In this episode we give some easy summer holiday snacks for kids.
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Show notes
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Transcript
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Highlights
In this episode - Easy summer holiday snacks for kids
In this episode Joanne runs through some suggestions for making the endless summer holiday snack production line a little easier.
Joanne suggests stocking up for summer snacks using a pick and mix approach with three groups of items that can mix and match for balanced snacks, and gives a long list of suggestions of items for each group to choose from each week when you're doing the shopping list.
Music "Happy Days" by Simon Folwar via Uppbeat
About the host
Joanne Roach is the author and creator of The Foodies Books and The Little Foodies Club. She has a background in Early Years childcare development and school food provision, and has been helping children to grow vegetables at home and in school for over 18 years. She creates educational materials, workshops and products for parents, grandparents and educators who want to engage children with fruits and vegetables.
Useful links in this episode
Cool post with summer snack ideas for helping children explore food, including the ice cream cone example - https://nutrition4kidsni.com/best-picnic-foods-for-fussy-eaters-easy-ways-to-support-fruit-and-veg-exploration
For a list of the fruit and veggies in season to put in your summer holiday snacks go to: https://www.thefoodies.org/seasonal/august-food-ideas/
Episode Transcript - Easy summer holiday snacks for kids
Joanne Roach (00:13)
Joanne Roach (00:13)
Hello and welcome to the Food for Kids podcast. I'm Joanne from the Foodies. Today is the first full week of summer holidays for families in England and most of the UK is pretty similar. And as the name, The Six Weeks Holidays suggests, for most families that means somewhere in the region of 40 to 45 days of having the kids at home. There are lots of fun things to do, memories to make, school runs to not miss at all, but there's also quite a lot of work juggling to do, lots of keeping spirits up and activities and boredom and lots and lots and lots of food. So it's nice to not have to think about before school breakfast and packed lunches or dinner money accounts for a bit unless you have a holiday club to go to.
But on the other hand, for many families there is a house full of small people needing to be fed around the clock and the main thing that parents complain about is the constant need for snacks. Not surprising because if you have two kids at home eating two or three snacks a day as well as their meals, this summer you will be providing something in the region of 160 to 250 snacks before they go back to school. You don't obviously want them all to end up being crisps or biscuits and on the other hand you don't want to spend summer with one arm chained to the fridge. So let's come up with some ideas to try and make life a little bit easier, little bit tastier and a little bit healthier with some snack ideas. So let's get into it!
Joanne Roach (01:35)
There are loads of fantastic ideas around online for great healthy snacks for your kids and lots of them are absolutely gorgeous to look at and very insta-worthy but I'm not going to talk through those ideas here you can google those yourself. instead I'm going to advocate for the approach which kept me sane with my own kids and which I've also used in school which is a pick and mix snack approach. It's not rocket science, it's absolutely not my invention, but I do hope it will be helpful.
So I'm not talking about Woolworths pick and mix, unfortunately, but I'm also not talking about the kind of pick and mix that you see in those gorgeous reels with the incredible batch prepping mums usually in America with their huge American fridges, and they make up these beautiful baskets and boxes of little pouches of different items for their kids, and they've got cute labels with the children's names on them and these tiny little packs. I mean, if that's you, all power to you, I bow down to your effort and enthusiasm, and you absolutely don't need this episode, you can skip it, but I did not have the budget or the time, nor the fridge space, or the head space, frankly, for that matter to do things quite like that.
So what I'm talking about is a much more low-key version of that, more budget friendly, less individual packaging too.
In one of my jobs I set up a tuck shop at a primary school and we used this pick and mix approach there. It was a whole project using year fives to serve food and do business skills and I will do an episode on that at some point because it was actually really great fun. But the basic idea was to have three items a day on offer and children could choose from them. We encouraged them to have either two or three items. Broadly speaking there was always one food that was a starchy carbohydrate type food, one that was a good source of protein and one fruit or veg.
So for example, we might have had half slices of bagel, quarter slices of ham and some apple pieces. Or we might have had a quarter wrap, cream cheese and strawberries or one of their favourites was always popcorn, sunflower seeds and raisins.
Now I'm not suggesting obviously that you do that at home every day, God forbid, but just use that basic idea to get into the fridge and cupboard a selection of things each week that are in these three rough groups. It doesn't have to be that children have all three at every snack. Sometimes when children are asking for a snack, especially quite close to a meal time, a piece of fruit on its own is perfectly good enough.
But when you can, a snack that has a bit of balance has a better chance of keeping them satisfied until the next meal. So the idea is to get in three to five items from each of those three groups when you do your food shop, so that during that week, either you or your children can put together some different combinations from the items to make up some balanced snacks. And then the next week, keep some of the favourites and swap out some of the others for different ones for a bit of variety.
So I'll run through some of the ideas that I've used either with my own kids or at the school and I'll put the list in a show note so that you can come over there and jot down some next time you go shopping if you like the idea. Most of them are pretty easy to put together or you can prep some of them in Tupperwares for kids to assemble for themselves.
So here are the suggestions roughly in those three groups.
So in the broadly starchy carbs group you've got obvious things like toast and crackers but also things like bagels, English muffins in halves are quite nice, pitas cut up into little strips, breadsticks are great for nibbling from one end to the other as long as they're not a very salty one, similarly with pretzels, things like rice cakes and oat cakes, wraps which you can have whole wraps or those mini wraps or cut them into quarters. Handfuls of dry cereal are really good if they're a higher fibre, lower sugar sort of cereal popcorn's great, you can either pop your own or you can get the microwave stuff
I recently saw a brilliant blog post from Nutrition for Kids that I'll link to in the show notes where they used ice cream cones to pile things inside of. That was really cool. So that's your sort of broadly starchy components.
And then for your more protein rich group, the obvious ones are things like cheese or ham, there's also things like hummus or other kind of beany spreads. S mall yogurts can be great, obviously keeping an on the sugar levels on the individual yogurts but they can be a great snack. Handfuls of nuts like cashews, almonds are great or seeds like sunflower seeds or pumpkin seeds or a mixture of the two. Cream cheese is great for spreading on stuff but also for gluing things together and the same with peanut butter or almond butter. Obviously you can get those little individual cheeses but you can just chop up little cubes of cheese yourself. And the same with things like leftover cooked meats, ⁓ also things like those little chicken satay's, you can buy those in the shops already made if you want to. And then tinned tuna or salmon are great because you can just keep them in the cupboard you don't need to do anything with them and and then a spoonful of those are great on a snack. And then also hard-boiled eggs, if your children like hard-boiled eggs you can cook a batch up at the weekend and keep them in the fridge and they're ready to go.
If you've got vegetarians in the house, then air fried chickpeas that you just make up at the weekend and put into a container are fantastic. And also those mini falafel are brilliant.
Milkshake or hot chocolate contains a decent amount of dairy milk or something like a soya milk that has slightly higher protein in or things like Actimel or the drinking yogurts can be great too. Again keep an eye on the sugar but loads of those have got a decent amount of protein and some good bacteria to boot.
So that's the sort of protein-y group.
And then finally your fruit or veg group. I don't need to tell you what fruit and veg looks like. But here are some suggestions of ones you might not have thought of. So obviously, you you've got your favourites like apples, bananas, carrot sticks, celery, cucumber. Pepper strips are great to prep ahead. Sugar snap peas or mange tout are usually pretty popular. Cherry tomatoes, easy peel or satsumas. Things like grapes, sultanas, raisins or apricots.
Don't overlook canned fruit, canned pineapple or peaches, if you can get them in juice rather than in syrup, are brilliant.
Frozen berries are also great and they're usually a lot cheaper. You can also freeze your own grapes or berries and you can eat them from frozen. Obviously keep an eye on choking hazards with younger children but I'll link in the show notes to the episode where we talked about freezing berries.
Bananas are obviously great just as they are but they're also really great frozen. You can dip them in a bit of dark chocolate if you want to, can shove them on a stick or you can blend them into what they call nice cream but basically ice cream. Stick some chocolate chips in it, jobs a good'un
And then for on the go, there's some convenience versions of some of these things. So like pouches of puree or smoothie. Do check the labels on those a lot of them do contain an awful lot of sugar and not as much fruit as you'd hope, but some of them are really great.
And the same goes for jelly, you can get low sugar ones in the shop or you can make your own at home you can make them with fruit juice with either gelatin or agar-agar if you're a vegetarian and they can be great for mixing with fruit to make it more fun.
So there's some suggestions for the fruit and veg group.
So obviously that was a huge list, I'm not suggesting you buy all of those things. But like I say, it's just some ideas to be able to pick out a few each week to assemble yourself or your child to assemble their own, depending on their age and stage. So prep anything that needs to be prepped in advance to be tempting, like carrot sticks or pita slices, and pop them in whatever containers works for you. If you want to have an area of the fridge and a tray on the counter for this week's snacks, you can do if you want to, or could have a little list so that everybody knows what's available to choose from this week.
And as a bonus, this approach actually does build familiarity for children, even with the foods that they don't choose, because they have to consider them each time they don't choose them.
If you really want to, can obviously assemble some of these ingredients beforehand So some examples of that would be mixing some of the dried ingredients together into a trail mix or those cute little hummus snack jars that you see online where you put a bit of hummus in the bottom and then you stick your carrot sticks and pepper slices in on top and then seal the jar up and then people can take them out and dip them in or things like quesadillas or mini muffin pizzas where you're using that starchy base but you're putting a bit of tomato puree in, a little bit of the cheese and one of your vegetables.
