There’s nothing to eat in this house!

[InigoJollifant]

Endless refrain from my teenager. Drives me mad. What she wants is a freezer full of crap & a cupboard full of crisps & biscuits. I’m not up for supplying that... but I probably am a bit crap at keeping the kitchen stocked with a ready supply of quick easy teenager friendly snacks/light meals.

would love suggestions - things you always have in? Quick things that are also nutritious? Half thinking of always having certain things in along with a recipe notebook so I can bat her back to consult that rather than texting me with food based complaints in my absence…

I just stopped buying the snacks.

DK - Dear Kids are old enough to walk to a shop, why have weekend jobs and can buy their own!

Don’t feel guilty, she’ll live.

Change the narrative, Oh you know where the shop is.

My favourite snacks are chocolate rice cakes, apple and peanut butter, toast and peanut butter, Pringles, nuts, sesame sticks/Bombay mix, muller corner yogurts, grapes from the freezer, digestive biscuits with peanut butter or Nutella, Oreo’s, etc etc etc…

Ah ok just seen you mean lunch

Honestly I think looking at a store cupboard and being able to create a meal is quite a skill and one most teens (and quite a few adults) haven’t learned yet. In your shoes I’d have given her a couple of ideas before leaving eg DD you can have pasta pesto or a cheese or PB sandwich & fruit for lunch.

In this house if you have popcorn, grapes, cereal bars, yoghurts, crisps, ‘the nice bread’ and fizzy drinks you get ‘great shopping!’ If you don’t have one of them it is ‘god what happened tonight’, more than two ‘we’re going to have to do more of a shop, there’s nothing in’😅

Ah yes, I’m familiar with that song. And it’s chorus of “I just don’t like the way YOU cook it” and the bonus verse of “Why do we never get Domino’s “….

Yes I’m talking about lunch really - the rest of us left early for a sports tournament so she was home alone. There were croissants for breakfast but when she got back from work for lunch I got a stream of annoying messages telling me the things we were missing - I quote
we don’t have any crisps
Or any nice food
We’ve got literally nothing edible
Where are the sweets we bought yesterday? We don’t have any ketchup so I can’t have cheese on toast either

i told her to make a chickpea & halloumi salad which I assume she did as the debris is in my kitchen!

the shops are about a 15 min bike ride away.

'Disorganised' because OP runs out of items the odd time ?? Really ??

OP I have 5 hungry bears and I hear this all the time . I just ignore them . I spend 400 euro plus a week on food .

I’d prob just have some snacks in- teens eat loads, can’t and prob shouldn’t always be a meal.

Good snack ideas:
Egg muffins
flapjacks
date energy balls
cheese and crackers
anything carbs - bagels, crumpets. Easy to freeze as well.
Cereal
Pita and houmous
Brownies or muffins

Ah well good she did make the salad even if the clearing up is a work in progress.

Just looked in the fridge and there is a full bottle of bloody ketchup anyway!!

I feel your pain! Mine constantly moans about nothing to eat, you only buy food I don’t like, you never have anything I like to eat

we have a cupboard full of pasta, sauce, soup etc - freezer with veg, pies, baked spuds, pizza pockets - fridge with cheese, salad veg, chicken, bacon etc and eggs, bread, wraps
plus the usual crisps and snacks and fruit

we often have a stand off ‘tell me what you want to eat’ …’you don’t have anything I like’ …’tell me what you would like and I’ll get it’ … ‘but I don’t know what I want but I don’t want anything you have’ 🙄🙄🙄

to be fair she does get bad hanger but still it drives me mad - I’m a single parent and not made of money!

I saw a thread in a similar vein a few years ago (I now have a teen DC and a hungry 9 year old boy too) and mostly it was around stuff they don't have to prep, rather than a lack of food.

Cut up cucumber/carrot/pepper slices readily available in tubs with hummus
Microwaveable rice/noodles
Soup
Fresh pasta with the small pots of pasta sauce
Bread/hot cross buns/crumpets/bagels
Ham
Cheese slices
Fruit

If she's old enough to have a job then cooking stuff is more achievable! I've really noticed a massive difference in what teenDc wants now than to what she was happy to eat a two years ago (junk!)

Crisps/junk is readily available but the deal is (while my small amount of control over what they eat diminishes over time) is that they have fruit and veg in a day as well as junk. I fully expect this to change as they get older... but it works for now!

In our house there's a stocked fruit bowl, cheddars and cereal bars. In the freezer, there are Cornish pasties. There's also home made wholemeal bread, assorted cheese and cherry tomatoes.

If ds (16) isn't happy, he is welcome to go to the shop for himself.

@MagicStarMama

do you not end up with a lot of waste then?

As a teen I used to come home and make myself simple things like French toast, pancakes, 2 minute noodles, Marmite and cheese on toast, cereal etc.

Edited for typo.

Erm - yes me too, not sure why you are quoting me. I literally suggested easy snacks as cooking a full meal probably wasn’t what the teen wanted to do.

Big bag of mixed nuts , readily available bread and a big tub of 100% peanut butter , m and s cheese straws and breadsticks , hot cross buns , homemade flapjacks with lots of hidden seeds in ,

@Comedycook

how on earth does she sound disorganised?! It’s one thing - ketchup. Hardly an essential. Op has in loads of other food she could have had. We all run out of stuff it’s naturally and normal.

Err, cost. And the fact that ds would live on pepperoni pizza and chocolate digestives if I kept them in.

For adults in our household the default filling snack is Greek yogurt with toppings. I like fruit ( fresh or dried), seeds, honey, granola. Dh tends to add granola, chocolate chips, and cashews.

Pesto in cupboard is a good back up if you always have pasta and basics for lunch. Ingredients for toasties. Some soups ( fresh, frozen, or tin)

No teenager is making sardines and pasta

Maybe stuff you’d think to put in a pack lunch box? If she wants the typical crisps etc then tell her she needs to get a job because you ain’t buying it 😂

Nobody needs crisps and biscuits. They are just empty calories.

So what? Sometimes people like eating things because they enjoy the taste...