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Feed a Hungry Teenager Without Breaking Your Grocery Budget

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Feed a Hungry Teen

I’ve heard how expensive it is to feed a hungry teenager because they can eat everything in the house, and now I’m experiencing it firsthand.  My son isn’t even a teen—just 12—but over the last six months, he’s grown three inches and put on 20 pounds.  I used to think my husband could eat a lot, but our son can easily eat double or triple what his dad can eat.  Then an hour or two later, he’ll tell us he’s hungry again.  If you have a tween or teen, this may sound all too familiar.

However, we don’t really have enough room to raise the grocery budget, so we’re finding creative ways to keep him full.

Satisfying Foods to Feed a Hungry Teenager

There are several foods that can keep your hungry teen satisfied.

Protein

Meat can be expensive, but growing teens need protein to help them feel satiated.  We make sure to serve an ample serving of protein at breakfast and during every meal.  Some of our favorite breakfast proteins include homemade meat patties, eggs, or bacon.

For snacks, we like to make protein based snacks such as these Cacao Balls.  Between the pecans and protein powder, this snack keeps our teen full.

Healthy Carbs

Three staples in our teen’s diet are white potatoes, sweet potatoes, and rice.  He often eats rice with breakfast, homemade baked French fries for lunch, and baked sweet potatoes for dinner.  These carbs help fill him up and round out his meal.  After he eats an entire plateful of food and is still hungry, we give him vegetables and one of these carbs.

Fruits

These are a great way to fill up hungry teens, especially in between meals.  I find that grapefruit is my best bet.  It’s not that expensive, and it’s large and watery, so it fills him up.  Other options include apples, pears, bananas, oranges, or whatever other fruit you have on hand.  I always buy a lot of fruit when doing my weekly shopping.

Veggies

Vegetables are another choice that aren’t that expensive.  Organic carrots are .60 a pound at Costco.  We buy the ten pound bag and prepare them as raw carrot sticks or as roasted carrots.  We also frequently give the kids hummus to dip their veggies in.  Whenever a vegetable is on sale, I stock up and make extra knowing that our son will have multiple servings.

Healthy Fats

Feed a Hungry Teen
Photo by Heather Ford on Unsplash

Healthy fat can definitely help fill up a teen.  We’re big fans of avocado.  We often make guacamole to serve with our salads and soups.  We also serve it as a snack with organic corn chips.  Coconut oil, coconut cream, and coconut milk are also great ingredients to use in muffins, smoothies, and desserts to help satiate your child.  One of our go to favorites now is Chocolate Chia Pudding.  The chia and almond milk (or sub out for coconut milk) keep him full and satisfies his sweet tooth.

Foods to Avoid

Junk Food

I know, I know, teens love this stuff.  But the truth is, they can wolf down a bag of Cheetos or chips and then be hungry just a little later because they were eating empty calories.  We like to keep the junk food to a minimum and rely on healthy staples instead.  In the long run, when it comes to teen appetites, healthy food IS cheaper.  Plus, you’re helping your child maintain a healthy lifestyle.

Fast Food

The stereotype has teen boys living off fast food.  While it is temporarily filling, if your child relies on this type of food frequently, he may be facing health issues down the road.

Final Thoughts

While teen’s appetites do ramp up tremendously in the tween and teen years, feeding them healthy food without ruining the grocery budget is possible.  Our family has a number of food intolerances, so we can’t rely on other staples that will help fill kids up like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches or cottage cheese, but those are also fairly nutritious options.

What are your favorite foods to help fill your growing teen’s bottomless pit?  Please share.

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How to Feed Your Family on a Low Budget

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If you have a low income or you’re paying down debt, saving for retirement or college, or just want to be a good steward of your money, you may want to keep your grocery budget as low as possible.  According to the USDA, the average cost to feed a family of four for a month based on their thrifty guidelines is approximately $646.80.  You may be wondering how to feed your family on a low budget and spend less than or equal to the USDA’s thrifty guidelines.  Doing so is challenging, but it can be done.  Here are some strategies that will help you:

How to Feed Your Family on a Low Budget

Cook at Home

Eating out will cost you more, plain and simple.  If you’re trying to keep your food bill in check, cook at home for all of your meals.  You’ll save hundreds of dollars a month by choosing to eat at home versus eating at a restaurant.

Get Back to the Basics

You can eat nutritiously without breaking the bank.  Find simple recipes that nourish your body and save you money.  Some examples include vegetarian soup, noodle soup, chili, spaghetti, etc.  Make sure that you serve a generous side (or two or three) or fruits and vegetables to stretch your main dish.

