Hey, I just found this great site that I could spend all day on! It’s called Netmums.com and it’s full of informative articles, ideas and recipes for our kids. I’m posting one of the articles I read this morning because I like some of the tips they include for helping our kids eat healthier. Some of the points might be a tad hard to do simply because I don’t have oodles of time, but I will certainly give them a try!

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Cooking on a Budget

Leave the processed food and ready-made meals on the supermarket shelves. On the face of it, it may seem like the cheapest option but when you look at the labels, you’ll find you’re only getting 50% of meat in your chicken nuggets – you really aren’t getting value for money. The food manufacturers manage to make their food cheap by using the poorest quality ingredients and an abundance of additives to cover up the poor quality and taste. We all remember the huge quantities of chicken skin going into chicken nuggets in Jamie Oliver’s demonstration.

If you take quality into account, processed food is not cheap at all.

The link between a good diet and our children’s well being and ability to learn is being proved more and more by new research. We all want to feed our families good food so they can thrive at school and at play … to do this you need to ditch processed food and get cooking…here are some words of advice from our members:

“Ditch the cheese spread and slices as they’re poor quality…instead get a good 1lb block of cheese to replace all the cheese slices, spread and grated stuff. I’ve also ditched all the chips, wedges etc…buy a big bag of potatoes and prepare them yourself. I now make my own oven chips, wedges for a fraction of the cost and there’s plenty to put in the freezer for the following week.”  Nikki.

A bread maker is a great way of cutting down on the cost of bread. Our bread maker cost £45 and you can buy enormous bags of flour from farm shops. It is cheaper to use a bread maker than to heat your oven up to the enormously high (and expensive) temperatures that bread cooking requires – plus you can put it on a timer and have warm fresh bread for breakfast. It also does dough for make it yourself pizzas and for rolls and buns.You can have a large loaf of home made bread for about 50p and we all know how much families eat!

“I have to cook on a very tight budget so when I go shopping I go straight to the reduced selection and always stock up with as much reduced food as possible and either cook it that night and freeze it down, or freeze it straight away. That way my family can eat very healthy for a fraction of the price.”

Plan ahead

Plan the week’s meals before you go shopping. Use our Netmums Meal Planner to help. Print out the chart and use it as the basis for your weekly shopping list.

Other things to consider when thinking about meals for the week ahead:

Are there any tins of food lurking in the back of the cupboard that you can incorporate into your meals this week? Click here for a list of store cupboard basics.

Do you have any leftovers from the weekend?

Are any members of the family going to be away? If so adjust the amount of food you buy when any of your children are having tea with friends or your partner has a evening out booked.

Write out a shopping list and stick to it … no wandering off into the doughnut section!

Click here to print out a useful shopping list with guidelines.

“I keep a list in a little book that fits into my handbag. In the back is the shopping list and at the front I keep a tally of how much money I am spending. Writing it all down for a month was an eye-opener. The result of this has been a shopping bill that has more than halved, healthier meals and fun with my boy when we choose what we will have.”

Avoid wasting food

If you’ve made a bit too much food, don’t throw it away. Most foods will keep for up to 2 days in the fridge (not fish or seafood though!) and can be used again. Always cool left over cooked food as quickly as possible, cover and store in the fridge or freezer until needed.

Double up the quantities of a recipe with ‘leftovers’ in mind. Freeze half of it and have it later in the month. More batch cooking ideas here.

“If you buy double quantity of mince you cook it all together then separate it into two.  Add chilli beans and chilli to one half and make a con-carne and use the other half for bolognaise or lasagne, the recipe is practically the same anyway.”

Keep any leftover food in a sealed container in the fridge or in a dish covered with cling-film. Keep away from raw meats.

“If you are storing leftovers in the fridge, save money by ditching the cling film. Use the money to buy some containers with lids which can be reused or just do as my parents’ generation did and put a plate over the top”. Diana

Even if you only have a small amount of food left, think about how you could use it creatively in a snack, or as part of another meal. Pieces of chicken could be used to make Coronation Chicken for use in sandwiches, with rice, or in a jacket potato. Stir-fry is another option. Click here for more leftover recipe ideas.

“If I have mince left over from bolognaise or shepherds pie I make up some pastry and make mini mince pasties for Caitlin and then freeze them. She loves them and make a good standby meal for her if we have a meal that she can’t have.”

Don’t re-heat fish, and don’t re-heat anything more than once.
If you have cooked too much rice, cool it as quickly as possible (within one hour) and keep it in the fridge for no more than one day until reheating. Make sure you heat leftovers through until they are piping hot – whether using a microwave or conventional oven.