper,
rosemany and thyme
salt and vinegar - give a good shake before u add the oil.
lemon and (cant remember but i have used lemon before) -- oh rememebred - honey!

u can use just about anything, only takes a short time and are waaaay healthier than the mass produced, chemially laden ones - plus did u know, if u eat 1 packet of crisps per day for a year, it works out that u have eaten 3 litres of oil!

soo glad im not a big crisp eater, i used to have abt 2 packets a year! now that i make my own, its still doesnt even work out to be 1 a month! i normally only do it if i have friends in unexpectedly and cant be bothered making cakes.

i remember when i was between 15-19, i would eat constantly, breakfast when i got up, abt 8am, snack at 10 and then if not at school/college/work i would eat all day near enough, but it was always fruit and veg (in town and friends would buy crisps from M&S, big bags of cheesy stuff or onion rings, i'd buy a ready to eat salad, without a dressing! weirdo or what lol) and i would still eat dinner which was nearly always meat with chips n gravy, or macaroni (didnt like it back gthen, like it now that i cant eat dairy!) i would normally stop eating abt 8 o'clock, unless i was at dancing then when i got out at 9.30/10 i would have something else before bed.
i think its down to the more active lifestyle, and that really, fruit and veg dont fill us up, they just 'fill a hole' for a while, i didnt eat much bread - still dont, so didnt have much to chose from to make me feel full. when i strated working properly, and didnt have the opertuinty to eat all the time, just when they dictated i could, i found i could go without, but was filling up on foods i wouldnt noramlly eat, like sandwiches, yoghurts, pot noodles/supernoodles, cup a soups, pre made microwave meals etc, yeah they filled me up, but where empty foods, not much nurtition, less energy and put on a lot of weight... ive lost my point to this story now lol..... i dont have snacks budget, but from when my son was born til this year (he's nearly 4) ive spent roughly £20 a week on fruit n veg as he used to go through loads of it! thier is only me and him here, and he has now got his bitter taste buds developed (the natural stage where children will taste veg as 'horrible' to protect and save them - goes back to the cave man days when kids where left alone whilst parents went out hunting, it helped them not to eat the poisionous plants and survive long enough for a saber tooth to come eat them lol....) i still buy bananas and apples, but thats it just now. only buy buscuits once or twice a year, and thats things like digestives, custard creams etc, and they last me months! unless i take the nbotion for a cup of tea- then a pack is gone before the tea is half way down.

try more oats to help hunger at bay, oat cakes, porridge, oatabix, oatflakes instead of corn flakes, oat bread, flapjacks etc

good luck

adelight

Sounds like you have some seriously hungry daughters! Will they eat toast? You could conveniently not have any of their usual snacks in for a few days and suggest wholemeal toast w/cheese spread or jam? They might develop a taste for it... Or try making your own healthy flapjacks or cereal bars: http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/3305/sunshine-bars http://australianfood.about.com/od/breakfast/r/MuesliBars.htm you can play around with the ingredients to suit what they usually like and they will store for ~week. Could maybe even keep some in freezer too? Be sure to cut them up into the usual small sizes.

Are they eating a good breakfast? None of these puny 30g bowls of rice crispies(never understood this, european boxes say 45g+ which is much more reasonable!), big bowls of porridge with fruit or a few rounds of toast. Could try some really dense brown bread or rye bread, it might keep them extra full! A slice of rye bread w/jam and a cup of herbal tea definitely fills a hole! Do you they drink tea? Could get them on to tea/squash when they are "peckish" aka not hungry but just want to eat!



I developed a habit of "snacking" and kicked it by just not buying food I can snack on and pushing dinner back an hour. Everything I buy has to be cooked, with the exception of a loaf of bread every other week which I know I have to make last so I just don't snack because I can't!

zippychick

Hi Cooking Mama

i don't think there are threads specifically about budgeting for particular parts of the groceries. If you do want links on grocery spending and budgets you can always look those up

In the meantime these threads should help

What about home made hommous?

Healthy snacks for kids

back to school packed lunch OS ideas

Cheap snacks to fill up teenagers

Cheap/healthy snacks

Quick and easy alternative snacks

Cheap healthy playground snacks

thanks
Zip