So there are some interesting things you can make from some of these ingredients, but honestly, a lot of them can just be people grabbing a handful of each on a plate to make up an easy picky snack.
So I hope you like this pick and mix approach to snack provision. The good thing is it means you only have to think about it once per week and then after that everybody knows what the ingredients are to choose from this week. I'll leave it up to you how you put it into practice whether it's having a pick and mix list for your kids to really get involved with or on busy or tired weeks honestly just using these lists to make your shopping list easier even if you don't do anything special with them. Let me know how you get on and what weird combinations of pick and mix your children come up with I would love to hear. And I'll see you on Monday and in the meantime, happy eating.
Hello and welcome to the Food for Kids podcast. I'm Joanne from the Foodies. Today is the first full week of summer holidays for families in England and most of the UK is pretty similar. And as the name, The Six Weeks Holidays suggests, for most families that means somewhere in the region of 40 to 45 days of having the kids at home. There are lots of fun things to do, memories to make, school runs to not miss at all, but there's also quite a lot of work juggling to do, lots of keeping spirits up and activities and boredom and lots and lots and lots of food. So it's nice to not have to think about before school breakfast and packed lunches or dinner money accounts for a bit unless you have a holiday club to go to.
Joanne Roach (00:13)
Hello and welcome to the Food for Kids podcast. I'm Joanne from the Foodies. Today is the first full week of summer holidays for families in England and most of the UK is pretty similar. And as the name, The Six Weeks Holidays suggests, for most families that means somewhere in the region of 40 to 45 days of having the kids at home. There are lots of fun things to do, memories to make, school runs to not miss at all, but there's also quite a lot of work juggling to do, lots of keeping spirits up and activities and boredom and lots and lots and lots of food. So it's nice to not have to think about before school breakfast and packed lunches or dinner money accounts for a bit unless you have a holiday club to go to.
But on the other hand, for many families there is a house full of small people needing to be fed around the clock and the main thing that parents complain about is the constant need for snacks. Not surprising because if you have two kids at home eating two or three snacks a day as well as their meals, this summer you will be providing something in the region of 160 to 250 snacks before they go back to school. You don't obviously want them all to end up being crisps or biscuits and on the other hand you don't want to spend summer with one arm chained to the fridge. So let's come up with some ideas to try and make life a little bit easier, little bit tastier and a little bit healthier with some snack ideas. So let's get into it!
Joanne Roach (01:35)
There are loads of fantastic ideas around online for great healthy snacks for your kids and lots of them are absolutely gorgeous to look at and very insta-worthy but I'm not going to talk through those ideas here you can google those yourself. instead I'm going to advocate for the approach which kept me sane with my own kids and which I've also used in school which is a pick and mix snack approach. It's not rocket science, it's absolutely not my invention, but I do hope it will be helpful.
So I'm not talking about Woolworths pick and mix, unfortunately, but I'm also not talking about the kind of pick and mix that you see in those gorgeous reels with the incredible batch prepping mums usually in America with their huge American fridges, and they make up these beautiful baskets and boxes of little pouches of different items for their kids, and they've got cute labels with the children's names on them and these tiny little packs. I mean, if that's you, all power to you, I bow down to your effort and enthusiasm, and you absolutely don't need this episode, you can skip it, but I did not have the budget or the time, nor the fridge space, or the head space, frankly, for that matter to do things quite like that.
So what I'm talking about is a much more low-key version of that, more budget friendly, less individual packaging too.
In one of my jobs I set up a tuck shop at a primary school and we used this pick and mix approach there. It was a whole project using year fives to serve food and do business skills and I will do an episode on that at some point because it was actually really great fun. But the basic idea was to have three items a day on offer and children could choose from them. We encouraged them to have either two or three items. Broadly speaking there was always one food that was a starchy carbohydrate type food, one that was a good source of protein and one fruit or veg.
So for example, we might have had half slices of bagel, quarter slices of ham and some apple pieces. Or we might have had a quarter wrap, cream cheese and strawberries or one of their favourites was always popcorn, sunflower seeds and raisins.
Now I'm not suggesting obviously that you do that at home every day, God forbid, but just use that basic idea to get into the fridge and cupboard a selection of things each week that are in these three rough groups. It doesn't have to be that children have all three at every snack. Sometimes when children are asking for a snack, especially quite close to a meal time, a piece of fruit on its own is perfectly good enough.
But when you can, a snack that has a bit of balance has a better chance of keeping them satisfied until the next meal. So the idea is to get in three to five items from each of those three groups when you do your food shop, so that during that week, either you or your children can put together some different combinations from the items to make up some balanced snacks. And then the next week, keep some of the favourites and swap out some of the others for different ones for a bit of variety.
So I'll run through some of the ideas that I've used either with my own kids or at the school and I'll put the list in a show note so that you can come over there and jot down some next time you go shopping if you like the idea. Most of them are pretty easy to put together or you can prep some of them in Tupperwares for kids to assemble for themselves.
So here are the suggestions roughly in those three groups.
So in the broadly starchy carbs group you've got obvious things like toast and crackers but also things like bagels, English muffins in halves are quite nice, pitas cut up into little strips, breadsticks are great for nibbling from one end to the other as long as they're not a very salty one, similarly with pretzels, things like rice cakes and oat cakes, wraps which you can have whole wraps or those mini wraps or cut them into quarters. Handfuls of dry cereal are really good if they're a higher fibre, lower sugar sort of cereal popcorn's great, you can either pop your own or you can get the microwave stuff
I recently saw a brilliant blog post from Nutrition for Kids that I'll link to in the show notes where they used ice cream cones to pile things inside of. That was really cool. So that's your sort of broadly starchy components.
And then for your more protein rich group, the obvious ones are things like cheese or ham, there's also things like hummus or other kind of beany spreads. S mall yogurts can be great, obviously keeping an on the sugar levels on the individual yogurts but they can be a great snack. Handfuls of nuts like cashews, almonds are great or seeds like sunflower seeds or pumpkin seeds or a mixture of the two. Cream cheese is great for spreading on stuff but also for gluing things together and the same with peanut butter or almond butter. Obviously you can get those little individual cheeses but you can just chop up little cubes of cheese yourself. And the same with things like leftover cooked meats, ⁓ also things like those little chicken satay's, you can buy those in the shops already made if you want to. And then tinned tuna or salmon are great because you can just keep them in the cupboard you don't need to do anything with them and and then a spoonful of those are great on a snack. And then also hard-boiled eggs, if your children like hard-boiled eggs you can cook a batch up at the weekend and keep them in the fridge and they're ready to go.
If you've got vegetarians in the house, then air fried chickpeas that you just make up at the weekend and put into a container are fantastic. And also those mini falafel are brilliant.
Milkshake or hot chocolate contains a decent amount of dairy milk or something like a soya milk that has slightly higher protein in or things like Actimel or the drinking yogurts can be great too. Again keep an eye on the sugar but loads of those have got a decent amount of protein and some good bacteria to boot.
So that's the sort of protein-y group.
And then finally your fruit or veg group. I don't need to tell you what fruit and veg looks like. But here are some suggestions of ones you might not have thought of. So obviously, you you've got your favourites like apples, bananas, carrot sticks, celery, cucumber. Pepper strips are great to prep ahead. Sugar snap peas or mange tout are usually pretty popular. Cherry tomatoes, easy peel or satsumas. Things like grapes, sultanas, raisins or apricots.
Don't overlook canned fruit, canned pineapple or peaches, if you can get them in juice rather than in syrup, are brilliant.
Frozen berries are also great and they're usually a lot cheaper. You can also freeze your own grapes or berries and you can eat them from frozen. Obviously keep an eye on choking hazards with younger children but I'll link in the show notes to the episode where we talked about freezing berries.
Bananas are obviously great just as they are but they're also really great frozen. You can dip them in a bit of dark chocolate if you want to, can shove them on a stick or you can blend them into what they call nice cream but basically ice cream. Stick some chocolate chips in it, jobs a good'un
And then for on the go, there's some convenience versions of some of these things. So like pouches of puree or smoothie. Do check the labels on those a lot of them do contain an awful lot of sugar and not as much fruit as you'd hope, but some of them are really great.
And the same goes for jelly, you can get low sugar ones in the shop or you can make your own at home you can make them with fruit juice with either gelatin or agar-agar if you're a vegetarian and they can be great for mixing with fruit to make it more fun.
So there's some suggestions for the fruit and veg group.
So obviously that was a huge list, I'm not suggesting you buy all of those things. But like I say, it's just some ideas to be able to pick out a few each week to assemble yourself or your child to assemble their own, depending on their age and stage. So prep anything that needs to be prepped in advance to be tempting, like carrot sticks or pita slices, and pop them in whatever containers works for you. If you want to have an area of the fridge and a tray on the counter for this week's snacks, you can do if you want to, or could have a little list so that everybody knows what's available to choose from this week.
And as a bonus, this approach actually does build familiarity for children, even with the foods that they don't choose, because they have to consider them each time they don't choose them.
If you really want to, can obviously assemble some of these ingredients beforehand So some examples of that would be mixing some of the dried ingredients together into a trail mix or those cute little hummus snack jars that you see online where you put a bit of hummus in the bottom and then you stick your carrot sticks and pepper slices in on top and then seal the jar up and then people can take them out and dip them in or things like quesadillas or mini muffin pizzas where you're using that starchy base but you're putting a bit of tomato puree in, a little bit of the cheese and one of your vegetables.
So there are some interesting things you can make from some of these ingredients, but honestly, a lot of them can just be people grabbing a handful of each on a plate to make up an easy picky snack.
