Help yourself food for children

[BlackeyedSusan]

Thanks to someone on thread nine for raising this. What are you getting that your children can help themselves to?

Mine can help themselves to cereal and milk, can do toast.

... But what about when we have run out of bread and milk?

We have:
Crackers
Cereal and soya milk for DD
Baked beans
Ds has curry in tins he can heat up.
Lots of biscuits.
Wraps for DD.
Dried fruit for DD.

Long term things require an adult/ knife/ heat/ recipe.

Oops.

They don't eat rice pudding or custard.

Ho hum. Need a rethink. And to teach Ds to use the oven.

Bugger.

So I've found that my 4 year old can open Cow and Gate fruit pots, but not Del Monte ones which have the lids glued on with too much glue.

I'll try him with a peelable tin of tuna later on and report back.

The trouble with kids using microwaves etc is that although it's safer than using a hob, food still comes out very hot. I sometimes find it a bit tricky not to scald myself getting those microwave rice sachets onto a plate.

I'm also trying to teach a bit more food hygiene, e.g. Once you've opened a container of wet food it has to be thrown away in a couple of hours, you can't come back for some more of that tuna salad a day later.

@DailyMailSucks

My DD would use a little wooden cocktail stick to poke a couple of holes, then peel the plastic top back from the middle rather than the glued edges.

She saw us doing it to pierce plastic covers for microwave foods and copied. It works really well. Over time it's evolved to a very graceful and classy 'pierce, pierce, slurp juice through holes, peel off lid approach'. She does similar with the small milkshake bottles, rather than peel back the lid, she pokes a hole then sticks one of our reuseable straws in. Less likely to spill milkshake everywhere that way.

Very helpful thread.
I’m cooking and freezing portions of pasta that can be defrosted and warmed through.
I might look at getting some containers or boxes that can be frozen, microwaves and eaten out of just to simplify things.

@DailyMailSucks excellent point about food hygiene.

dd(5) and I have prepped a box of cereals which she can open and eat (kelloggs small boxes) varieties of crisps like pombears, walkers etc, raisins, biscuits, snack pack rice cakes, nut butter, Jelly, ellas kitchen baby food pouches & baby fruit and veg purées, juice cartons, some bread and fresh fruits (which I’m religiously replacing with fresh ones) also have cheese, milk, fruits n juices in the fridge until now.

DC1 is 12, so could make toast, and microwave food. We have tins of soup, hot dogs, meatballs and ravioli that he could open and microwave easily. He can also cook super noodles in the microwave, and we have snap pots of beans and spaghetti hoops.

DC2 and DC3 both have ASD (and different food aversions), and are cognitively delayed, so would be unable to cook anything if DC1 was also out of action - DGPs are all in their 80s so I wouldn't risk asking them for help, and there's no one else DC2 and 3 would cope with. So worst case we currently have:

Cartons of UHT milkshakes and juice, and fruit shoots
Cereal bars and individual boxes of cereal they could eat dry
Go ahead bars
Dairylea dunkers and cheese strips
Lunchables
Yogurts
bananas, apples and grapes
sugar snap peas and mange tout
Packets of ham and billy bear
Cracker breads, Cream Crackers and Breadsticks with Peanut Butter, Nutella and Jam to spread on them
Crisps
Raisins
Biscuits
Cake Bars

Not the healthiest, but in an emergency it would get them through a few days - hopefully all 3 of us wouldn't be out at the same time for too long!

My older DC are 8 and 5, oldest has ASD and PDA and refuses to learn to cook, 5 year old has the attention span of a gnat and is very very accident prone with knives, scissors etc. Wouldn't want either of them messing with the gas cooker at all. Both are dairy intolerant.

I've bought -
Cereal including those little packs from Kellogg's to keep it interesting
Oatly milk
Cereal bars - found some dairy free choc chip ones in quality save
Belvita biscuits
Aldi fruit puree pouches
Freeze dried fruit
Dried banana
Twiglets
Pom bears
Parma ham and salami
Frozen fruit - mango, blueberries, cherries

Severely lacking in veg but they've got protein, carbs, fat, fibre, some vitamins, so would be ok for a while.

Stop them starving and dehydrating food is good enough in an emergency, I think. Nice to have healthy stuff but that's a bonus if it is really bad.