What are your go to cheap meals/bakes?

[Infinity234]

I’m spending far too much on food.

Family of 5, 2 adults, 2 teenagers, 1 child. Myself and 1 teen are veggie, others happy to eat vegetarian most of the time.

Teenage son in particular eats lots of snacky things. We are going through ridiculous amounts of those cadburys cereal bars. I wondered if anyone had any good cheap baking ideas!

Make your own snack cereal bars and stop buying them. Plenty of recipes on good food etc for tray bakes, great to get child or teens involved in cooking them too.

Cereal bars are basically flapjacks with seeds added, so I would start there.

Snacks like lunchables are easy, and much cheaper, to prep and leave in the fridge with some edam, ham and crackers in little tubs with carrot sticks. Extra cheese for the veggies or quorn slices.

A batch of homemade muffins is cheap and easy, and more filling than the bought versions.

I found that teenagers tended to get home, open the fridge and eat what was visible, so I used to leave some made up snack boxes or homemade sausage rolls at the front. You can easily make a veggie version with mashed potato, cheese and chives or chopped fried onion.

For meals, stuffed baked potatoes are a good filling and cheap standby, and you can vary the fillings to different diets. My two would always eat pasta based things, cheesy sauces with mushrooms and peas, or tomato based with beans/lentils are nutritious and reasonable cost.

Thise bars are expensive and not filling. I'd make flapjack if that's what the teen likes, with added dried fruits, nuts and seeds. Some dark chocolate chips added.

Or date slice.

I have dried fruits (prunes are current favourite), nuts and seeds knockingbaround, along with Greek yogurt, peanut butter and honey. They can make their own concoctions then.

My teen son is very partial to an egg, so boiled eggs in the fridge may help, or encourage them to scramble some on toast.

Pancakes are a great, cheap filler.

Some veg soup When they come home from.school is good too.

Not really very summer useful but when mine were teens i used to always have a batch of homemade soup in the fridge ( which had been advice from my stepmother) super cheap to make, kids help themselves and add a slice of bread.
A.gree also with making your own flapjacks, loads nicer than the cereal bars too.

Is your teenage child capable enough to make snack bars for themself? If so, and if they don't already know how to do this, show them how to find recipes, show them where your baking equipment is and let them develop their baking skills. Tell them to tell you/whoever does the shopping what ingredients they'd like, and if they're reasonable, buy the ingredients.

If you have space for it, consider acquiring a bread machine and use it to make bread which is much more filling than the standard supermarket loaves. Give the job of making the bread (weighing out ingredients and pressing a few buttons) to one of the children. My kids were happy with wholemeal bread when made freshly. It keeps them satisfied for much longer than a supermarket loaf.

We use a lot of bananas, apples, peanut butter, natural or greek yoghurt and seeds, oatcakes/crackers, mixed nuts, and oats/other flaked cereals in our go-to snacks. Chicken drumsticks could make an easy snack for the non-veggie members of the family, and might be useful for lunch boxes if any of your meat eaters take lunch with them. Cheese & onion lentil bars are cheap, tasty, contain useful amounts of protein and are easy to make.

Bowls of unsalted, mixed nuts with or without dried fruits are great for snacking on and if you include some dried fruits and cheap seeds, can be a good way to increase fibre intake and variety.

Good luck with finding things that work for your family, and I hope you can get some of them to share some of the burden that comes with doing more of the food prep at home.

Seasoned crackers.
Yogurts
Fruit