So I hope you like this pick and mix approach to snack provision. The good thing is it means you only have to think about it once per week and then after that everybody knows what the ingredients are to choose from this week. I'll leave it up to you how you put it into practice whether it's having a pick and mix list for your kids to really get involved with or on busy or tired weeks honestly just using these lists to make your shopping list easier even if you don't do anything special with them. Let me know how you get on and what weird combinations of pick and mix your children come up with I would love to hear. And I'll see you on Monday and in the meantime, happy eating.
But on the other hand, for many families there is a house full of small people needing to be fed around the clock and the main thing that parents complain about is the constant need for snacks. Not surprising because if you have two kids at home eating two or three snacks a day as well as their meals, this summer you will be providing something in the region of 160 to 250 snacks before they go back to school. You don't obviously want them all to end up being crisps or biscuits and on the other hand you don't want to spend summer with one arm chained to the fridge. So let's come up with some ideas to try and make life a little bit easier, little bit tastier and a little bit healthier with some snack ideas. So let's get into it!
Joanne Roach (00:13)
Hello and welcome to the Food for Kids podcast. I'm Joanne from the Foodies. Today is the first full week of summer holidays for families in England and most of the UK is pretty similar. And as the name, The Six Weeks Holidays suggests, for most families that means somewhere in the region of 40 to 45 days of having the kids at home. There are lots of fun things to do, memories to make, school runs to not miss at all, but there's also quite a lot of work juggling to do, lots of keeping spirits up and activities and boredom and lots and lots and lots of food. So it's nice to not have to think about before school breakfast and packed lunches or dinner money accounts for a bit unless you have a holiday club to go to.
But on the other hand, for many families there is a house full of small people needing to be fed around the clock and the main thing that parents complain about is the constant need for snacks. Not surprising because if you have two kids at home eating two or three snacks a day as well as their meals, this summer you will be providing something in the region of 160 to 250 snacks before they go back to school. You don't obviously want them all to end up being crisps or biscuits and on the other hand you don't want to spend summer with one arm chained to the fridge. So let's come up with some ideas to try and make life a little bit easier, little bit tastier and a little bit healthier with some snack ideas. So let's get into it!
Joanne Roach (01:35)
There are loads of fantastic ideas around online for great healthy snacks for your kids and lots of them are absolutely gorgeous to look at and very insta-worthy but I'm not going to talk through those ideas here you can google those yourself. instead I'm going to advocate for the approach which kept me sane with my own kids and which I've also used in school which is a pick and mix snack approach. It's not rocket science, it's absolutely not my invention, but I do hope it will be helpful.
So I'm not talking about Woolworths pick and mix, unfortunately, but I'm also not talking about the kind of pick and mix that you see in those gorgeous reels with the incredible batch prepping mums usually in America with their huge American fridges, and they make up these beautiful baskets and boxes of little pouches of different items for their kids, and they've got cute labels with the children's names on them and these tiny little packs. I mean, if that's you, all power to you, I bow down to your effort and enthusiasm, and you absolutely don't need this episode, you can skip it, but I did not have the budget or the time, nor the fridge space, or the head space, frankly, for that matter to do things quite like that.
So what I'm talking about is a much more low-key version of that, more budget friendly, less individual packaging too.
In one of my jobs I set up a tuck shop at a primary school and we used this pick and mix approach there. It was a whole project using year fives to serve food and do business skills and I will do an episode on that at some point because it was actually really great fun. But the basic idea was to have three items a day on offer and children could choose from them. We encouraged them to have either two or three items. Broadly speaking there was always one food that was a starchy carbohydrate type food, one that was a good source of protein and one fruit or veg.
So for example, we might have had half slices of bagel, quarter slices of ham and some apple pieces. Or we might have had a quarter wrap, cream cheese and strawberries or one of their favourites was always popcorn, sunflower seeds and raisins.
Now I'm not suggesting obviously that you do that at home every day, God forbid, but just use that basic idea to get into the fridge and cupboard a selection of things each week that are in these three rough groups. It doesn't have to be that children have all three at every snack. Sometimes when children are asking for a snack, especially quite close to a meal time, a piece of fruit on its own is perfectly good enough.
But when you can, a snack that has a bit of balance has a better chance of keeping them satisfied until the next meal. So the idea is to get in three to five items from each of those three groups when you do your food shop, so that during that week, either you or your children can put together some different combinations from the items to make up some balanced snacks. And then the next week, keep some of the favourites and swap out some of the others for different ones for a bit of variety.
So I'll run through some of the ideas that I've used either with my own kids or at the school and I'll put the list in a show note so that you can come over there and jot down some next time you go shopping if you like the idea. Most of them are pretty easy to put together or you can prep some of them in Tupperwares for kids to assemble for themselves.
So here are the suggestions roughly in those three groups.
So in the broadly starchy carbs group you've got obvious things like toast and crackers but also things like bagels, English muffins in halves are quite nice, pitas cut up into little strips, breadsticks are great for nibbling from one end to the other as long as they're not a very salty one, similarly with pretzels, things like rice cakes and oat cakes, wraps which you can have whole wraps or those mini wraps or cut them into quarters. Handfuls of dry cereal are really good if they're a higher fibre, lower sugar sort of cereal popcorn's great, you can either pop your own or you can get the microwave stuff
I recently saw a brilliant blog post from Nutrition for Kids that I'll link to in the show notes where they used ice cream cones to pile things inside of. That was really cool. So that's your sort of broadly starchy components.
And then for your more protein rich group, the obvious ones are things like cheese or ham, there's also things like hummus or other kind of beany spreads. S mall yogurts can be great, obviously keeping an on the sugar levels on the individual yogurts but they can be a great snack. Handfuls of nuts like cashews, almonds are great or seeds like sunflower seeds or pumpkin seeds or a mixture of the two. Cream cheese is great for spreading on stuff but also for gluing things together and the same with peanut butter or almond butter. Obviously you can get those little individual cheeses but you can just chop up little cubes of cheese yourself. And the same with things like leftover cooked meats, ⁓ also things like those little chicken satay's, you can buy those in the shops already made if you want to. And then tinned tuna or salmon are great because you can just keep them in the cupboard you don't need to do anything with them and and then a spoonful of those are great on a snack. And then also hard-boiled eggs, if your children like hard-boiled eggs you can cook a batch up at the weekend and keep them in the fridge and they're ready to go.
If you've got vegetarians in the house, then air fried chickpeas that you just make up at the weekend and put into a container are fantastic. And also those mini falafel are brilliant.
Milkshake or hot chocolate contains a decent amount of dairy milk or something like a soya milk that has slightly higher protein in or things like Actimel or the drinking yogurts can be great too. Again keep an eye on the sugar but loads of those have got a decent amount of protein and some good bacteria to boot.
So that's the sort of protein-y group.
And then finally your fruit or veg group. I don't need to tell you what fruit and veg looks like. But here are some suggestions of ones you might not have thought of. So obviously, you you've got your favourites like apples, bananas, carrot sticks, celery, cucumber. Pepper strips are great to prep ahead. Sugar snap peas or mange tout are usually pretty popular. Cherry tomatoes, easy peel or satsumas. Things like grapes, sultanas, raisins or apricots.
Don't overlook canned fruit, canned pineapple or peaches, if you can get them in juice rather than in syrup, are brilliant.
Frozen berries are also great and they're usually a lot cheaper. You can also freeze your own grapes or berries and you can eat them from frozen. Obviously keep an eye on choking hazards with younger children but I'll link in the show notes to the episode where we talked about freezing berries.
Bananas are obviously great just as they are but they're also really great frozen. You can dip them in a bit of dark chocolate if you want to, can shove them on a stick or you can blend them into what they call nice cream but basically ice cream. Stick some chocolate chips in it, jobs a good'un
And then for on the go, there's some convenience versions of some of these things. So like pouches of puree or smoothie. Do check the labels on those a lot of them do contain an awful lot of sugar and not as much fruit as you'd hope, but some of them are really great.
And the same goes for jelly, you can get low sugar ones in the shop or you can make your own at home you can make them with fruit juice with either gelatin or agar-agar if you're a vegetarian and they can be great for mixing with fruit to make it more fun.
So there's some suggestions for the fruit and veg group.
So obviously that was a huge list, I'm not suggesting you buy all of those things. But like I say, it's just some ideas to be able to pick out a few each week to assemble yourself or your child to assemble their own, depending on their age and stage. So prep anything that needs to be prepped in advance to be tempting, like carrot sticks or pita slices, and pop them in whatever containers works for you. If you want to have an area of the fridge and a tray on the counter for this week's snacks, you can do if you want to, or could have a little list so that everybody knows what's available to choose from this week.
And as a bonus, this approach actually does build familiarity for children, even with the foods that they don't choose, because they have to consider them each time they don't choose them.
If you really want to, can obviously assemble some of these ingredients beforehand So some examples of that would be mixing some of the dried ingredients together into a trail mix or those cute little hummus snack jars that you see online where you put a bit of hummus in the bottom and then you stick your carrot sticks and pepper slices in on top and then seal the jar up and then people can take them out and dip them in or things like quesadillas or mini muffin pizzas where you're using that starchy base but you're putting a bit of tomato puree in, a little bit of the cheese and one of your vegetables.
So there are some interesting things you can make from some of these ingredients, but honestly, a lot of them can just be people grabbing a handful of each on a plate to make up an easy picky snack.