Use Low Cost Proteins

How to Feed Your Family on a Low Budget
Photo by Anh Nguyen on Unsplash

If you’re on a budget, you likely won’t be eating steak.  Instead, go for the cheaper types of proteins such as ground meat, chicken legs and thighs, beans, tofu, and cheese.

Use Healthy Carbohydrate Fillers

When you’re eating carbs at a meal, choose the least expensive but still nutritious carbs such as brown rice and sweet potatoes or Russet potatoes.  Remember, carbohydrates have a place in your meal, but you likely don’t want the majority of your meals to be based around carbs.  Instead, also focus on fruits and vegetables.

Consider Growing a Veggie Garden

If you’re able, consider growing a vegetable garden.  You don’t need a lot of space to do this.  If you have no space, consider an herb garden that you can grow on your kitchen window sill.  If you’re in an apartment or have a small yard, you can grow some veggies in pots on your patio or balcony.  Be creative!

Utilize Frugal Websites

Have a few frugal recipe websites in your repertoire to save.  Sites like Budget Bytes, Good Cheap Eats, and $5 Dollar Dinners have delicious, healthy, frugal recipes.  Consult these sites regularly for new ideas.  All of these sites also have vegetarian recipes, which will help you save by limiting your meat consumption.

Make a Few Freezer Meals

If you make a meal and have ample leftovers, consider freezing some of it.  Also, when you make a meal, you can intentionally make extras by doubling the recipe.  Then put one serving in the freezer.  Freezer meals are the perfect way to help you save money when you have a busy day and don’t have time to cook or when you have an unexpected event such as a child who is sick so you can’t get to the store.

Final Thoughts

Learning how to feed your family on a low budget is possible, you just have to be strategic when it comes to grocery shopping and meal planning.

 

 

Save Money on the Grocery Budget by Reducing Food Waste

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Behind a mortgage, groceries are often the second most expensive line item in the budget.  If you’re looking to save more money this year, a good place to look is to reduce the grocery budget.  But don’t stop there.  Make sure to also look at the other side of the grocery budget—reducing food waste.

Whenever you waste food, you’re essentially dropping money into the garbage.  Instead, learn to reduce your food waste to stretch your grocery budget even further.  Here are some of my favorite strategies:

Save Money by Reducing Waste
Save Money by Reducing Waste

Look at your calendar before you shop.  Do you have a busy week coming up?  If so, don’t plan labor intensive meals; you just won’t have time to make them and you’ll likely have food go bad before you have time to cook it.  Instead, make some meals on the weekend to eat during the week when you’re busy or plan simple recipes and buy simple ingredients.  Rachael Ray’s Week in a Day is a great springboard for finding recipes you can make on the weekend to enjoy all week long.

Alternatively, you can choose simple meals to make on busy weeknights.  Fresh spinach can be sautéed in minutes.  Paired with a microwaved baked potato and a simple meat like a polish sausage that can be cooked quickly, and you have a fairly healthy, inexpensive meal.  Another option is to keep frozen vegetables on hand to cook quickly and pair with an easy meat and minute rice.

Buy foods your family likes.  Too often, people buy a bargain that turns out to be a waste of money because their family won’t eat it.  Buy the foods that your family will eat, not the foods that are a bargain.

Use leftovers!  Do you eat leftovers?  Some people don’t like them, but I love leftovers because they offer me one meal I don’t have to cook!  Eating leftovers can be a great way to stretch your food dollars.  If your family refuses leftovers, try to cook only as much as your family will eat in a meal so you don’t waste extras.

Create new meals with the leftovers.  Another idea is to creatively repurpose leftovers.  For instance, if you cook a whole chicken or buy a rotisserie chicken, keep the leftovers to turn into other meals like chicken enchiladas or chicken noodle soup.  Thanks to the Internet, you can find plenty of recipes for reusing leftovers.  Some chefs, like Robin Miller of the Food Network, specifically look to make meals out of leftovers to help you better utilize your time and food.

Utilize the freezer.  One of my favorite ways to reduce food waste is to use the freezer.  We recently bought a large box of individual serve guacamole.  I still had 8 left close to the expiration date, so I put them in the freezer, and now we just pull them out as we need them.  Many meals that you make and don’t want to eat all at once can be frozen for later use.

What are your favorite strategies for avoiding food waste?  Do you waste a lot of food or a minimal amount?