What ‘fill em up’ foods should you teach your son to make before he hits his teens?

[timeisnotaline]

Not exactly a taat… I have a growing list of easy and filling foods my currently 6yo ds needs to learn so he doesn’t starve to death as a teen and we don’t have to quit our jobs ti cook every few hours. Since he was 2 he’s regularly eaten more than me, and I distinctly recall baking a cake at about 19 and when I turned around the 16yo brother had eaten half of it. half. Not a few slices. Half. So, my list is:
mac and cheese, bonus if he adds veg
pizza dough
baked potato pizza (slice left over baked potato, spread with tomato paste, maybe ham, and cheese, bake.
toasted sandwiches
fried rice
marcellas Tomato pasta sauce
puttanesca
chili con carne
possibly no knead bread but I’ve not got around to trying it myself

At over the 90th %ile for height, he probably will be a skinny 6 footer who eats enormous amounts
of food, hence this thread. That’s not that strange surely? He is mad about footy, basketball and running and uses energy all day long. We go through quite a lot of milk, I’ve looked at deliveries but there aren’t any local milkmen. I almost got a chance to make banana bread today as some had actually gone brown when usually we run out midweek if we don’t restock but I turned around and they had been eaten. I also remember living with my brothers, I don’t think looking ahead to the teen years of having a human dump truck in the house is strange at all.

My son has porridge pots (just add water) and those protein yogurts so not much cooking at all unfortunately.

My son has been making his own food for years watching TikTok etc

Teens these days really don’t need teaching - that’s the power of the Internet! The quick how to videos are fantastic

Another vote for soup, we have a soup machine which makes life easier but basically DS will empty pretty much any left over, add a tin or two of tomatoes and press go.

Pancakes obviously.

Yes I would say omelettes, spaghetti Bol, chilli, toasted sandwiches, stir fry, a sunday dinner, toad in the hole , cauliflower cheese ,

@timeisnotaline

You just need to make sure they roughly go together! Some examples I can remember are:

Leftover roast fritter, with whatever leftover meat and vegetables they were, leftover gravy. Added some cheddar cheese

Sometimes I make a stir fry dish and make the sauce from scratch, and there's always leftovers. So we'll use that vegetables that tend to go with Asian flavours- carrots, cabbage, broccoli, peppers etc. but I'm not super picky about making sure the ingredients are 'authentic!'

It can sound weird but we'll use up any leftover pasta or rice in there as well. You can pretty much add anything to a fritter! just chop everything up to little pieces and mix it in.

We often cook up a batch of baked chicken thigh fillets with either Italian or Cajun seasoning and they stay in the fridge for the week, they're a great high protein snack and if there's some left over they'll go in a fritter too. Sometimes there's feta or other cheeses that have a bit left over and need using, or we never seem to use a whole tub of butter milk/sour cream/crème fraiche up so that'll go in.

We do a similar thing by adding any vegetables that need using up to a pan, sometimes with garlic or chillis, and add some beaten eggs and cheese and make a really filling egg scramble. Also a good way to use up avocados that need eating.

Toast and things on toast - he should be able to make toast as a 6 year old using a toaster.

Toaster bags can be useful to make ham and cheese toasties.

Left over baked potatoes are easy to turn in to gnocchi, just remove the skin and mix with flour.

Eggs - omelets, frittata, scrambled (can add cheese, ham, chives, cream cheese)

Pasta and sauces, you can make a sauce with just putting cream cheese in a pan with a bit of pasta water, obviously you can put veg / meat in to the pan first, just cook before adding cream cheese.

Pancakes.

Mine didn't seem to like waiting for real food to cook so it was all quick things

Omelette, toasties, instant noodles, those packets of cheese and broccoli pasta, crumpets , wraps

They can get through more cheese than you'd think is possible!

scrambled egg/omlette in a pan.
also microwave scrambled egg in a cup.
toastie (make sure you have sliced pickle so they want to put veg in).
stir fry/egg fried noodles (dc like to add mushrooms or other veg from freezer)

Protein doesn’t have to be meat or fish op. What about good old beans on toast?

I have always absolutely loathed baked beans whcih is why I didn’t think of it but more than happy for the dc to adopt it! I’d like to get into home made baked beans.

here is why I’m so intrigued by fridge fritters!!