So I hope you like this pick and mix approach to snack provision. The good thing is it means you only have to think about it once per week and then after that everybody knows what the ingredients are to choose from this week. I'll leave it up to you how you put it into practice whether it's having a pick and mix list for your kids to really get involved with or on busy or tired weeks honestly just using these lists to make your shopping list easier even if you don't do anything special with them. Let me know how you get on and what weird combinations of pick and mix your children come up with I would love to hear. And I'll see you on Monday and in the meantime, happy eating.
Joanne Roach (01:35)
Joanne Roach (00:13)
Hello and welcome to the Food for Kids podcast. I'm Joanne from the Foodies. Today is the first full week of summer holidays for families in England and most of the UK is pretty similar. And as the name, The Six Weeks Holidays suggests, for most families that means somewhere in the region of 40 to 45 days of having the kids at home. There are lots of fun things to do, memories to make, school runs to not miss at all, but there's also quite a lot of work juggling to do, lots of keeping spirits up and activities and boredom and lots and lots and lots of food. So it's nice to not have to think about before school breakfast and packed lunches or dinner money accounts for a bit unless you have a holiday club to go to.
But on the other hand, for many families there is a house full of small people needing to be fed around the clock and the main thing that parents complain about is the constant need for snacks. Not surprising because if you have two kids at home eating two or three snacks a day as well as their meals, this summer you will be providing something in the region of 160 to 250 snacks before they go back to school. You don't obviously want them all to end up being crisps or biscuits and on the other hand you don't want to spend summer with one arm chained to the fridge. So let's come up with some ideas to try and make life a little bit easier, little bit tastier and a little bit healthier with some snack ideas. So let's get into it!
Joanne Roach (01:35)
There are loads of fantastic ideas around online for great healthy snacks for your kids and lots of them are absolutely gorgeous to look at and very insta-worthy but I'm not going to talk through those ideas here you can google those yourself. instead I'm going to advocate for the approach which kept me sane with my own kids and which I've also used in school which is a pick and mix snack approach. It's not rocket science, it's absolutely not my invention, but I do hope it will be helpful.
So I'm not talking about Woolworths pick and mix, unfortunately, but I'm also not talking about the kind of pick and mix that you see in those gorgeous reels with the incredible batch prepping mums usually in America with their huge American fridges, and they make up these beautiful baskets and boxes of little pouches of different items for their kids, and they've got cute labels with the children's names on them and these tiny little packs. I mean, if that's you, all power to you, I bow down to your effort and enthusiasm, and you absolutely don't need this episode, you can skip it, but I did not have the budget or the time, nor the fridge space, or the head space, frankly, for that matter to do things quite like that.
So what I'm talking about is a much more low-key version of that, more budget friendly, less individual packaging too.
In one of my jobs I set up a tuck shop at a primary school and we used this pick and mix approach there. It was a whole project using year fives to serve food and do business skills and I will do an episode on that at some point because it was actually really great fun. But the basic idea was to have three items a day on offer and children could choose from them. We encouraged them to have either two or three items. Broadly speaking there was always one food that was a starchy carbohydrate type food, one that was a good source of protein and one fruit or veg.
So for example, we might have had half slices of bagel, quarter slices of ham and some apple pieces. Or we might have had a quarter wrap, cream cheese and strawberries or one of their favourites was always popcorn, sunflower seeds and raisins.
Now I'm not suggesting obviously that you do that at home every day, God forbid, but just use that basic idea to get into the fridge and cupboard a selection of things each week that are in these three rough groups. It doesn't have to be that children have all three at every snack. Sometimes when children are asking for a snack, especially quite close to a meal time, a piece of fruit on its own is perfectly good enough.
But when you can, a snack that has a bit of balance has a better chance of keeping them satisfied until the next meal. So the idea is to get in three to five items from each of those three groups when you do your food shop, so that during that week, either you or your children can put together some different combinations from the items to make up some balanced snacks. And then the next week, keep some of the favourites and swap out some of the others for different ones for a bit of variety.
So I'll run through some of the ideas that I've used either with my own kids or at the school and I'll put the list in a show note so that you can come over there and jot down some next time you go shopping if you like the idea. Most of them are pretty easy to put together or you can prep some of them in Tupperwares for kids to assemble for themselves.
So here are the suggestions roughly in those three groups.
So in the broadly starchy carbs group you've got obvious things like toast and crackers but also things like bagels, English muffins in halves are quite nice, pitas cut up into little strips, breadsticks are great for nibbling from one end to the other as long as they're not a very salty one, similarly with pretzels, things like rice cakes and oat cakes, wraps which you can have whole wraps or those mini wraps or cut them into quarters. Handfuls of dry cereal are really good if they're a higher fibre, lower sugar sort of cereal popcorn's great, you can either pop your own or you can get the microwave stuff
I recently saw a brilliant blog post from Nutrition for Kids that I'll link to in the show notes where they used ice cream cones to pile things inside of. That was really cool. So that's your sort of broadly starchy components.
And then for your more protein rich group, the obvious ones are things like cheese or ham, there's also things like hummus or other kind of beany spreads. S mall yogurts can be great, obviously keeping an on the sugar levels on the individual yogurts but they can be a great snack. Handfuls of nuts like cashews, almonds are great or seeds like sunflower seeds or pumpkin seeds or a mixture of the two. Cream cheese is great for spreading on stuff but also for gluing things together and the same with peanut butter or almond butter. Obviously you can get those little individual cheeses but you can just chop up little cubes of cheese yourself. And the same with things like leftover cooked meats, ⁓ also things like those little chicken satay's, you can buy those in the shops already made if you want to. And then tinned tuna or salmon are great because you can just keep them in the cupboard you don't need to do anything with them and and then a spoonful of those are great on a snack. And then also hard-boiled eggs, if your children like hard-boiled eggs you can cook a batch up at the weekend and keep them in the fridge and they're ready to go.
If you've got vegetarians in the house, then air fried chickpeas that you just make up at the weekend and put into a container are fantastic. And also those mini falafel are brilliant.
Milkshake or hot chocolate contains a decent amount of dairy milk or something like a soya milk that has slightly higher protein in or things like Actimel or the drinking yogurts can be great too. Again keep an eye on the sugar but loads of those have got a decent amount of protein and some good bacteria to boot.
So that's the sort of protein-y group.
And then finally your fruit or veg group. I don't need to tell you what fruit and veg looks like. But here are some suggestions of ones you might not have thought of. So obviously, you you've got your favourites like apples, bananas, carrot sticks, celery, cucumber. Pepper strips are great to prep ahead. Sugar snap peas or mange tout are usually pretty popular. Cherry tomatoes, easy peel or satsumas. Things like grapes, sultanas, raisins or apricots.
Don't overlook canned fruit, canned pineapple or peaches, if you can get them in juice rather than in syrup, are brilliant.
Frozen berries are also great and they're usually a lot cheaper. You can also freeze your own grapes or berries and you can eat them from frozen. Obviously keep an eye on choking hazards with younger children but I'll link in the show notes to the episode where we talked about freezing berries.
Bananas are obviously great just as they are but they're also really great frozen. You can dip them in a bit of dark chocolate if you want to, can shove them on a stick or you can blend them into what they call nice cream but basically ice cream. Stick some chocolate chips in it, jobs a good'un
And then for on the go, there's some convenience versions of some of these things. So like pouches of puree or smoothie. Do check the labels on those a lot of them do contain an awful lot of sugar and not as much fruit as you'd hope, but some of them are really great.
And the same goes for jelly, you can get low sugar ones in the shop or you can make your own at home you can make them with fruit juice with either gelatin or agar-agar if you're a vegetarian and they can be great for mixing with fruit to make it more fun.
So there's some suggestions for the fruit and veg group.
So obviously that was a huge list, I'm not suggesting you buy all of those things. But like I say, it's just some ideas to be able to pick out a few each week to assemble yourself or your child to assemble their own, depending on their age and stage. So prep anything that needs to be prepped in advance to be tempting, like carrot sticks or pita slices, and pop them in whatever containers works for you. If you want to have an area of the fridge and a tray on the counter for this week's snacks, you can do if you want to, or could have a little list so that everybody knows what's available to choose from this week.
And as a bonus, this approach actually does build familiarity for children, even with the foods that they don't choose, because they have to consider them each time they don't choose them.
If you really want to, can obviously assemble some of these ingredients beforehand So some examples of that would be mixing some of the dried ingredients together into a trail mix or those cute little hummus snack jars that you see online where you put a bit of hummus in the bottom and then you stick your carrot sticks and pepper slices in on top and then seal the jar up and then people can take them out and dip them in or things like quesadillas or mini muffin pizzas where you're using that starchy base but you're putting a bit of tomato puree in, a little bit of the cheese and one of your vegetables.
So there are some interesting things you can make from some of these ingredients, but honestly, a lot of them can just be people grabbing a handful of each on a plate to make up an easy picky snack.
So I hope you like this pick and mix approach to snack provision. The good thing is it means you only have to think about it once per week and then after that everybody knows what the ingredients are to choose from this week. I'll leave it up to you how you put it into practice whether it's having a pick and mix list for your kids to really get involved with or on busy or tired weeks honestly just using these lists to make your shopping list easier even if you don't do anything special with them. Let me know how you get on and what weird combinations of pick and mix your children come up with I would love to hear. And I'll see you on Monday and in the meantime, happy eating.
There are loads of fantastic ideas around online for great healthy snacks for your kids and lots of them are absolutely gorgeous to look at and very insta-worthy but I'm not going to talk through those ideas here you can google those yourself. instead I'm going to advocate for the approach which kept me sane with my own kids and which I've also used in school which is a pick and mix snack approach. It's not rocket science, it's absolutely not my invention, but I do hope it will be helpful.
Joanne Roach (00:13)
Hello and welcome to the Food for Kids podcast. I'm Joanne from the Foodies. Today is the first full week of summer holidays for families in England and most of the UK is pretty similar. And as the name, The Six Weeks Holidays suggests, for most families that means somewhere in the region of 40 to 45 days of having the kids at home. There are lots of fun things to do, memories to make, school runs to not miss at all, but there's also quite a lot of work juggling to do, lots of keeping spirits up and activities and boredom and lots and lots and lots of food. So it's nice to not have to think about before school breakfast and packed lunches or dinner money accounts for a bit unless you have a holiday club to go to.
But on the other hand, for many families there is a house full of small people needing to be fed around the clock and the main thing that parents complain about is the constant need for snacks. Not surprising because if you have two kids at home eating two or three snacks a day as well as their meals, this summer you will be providing something in the region of 160 to 250 snacks before they go back to school. You don't obviously want them all to end up being crisps or biscuits and on the other hand you don't want to spend summer with one arm chained to the fridge. So let's come up with some ideas to try and make life a little bit easier, little bit tastier and a little bit healthier with some snack ideas. So let's get into it!
Joanne Roach (01:35)
There are loads of fantastic ideas around online for great healthy snacks for your kids and lots of them are absolutely gorgeous to look at and very insta-worthy but I'm not going to talk through those ideas here you can google those yourself. instead I'm going to advocate for the approach which kept me sane with my own kids and which I've also used in school which is a pick and mix snack approach. It's not rocket science, it's absolutely not my invention, but I do hope it will be helpful.
So I'm not talking about Woolworths pick and mix, unfortunately, but I'm also not talking about the kind of pick and mix that you see in those gorgeous reels with the incredible batch prepping mums usually in America with their huge American fridges, and they make up these beautiful baskets and boxes of little pouches of different items for their kids, and they've got cute labels with the children's names on them and these tiny little packs. I mean, if that's you, all power to you, I bow down to your effort and enthusiasm, and you absolutely don't need this episode, you can skip it, but I did not have the budget or the time, nor the fridge space, or the head space, frankly, for that matter to do things quite like that.
So what I'm talking about is a much more low-key version of that, more budget friendly, less individual packaging too.
In one of my jobs I set up a tuck shop at a primary school and we used this pick and mix approach there. It was a whole project using year fives to serve food and do business skills and I will do an episode on that at some point because it was actually really great fun. But the basic idea was to have three items a day on offer and children could choose from them. We encouraged them to have either two or three items. Broadly speaking there was always one food that was a starchy carbohydrate type food, one that was a good source of protein and one fruit or veg.
So for example, we might have had half slices of bagel, quarter slices of ham and some apple pieces. Or we might have had a quarter wrap, cream cheese and strawberries or one of their favourites was always popcorn, sunflower seeds and raisins.
Now I'm not suggesting obviously that you do that at home every day, God forbid, but just use that basic idea to get into the fridge and cupboard a selection of things each week that are in these three rough groups. It doesn't have to be that children have all three at every snack. Sometimes when children are asking for a snack, especially quite close to a meal time, a piece of fruit on its own is perfectly good enough.
But when you can, a snack that has a bit of balance has a better chance of keeping them satisfied until the next meal. So the idea is to get in three to five items from each of those three groups when you do your food shop, so that during that week, either you or your children can put together some different combinations from the items to make up some balanced snacks. And then the next week, keep some of the favourites and swap out some of the others for different ones for a bit of variety.
So I'll run through some of the ideas that I've used either with my own kids or at the school and I'll put the list in a show note so that you can come over there and jot down some next time you go shopping if you like the idea. Most of them are pretty easy to put together or you can prep some of them in Tupperwares for kids to assemble for themselves.
So here are the suggestions roughly in those three groups.
So in the broadly starchy carbs group you've got obvious things like toast and crackers but also things like bagels, English muffins in halves are quite nice, pitas cut up into little strips, breadsticks are great for nibbling from one end to the other as long as they're not a very salty one, similarly with pretzels, things like rice cakes and oat cakes, wraps which you can have whole wraps or those mini wraps or cut them into quarters. Handfuls of dry cereal are really good if they're a higher fibre, lower sugar sort of cereal popcorn's great, you can either pop your own or you can get the microwave stuff
I recently saw a brilliant blog post from Nutrition for Kids that I'll link to in the show notes where they used ice cream cones to pile things inside of. That was really cool. So that's your sort of broadly starchy components.
And then for your more protein rich group, the obvious ones are things like cheese or ham, there's also things like hummus or other kind of beany spreads. S mall yogurts can be great, obviously keeping an on the sugar levels on the individual yogurts but they can be a great snack. Handfuls of nuts like cashews, almonds are great or seeds like sunflower seeds or pumpkin seeds or a mixture of the two. Cream cheese is great for spreading on stuff but also for gluing things together and the same with peanut butter or almond butter. Obviously you can get those little individual cheeses but you can just chop up little cubes of cheese yourself. And the same with things like leftover cooked meats, ⁓ also things like those little chicken satay's, you can buy those in the shops already made if you want to. And then tinned tuna or salmon are great because you can just keep them in the cupboard you don't need to do anything with them and and then a spoonful of those are great on a snack. And then also hard-boiled eggs, if your children like hard-boiled eggs you can cook a batch up at the weekend and keep them in the fridge and they're ready to go.
If you've got vegetarians in the house, then air fried chickpeas that you just make up at the weekend and put into a container are fantastic. And also those mini falafel are brilliant.
Milkshake or hot chocolate contains a decent amount of dairy milk or something like a soya milk that has slightly higher protein in or things like Actimel or the drinking yogurts can be great too. Again keep an eye on the sugar but loads of those have got a decent amount of protein and some good bacteria to boot.
So that's the sort of protein-y group.
And then finally your fruit or veg group. I don't need to tell you what fruit and veg looks like. But here are some suggestions of ones you might not have thought of. So obviously, you you've got your favourites like apples, bananas, carrot sticks, celery, cucumber. Pepper strips are great to prep ahead. Sugar snap peas or mange tout are usually pretty popular. Cherry tomatoes, easy peel or satsumas. Things like grapes, sultanas, raisins or apricots.
Don't overlook canned fruit, canned pineapple or peaches, if you can get them in juice rather than in syrup, are brilliant.
Frozen berries are also great and they're usually a lot cheaper. You can also freeze your own grapes or berries and you can eat them from frozen. Obviously keep an eye on choking hazards with younger children but I'll link in the show notes to the episode where we talked about freezing berries.
Bananas are obviously great just as they are but they're also really great frozen. You can dip them in a bit of dark chocolate if you want to, can shove them on a stick or you can blend them into what they call nice cream but basically ice cream. Stick some chocolate chips in it, jobs a good'un
And then for on the go, there's some convenience versions of some of these things. So like pouches of puree or smoothie. Do check the labels on those a lot of them do contain an awful lot of sugar and not as much fruit as you'd hope, but some of them are really great.
And the same goes for jelly, you can get low sugar ones in the shop or you can make your own at home you can make them with fruit juice with either gelatin or agar-agar if you're a vegetarian and they can be great for mixing with fruit to make it more fun.
So there's some suggestions for the fruit and veg group.
So obviously that was a huge list, I'm not suggesting you buy all of those things. But like I say, it's just some ideas to be able to pick out a few each week to assemble yourself or your child to assemble their own, depending on their age and stage. So prep anything that needs to be prepped in advance to be tempting, like carrot sticks or pita slices, and pop them in whatever containers works for you. If you want to have an area of the fridge and a tray on the counter for this week's snacks, you can do if you want to, or could have a little list so that everybody knows what's available to choose from this week.
And as a bonus, this approach actually does build familiarity for children, even with the foods that they don't choose, because they have to consider them each time they don't choose them.
If you really want to, can obviously assemble some of these ingredients beforehand So some examples of that would be mixing some of the dried ingredients together into a trail mix or those cute little hummus snack jars that you see online where you put a bit of hummus in the bottom and then you stick your carrot sticks and pepper slices in on top and then seal the jar up and then people can take them out and dip them in or things like quesadillas or mini muffin pizzas where you're using that starchy base but you're putting a bit of tomato puree in, a little bit of the cheese and one of your vegetables.
So there are some interesting things you can make from some of these ingredients, but honestly, a lot of them can just be people grabbing a handful of each on a plate to make up an easy picky snack.
So I hope you like this pick and mix approach to snack provision. The good thing is it means you only have to think about it once per week and then after that everybody knows what the ingredients are to choose from this week. I'll leave it up to you how you put it into practice whether it's having a pick and mix list for your kids to really get involved with or on busy or tired weeks honestly just using these lists to make your shopping list easier even if you don't do anything special with them. Let me know how you get on and what weird combinations of pick and mix your children come up with I would love to hear. And I'll see you on Monday and in the meantime, happy eating.
So I'm not talking about Woolworths pick and mix, unfortunately, but I'm also not talking about the kind of pick and mix that you see in those gorgeous reels with the incredible batch prepping mums usually in America with their huge American fridges, and they make up these beautiful baskets and boxes of little pouches of different items for their kids, and they've got cute labels with the children's names on them and these tiny little packs. I mean, if that's you, all power to you, I bow down to your effort and enthusiasm, and you absolutely don't need this episode, you can skip it, but I did not have the budget or the time, nor the fridge space, or the head space, frankly, for that matter to do things quite like that.
Joanne Roach (00:13)
Hello and welcome to the Food for Kids podcast. I'm Joanne from the Foodies. Today is the first full week of summer holidays for families in England and most of the UK is pretty similar. And as the name, The Six Weeks Holidays suggests, for most families that means somewhere in the region of 40 to 45 days of having the kids at home. There are lots of fun things to do, memories to make, school runs to not miss at all, but there's also quite a lot of work juggling to do, lots of keeping spirits up and activities and boredom and lots and lots and lots of food. So it's nice to not have to think about before school breakfast and packed lunches or dinner money accounts for a bit unless you have a holiday club to go to.
But on the other hand, for many families there is a house full of small people needing to be fed around the clock and the main thing that parents complain about is the constant need for snacks. Not surprising because if you have two kids at home eating two or three snacks a day as well as their meals, this summer you will be providing something in the region of 160 to 250 snacks before they go back to school. You don't obviously want them all to end up being crisps or biscuits and on the other hand you don't want to spend summer with one arm chained to the fridge. So let's come up with some ideas to try and make life a little bit easier, little bit tastier and a little bit healthier with some snack ideas. So let's get into it!
Joanne Roach (01:35)
There are loads of fantastic ideas around online for great healthy snacks for your kids and lots of them are absolutely gorgeous to look at and very insta-worthy but I'm not going to talk through those ideas here you can google those yourself. instead I'm going to advocate for the approach which kept me sane with my own kids and which I've also used in school which is a pick and mix snack approach. It's not rocket science, it's absolutely not my invention, but I do hope it will be helpful.
So I'm not talking about Woolworths pick and mix, unfortunately, but I'm also not talking about the kind of pick and mix that you see in those gorgeous reels with the incredible batch prepping mums usually in America with their huge American fridges, and they make up these beautiful baskets and boxes of little pouches of different items for their kids, and they've got cute labels with the children's names on them and these tiny little packs. I mean, if that's you, all power to you, I bow down to your effort and enthusiasm, and you absolutely don't need this episode, you can skip it, but I did not have the budget or the time, nor the fridge space, or the head space, frankly, for that matter to do things quite like that.
So what I'm talking about is a much more low-key version of that, more budget friendly, less individual packaging too.
In one of my jobs I set up a tuck shop at a primary school and we used this pick and mix approach there. It was a whole project using year fives to serve food and do business skills and I will do an episode on that at some point because it was actually really great fun. But the basic idea was to have three items a day on offer and children could choose from them. We encouraged them to have either two or three items. Broadly speaking there was always one food that was a starchy carbohydrate type food, one that was a good source of protein and one fruit or veg.
So for example, we might have had half slices of bagel, quarter slices of ham and some apple pieces. Or we might have had a quarter wrap, cream cheese and strawberries or one of their favourites was always popcorn, sunflower seeds and raisins.
Now I'm not suggesting obviously that you do that at home every day, God forbid, but just use that basic idea to get into the fridge and cupboard a selection of things each week that are in these three rough groups. It doesn't have to be that children have all three at every snack. Sometimes when children are asking for a snack, especially quite close to a meal time, a piece of fruit on its own is perfectly good enough.
But when you can, a snack that has a bit of balance has a better chance of keeping them satisfied until the next meal. So the idea is to get in three to five items from each of those three groups when you do your food shop, so that during that week, either you or your children can put together some different combinations from the items to make up some balanced snacks. And then the next week, keep some of the favourites and swap out some of the others for different ones for a bit of variety.
So I'll run through some of the ideas that I've used either with my own kids or at the school and I'll put the list in a show note so that you can come over there and jot down some next time you go shopping if you like the idea. Most of them are pretty easy to put together or you can prep some of them in Tupperwares for kids to assemble for themselves.
So here are the suggestions roughly in those three groups.
So in the broadly starchy carbs group you've got obvious things like toast and crackers but also things like bagels, English muffins in halves are quite nice, pitas cut up into little strips, breadsticks are great for nibbling from one end to the other as long as they're not a very salty one, similarly with pretzels, things like rice cakes and oat cakes, wraps which you can have whole wraps or those mini wraps or cut them into quarters. Handfuls of dry cereal are really good if they're a higher fibre, lower sugar sort of cereal popcorn's great, you can either pop your own or you can get the microwave stuff
I recently saw a brilliant blog post from Nutrition for Kids that I'll link to in the show notes where they used ice cream cones to pile things inside of. That was really cool. So that's your sort of broadly starchy components.
And then for your more protein rich group, the obvious ones are things like cheese or ham, there's also things like hummus or other kind of beany spreads. S mall yogurts can be great, obviously keeping an on the sugar levels on the individual yogurts but they can be a great snack. Handfuls of nuts like cashews, almonds are great or seeds like sunflower seeds or pumpkin seeds or a mixture of the two. Cream cheese is great for spreading on stuff but also for gluing things together and the same with peanut butter or almond butter. Obviously you can get those little individual cheeses but you can just chop up little cubes of cheese yourself. And the same with things like leftover cooked meats, ⁓ also things like those little chicken satay's, you can buy those in the shops already made if you want to. And then tinned tuna or salmon are great because you can just keep them in the cupboard you don't need to do anything with them and and then a spoonful of those are great on a snack. And then also hard-boiled eggs, if your children like hard-boiled eggs you can cook a batch up at the weekend and keep them in the fridge and they're ready to go.
If you've got vegetarians in the house, then air fried chickpeas that you just make up at the weekend and put into a container are fantastic. And also those mini falafel are brilliant.
Milkshake or hot chocolate contains a decent amount of dairy milk or something like a soya milk that has slightly higher protein in or things like Actimel or the drinking yogurts can be great too. Again keep an eye on the sugar but loads of those have got a decent amount of protein and some good bacteria to boot.
So that's the sort of protein-y group.
And then finally your fruit or veg group. I don't need to tell you what fruit and veg looks like. But here are some suggestions of ones you might not have thought of. So obviously, you you've got your favourites like apples, bananas, carrot sticks, celery, cucumber. Pepper strips are great to prep ahead. Sugar snap peas or mange tout are usually pretty popular. Cherry tomatoes, easy peel or satsumas. Things like grapes, sultanas, raisins or apricots.
Don't overlook canned fruit, canned pineapple or peaches, if you can get them in juice rather than in syrup, are brilliant.
Frozen berries are also great and they're usually a lot cheaper. You can also freeze your own grapes or berries and you can eat them from frozen. Obviously keep an eye on choking hazards with younger children but I'll link in the show notes to the episode where we talked about freezing berries.
Bananas are obviously great just as they are but they're also really great frozen. You can dip them in a bit of dark chocolate if you want to, can shove them on a stick or you can blend them into what they call nice cream but basically ice cream. Stick some chocolate chips in it, jobs a good'un
And then for on the go, there's some convenience versions of some of these things. So like pouches of puree or smoothie. Do check the labels on those a lot of them do contain an awful lot of sugar and not as much fruit as you'd hope, but some of them are really great.
And the same goes for jelly, you can get low sugar ones in the shop or you can make your own at home you can make them with fruit juice with either gelatin or agar-agar if you're a vegetarian and they can be great for mixing with fruit to make it more fun.
So there's some suggestions for the fruit and veg group.
So obviously that was a huge list, I'm not suggesting you buy all of those things. But like I say, it's just some ideas to be able to pick out a few each week to assemble yourself or your child to assemble their own, depending on their age and stage. So prep anything that needs to be prepped in advance to be tempting, like carrot sticks or pita slices, and pop them in whatever containers works for you. If you want to have an area of the fridge and a tray on the counter for this week's snacks, you can do if you want to, or could have a little list so that everybody knows what's available to choose from this week.
And as a bonus, this approach actually does build familiarity for children, even with the foods that they don't choose, because they have to consider them each time they don't choose them.
If you really want to, can obviously assemble some of these ingredients beforehand So some examples of that would be mixing some of the dried ingredients together into a trail mix or those cute little hummus snack jars that you see online where you put a bit of hummus in the bottom and then you stick your carrot sticks and pepper slices in on top and then seal the jar up and then people can take them out and dip them in or things like quesadillas or mini muffin pizzas where you're using that starchy base but you're putting a bit of tomato puree in, a little bit of the cheese and one of your vegetables.
So there are some interesting things you can make from some of these ingredients, but honestly, a lot of them can just be people grabbing a handful of each on a plate to make up an easy picky snack.
So I hope you like this pick and mix approach to snack provision. The good thing is it means you only have to think about it once per week and then after that everybody knows what the ingredients are to choose from this week. I'll leave it up to you how you put it into practice whether it's having a pick and mix list for your kids to really get involved with or on busy or tired weeks honestly just using these lists to make your shopping list easier even if you don't do anything special with them. Let me know how you get on and what weird combinations of pick and mix your children come up with I would love to hear. And I'll see you on Monday and in the meantime, happy eating.
So what I'm talking about is a much more low-key version of that, more budget friendly, less individual packaging too.
Joanne Roach (00:13)
Hello and welcome to the Food for Kids podcast. I'm Joanne from the Foodies. Today is the first full week of summer holidays for families in England and most of the UK is pretty similar. And as the name, The Six Weeks Holidays suggests, for most families that means somewhere in the region of 40 to 45 days of having the kids at home. There are lots of fun things to do, memories to make, school runs to not miss at all, but there's also quite a lot of work juggling to do, lots of keeping spirits up and activities and boredom and lots and lots and lots of food. So it's nice to not have to think about before school breakfast and packed lunches or dinner money accounts for a bit unless you have a holiday club to go to.
But on the other hand, for many families there is a house full of small people needing to be fed around the clock and the main thing that parents complain about is the constant need for snacks. Not surprising because if you have two kids at home eating two or three snacks a day as well as their meals, this summer you will be providing something in the region of 160 to 250 snacks before they go back to school. You don't obviously want them all to end up being crisps or biscuits and on the other hand you don't want to spend summer with one arm chained to the fridge. So let's come up with some ideas to try and make life a little bit easier, little bit tastier and a little bit healthier with some snack ideas. So let's get into it!
Joanne Roach (01:35)
There are loads of fantastic ideas around online for great healthy snacks for your kids and lots of them are absolutely gorgeous to look at and very insta-worthy but I'm not going to talk through those ideas here you can google those yourself. instead I'm going to advocate for the approach which kept me sane with my own kids and which I've also used in school which is a pick and mix snack approach. It's not rocket science, it's absolutely not my invention, but I do hope it will be helpful.
So I'm not talking about Woolworths pick and mix, unfortunately, but I'm also not talking about the kind of pick and mix that you see in those gorgeous reels with the incredible batch prepping mums usually in America with their huge American fridges, and they make up these beautiful baskets and boxes of little pouches of different items for their kids, and they've got cute labels with the children's names on them and these tiny little packs. I mean, if that's you, all power to you, I bow down to your effort and enthusiasm, and you absolutely don't need this episode, you can skip it, but I did not have the budget or the time, nor the fridge space, or the head space, frankly, for that matter to do things quite like that.
So what I'm talking about is a much more low-key version of that, more budget friendly, less individual packaging too.
In one of my jobs I set up a tuck shop at a primary school and we used this pick and mix approach there. It was a whole project using year fives to serve food and do business skills and I will do an episode on that at some point because it was actually really great fun. But the basic idea was to have three items a day on offer and children could choose from them. We encouraged them to have either two or three items. Broadly speaking there was always one food that was a starchy carbohydrate type food, one that was a good source of protein and one fruit or veg.
So for example, we might have had half slices of bagel, quarter slices of ham and some apple pieces. Or we might have had a quarter wrap, cream cheese and strawberries or one of their favourites was always popcorn, sunflower seeds and raisins.
Now I'm not suggesting obviously that you do that at home every day, God forbid, but just use that basic idea to get into the fridge and cupboard a selection of things each week that are in these three rough groups. It doesn't have to be that children have all three at every snack. Sometimes when children are asking for a snack, especially quite close to a meal time, a piece of fruit on its own is perfectly good enough.
But when you can, a snack that has a bit of balance has a better chance of keeping them satisfied until the next meal. So the idea is to get in three to five items from each of those three groups when you do your food shop, so that during that week, either you or your children can put together some different combinations from the items to make up some balanced snacks. And then the next week, keep some of the favourites and swap out some of the others for different ones for a bit of variety.
So I'll run through some of the ideas that I've used either with my own kids or at the school and I'll put the list in a show note so that you can come over there and jot down some next time you go shopping if you like the idea. Most of them are pretty easy to put together or you can prep some of them in Tupperwares for kids to assemble for themselves.
So here are the suggestions roughly in those three groups.
So in the broadly starchy carbs group you've got obvious things like toast and crackers but also things like bagels, English muffins in halves are quite nice, pitas cut up into little strips, breadsticks are great for nibbling from one end to the other as long as they're not a very salty one, similarly with pretzels, things like rice cakes and oat cakes, wraps which you can have whole wraps or those mini wraps or cut them into quarters. Handfuls of dry cereal are really good if they're a higher fibre, lower sugar sort of cereal popcorn's great, you can either pop your own or you can get the microwave stuff
I recently saw a brilliant blog post from Nutrition for Kids that I'll link to in the show notes where they used ice cream cones to pile things inside of. That was really cool. So that's your sort of broadly starchy components.
And then for your more protein rich group, the obvious ones are things like cheese or ham, there's also things like hummus or other kind of beany spreads. S mall yogurts can be great, obviously keeping an on the sugar levels on the individual yogurts but they can be a great snack. Handfuls of nuts like cashews, almonds are great or seeds like sunflower seeds or pumpkin seeds or a mixture of the two. Cream cheese is great for spreading on stuff but also for gluing things together and the same with peanut butter or almond butter. Obviously you can get those little individual cheeses but you can just chop up little cubes of cheese yourself. And the same with things like leftover cooked meats, ⁓ also things like those little chicken satay's, you can buy those in the shops already made if you want to. And then tinned tuna or salmon are great because you can just keep them in the cupboard you don't need to do anything with them and and then a spoonful of those are great on a snack. And then also hard-boiled eggs, if your children like hard-boiled eggs you can cook a batch up at the weekend and keep them in the fridge and they're ready to go.
If you've got vegetarians in the house, then air fried chickpeas that you just make up at the weekend and put into a container are fantastic. And also those mini falafel are brilliant.
Milkshake or hot chocolate contains a decent amount of dairy milk or something like a soya milk that has slightly higher protein in or things like Actimel or the drinking yogurts can be great too. Again keep an eye on the sugar but loads of those have got a decent amount of protein and some good bacteria to boot.
So that's the sort of protein-y group.
And then finally your fruit or veg group. I don't need to tell you what fruit and veg looks like. But here are some suggestions of ones you might not have thought of. So obviously, you you've got your favourites like apples, bananas, carrot sticks, celery, cucumber. Pepper strips are great to prep ahead. Sugar snap peas or mange tout are usually pretty popular. Cherry tomatoes, easy peel or satsumas. Things like grapes, sultanas, raisins or apricots.
Don't overlook canned fruit, canned pineapple or peaches, if you can get them in juice rather than in syrup, are brilliant.
Frozen berries are also great and they're usually a lot cheaper. You can also freeze your own grapes or berries and you can eat them from frozen. Obviously keep an eye on choking hazards with younger children but I'll link in the show notes to the episode where we talked about freezing berries.
Bananas are obviously great just as they are but they're also really great frozen. You can dip them in a bit of dark chocolate if you want to, can shove them on a stick or you can blend them into what they call nice cream but basically ice cream. Stick some chocolate chips in it, jobs a good'un
And then for on the go, there's some convenience versions of some of these things. So like pouches of puree or smoothie. Do check the labels on those a lot of them do contain an awful lot of sugar and not as much fruit as you'd hope, but some of them are really great.
And the same goes for jelly, you can get low sugar ones in the shop or you can make your own at home you can make them with fruit juice with either gelatin or agar-agar if you're a vegetarian and they can be great for mixing with fruit to make it more fun.
So there's some suggestions for the fruit and veg group.
So obviously that was a huge list, I'm not suggesting you buy all of those things. But like I say, it's just some ideas to be able to pick out a few each week to assemble yourself or your child to assemble their own, depending on their age and stage. So prep anything that needs to be prepped in advance to be tempting, like carrot sticks or pita slices, and pop them in whatever containers works for you. If you want to have an area of the fridge and a tray on the counter for this week's snacks, you can do if you want to, or could have a little list so that everybody knows what's available to choose from this week.
And as a bonus, this approach actually does build familiarity for children, even with the foods that they don't choose, because they have to consider them each time they don't choose them.
If you really want to, can obviously assemble some of these ingredients beforehand So some examples of that would be mixing some of the dried ingredients together into a trail mix or those cute little hummus snack jars that you see online where you put a bit of hummus in the bottom and then you stick your carrot sticks and pepper slices in on top and then seal the jar up and then people can take them out and dip them in or things like quesadillas or mini muffin pizzas where you're using that starchy base but you're putting a bit of tomato puree in, a little bit of the cheese and one of your vegetables.
So there are some interesting things you can make from some of these ingredients, but honestly, a lot of them can just be people grabbing a handful of each on a plate to make up an easy picky snack.
So I hope you like this pick and mix approach to snack provision. The good thing is it means you only have to think about it once per week and then after that everybody knows what the ingredients are to choose from this week. I'll leave it up to you how you put it into practice whether it's having a pick and mix list for your kids to really get involved with or on busy or tired weeks honestly just using these lists to make your shopping list easier even if you don't do anything special with them. Let me know how you get on and what weird combinations of pick and mix your children come up with I would love to hear. And I'll see you on Monday and in the meantime, happy eating.
In one of my jobs I set up a tuck shop at a primary school and we used this pick and mix approach there. It was a whole project using year fives to serve food and do business skills and I will do an episode on that at some point because it was actually really great fun. But the basic idea was to have three items a day on offer and children could choose from them. We encouraged them to have either two or three items. Broadly speaking there was always one food that was a starchy carbohydrate type food, one that was a good source of protein and one fruit or veg.
Joanne Roach (00:13)
Hello and welcome to the Food for Kids podcast. I'm Joanne from the Foodies. Today is the first full week of summer holidays for families in England and most of the UK is pretty similar. And as the name, The Six Weeks Holidays suggests, for most families that means somewhere in the region of 40 to 45 days of having the kids at home. There are lots of fun things to do, memories to make, school runs to not miss at all, but there's also quite a lot of work juggling to do, lots of keeping spirits up and activities and boredom and lots and lots and lots of food. So it's nice to not have to think about before school breakfast and packed lunches or dinner money accounts for a bit unless you have a holiday club to go to.
But on the other hand, for many families there is a house full of small people needing to be fed around the clock and the main thing that parents complain about is the constant need for snacks. Not surprising because if you have two kids at home eating two or three snacks a day as well as their meals, this summer you will be providing something in the region of 160 to 250 snacks before they go back to school. You don't obviously want them all to end up being crisps or biscuits and on the other hand you don't want to spend summer with one arm chained to the fridge. So let's come up with some ideas to try and make life a little bit easier, little bit tastier and a little bit healthier with some snack ideas. So let's get into it!
Joanne Roach (01:35)
There are loads of fantastic ideas around online for great healthy snacks for your kids and lots of them are absolutely gorgeous to look at and very insta-worthy but I'm not going to talk through those ideas here you can google those yourself. instead I'm going to advocate for the approach which kept me sane with my own kids and which I've also used in school which is a pick and mix snack approach. It's not rocket science, it's absolutely not my invention, but I do hope it will be helpful.
So I'm not talking about Woolworths pick and mix, unfortunately, but I'm also not talking about the kind of pick and mix that you see in those gorgeous reels with the incredible batch prepping mums usually in America with their huge American fridges, and they make up these beautiful baskets and boxes of little pouches of different items for their kids, and they've got cute labels with the children's names on them and these tiny little packs. I mean, if that's you, all power to you, I bow down to your effort and enthusiasm, and you absolutely don't need this episode, you can skip it, but I did not have the budget or the time, nor the fridge space, or the head space, frankly, for that matter to do things quite like that.
So what I'm talking about is a much more low-key version of that, more budget friendly, less individual packaging too.
In one of my jobs I set up a tuck shop at a primary school and we used this pick and mix approach there. It was a whole project using year fives to serve food and do business skills and I will do an episode on that at some point because it was actually really great fun. But the basic idea was to have three items a day on offer and children could choose from them. We encouraged them to have either two or three items. Broadly speaking there was always one food that was a starchy carbohydrate type food, one that was a good source of protein and one fruit or veg.
So for example, we might have had half slices of bagel, quarter slices of ham and some apple pieces. Or we might have had a quarter wrap, cream cheese and strawberries or one of their favourites was always popcorn, sunflower seeds and raisins.
Now I'm not suggesting obviously that you do that at home every day, God forbid, but just use that basic idea to get into the fridge and cupboard a selection of things each week that are in these three rough groups. It doesn't have to be that children have all three at every snack. Sometimes when children are asking for a snack, especially quite close to a meal time, a piece of fruit on its own is perfectly good enough.
But when you can, a snack that has a bit of balance has a better chance of keeping them satisfied until the next meal. So the idea is to get in three to five items from each of those three groups when you do your food shop, so that during that week, either you or your children can put together some different combinations from the items to make up some balanced snacks. And then the next week, keep some of the favourites and swap out some of the others for different ones for a bit of variety.
So I'll run through some of the ideas that I've used either with my own kids or at the school and I'll put the list in a show note so that you can come over there and jot down some next time you go shopping if you like the idea. Most of them are pretty easy to put together or you can prep some of them in Tupperwares for kids to assemble for themselves.
So here are the suggestions roughly in those three groups.
So in the broadly starchy carbs group you've got obvious things like toast and crackers but also things like bagels, English muffins in halves are quite nice, pitas cut up into little strips, breadsticks are great for nibbling from one end to the other as long as they're not a very salty one, similarly with pretzels, things like rice cakes and oat cakes, wraps which you can have whole wraps or those mini wraps or cut them into quarters. Handfuls of dry cereal are really good if they're a higher fibre, lower sugar sort of cereal popcorn's great, you can either pop your own or you can get the microwave stuff
I recently saw a brilliant blog post from Nutrition for Kids that I'll link to in the show notes where they used ice cream cones to pile things inside of. That was really cool. So that's your sort of broadly starchy components.
And then for your more protein rich group, the obvious ones are things like cheese or ham, there's also things like hummus or other kind of beany spreads. S mall yogurts can be great, obviously keeping an on the sugar levels on the individual yogurts but they can be a great snack. Handfuls of nuts like cashews, almonds are great or seeds like sunflower seeds or pumpkin seeds or a mixture of the two. Cream cheese is great for spreading on stuff but also for gluing things together and the same with peanut butter or almond butter. Obviously you can get those little individual cheeses but you can just chop up little cubes of cheese yourself. And the same with things like leftover cooked meats, ⁓ also things like those little chicken satay's, you can buy those in the shops already made if you want to. And then tinned tuna or salmon are great because you can just keep them in the cupboard you don't need to do anything with them and and then a spoonful of those are great on a snack. And then also hard-boiled eggs, if your children like hard-boiled eggs you can cook a batch up at the weekend and keep them in the fridge and they're ready to go.
If you've got vegetarians in the house, then air fried chickpeas that you just make up at the weekend and put into a container are fantastic. And also those mini falafel are brilliant.
Milkshake or hot chocolate contains a decent amount of dairy milk or something like a soya milk that has slightly higher protein in or things like Actimel or the drinking yogurts can be great too. Again keep an eye on the sugar but loads of those have got a decent amount of protein and some good bacteria to boot.
So that's the sort of protein-y group.
And then finally your fruit or veg group. I don't need to tell you what fruit and veg looks like. But here are some suggestions of ones you might not have thought of. So obviously, you you've got your favourites like apples, bananas, carrot sticks, celery, cucumber. Pepper strips are great to prep ahead. Sugar snap peas or mange tout are usually pretty popular. Cherry tomatoes, easy peel or satsumas. Things like grapes, sultanas, raisins or apricots.
Don't overlook canned fruit, canned pineapple or peaches, if you can get them in juice rather than in syrup, are brilliant.
Frozen berries are also great and they're usually a lot cheaper. You can also freeze your own grapes or berries and you can eat them from frozen. Obviously keep an eye on choking hazards with younger children but I'll link in the show notes to the episode where we talked about freezing berries.
Bananas are obviously great just as they are but they're also really great frozen. You can dip them in a bit of dark chocolate if you want to, can shove them on a stick or you can blend them into what they call nice cream but basically ice cream. Stick some chocolate chips in it, jobs a good'un
And then for on the go, there's some convenience versions of some of these things. So like pouches of puree or smoothie. Do check the labels on those a lot of them do contain an awful lot of sugar and not as much fruit as you'd hope, but some of them are really great.
And the same goes for jelly, you can get low sugar ones in the shop or you can make your own at home you can make them with fruit juice with either gelatin or agar-agar if you're a vegetarian and they can be great for mixing with fruit to make it more fun.
So there's some suggestions for the fruit and veg group.
So obviously that was a huge list, I'm not suggesting you buy all of those things. But like I say, it's just some ideas to be able to pick out a few each week to assemble yourself or your child to assemble their own, depending on their age and stage. So prep anything that needs to be prepped in advance to be tempting, like carrot sticks or pita slices, and pop them in whatever containers works for you. If you want to have an area of the fridge and a tray on the counter for this week's snacks, you can do if you want to, or could have a little list so that everybody knows what's available to choose from this week.
And as a bonus, this approach actually does build familiarity for children, even with the foods that they don't choose, because they have to consider them each time they don't choose them.
If you really want to, can obviously assemble some of these ingredients beforehand So some examples of that would be mixing some of the dried ingredients together into a trail mix or those cute little hummus snack jars that you see online where you put a bit of hummus in the bottom and then you stick your carrot sticks and pepper slices in on top and then seal the jar up and then people can take them out and dip them in or things like quesadillas or mini muffin pizzas where you're using that starchy base but you're putting a bit of tomato puree in, a little bit of the cheese and one of your vegetables.
So there are some interesting things you can make from some of these ingredients, but honestly, a lot of them can just be people grabbing a handful of each on a plate to make up an easy picky snack.
So I hope you like this pick and mix approach to snack provision. The good thing is it means you only have to think about it once per week and then after that everybody knows what the ingredients are to choose from this week. I'll leave it up to you how you put it into practice whether it's having a pick and mix list for your kids to really get involved with or on busy or tired weeks honestly just using these lists to make your shopping list easier even if you don't do anything special with them. Let me know how you get on and what weird combinations of pick and mix your children come up with I would love to hear. And I'll see you on Monday and in the meantime, happy eating.
So for example, we might have had half slices of bagel, quarter slices of ham and some apple pieces. Or we might have had a quarter wrap, cream cheese and strawberries or one of their favourites was always popcorn, sunflower seeds and raisins.
Joanne Roach (00:13)
Hello and welcome to the Food for Kids podcast. I'm Joanne from the Foodies. Today is the first full week of summer holidays for families in England and most of the UK is pretty similar. And as the name, The Six Weeks Holidays suggests, for most families that means somewhere in the region of 40 to 45 days of having the kids at home. There are lots of fun things to do, memories to make, school runs to not miss at all, but there's also quite a lot of work juggling to do, lots of keeping spirits up and activities and boredom and lots and lots and lots of food. So it's nice to not have to think about before school breakfast and packed lunches or dinner money accounts for a bit unless you have a holiday club to go to.
But on the other hand, for many families there is a house full of small people needing to be fed around the clock and the main thing that parents complain about is the constant need for snacks. Not surprising because if you have two kids at home eating two or three snacks a day as well as their meals, this summer you will be providing something in the region of 160 to 250 snacks before they go back to school. You don't obviously want them all to end up being crisps or biscuits and on the other hand you don't want to spend summer with one arm chained to the fridge. So let's come up with some ideas to try and make life a little bit easier, little bit tastier and a little bit healthier with some snack ideas. So let's get into it!
Joanne Roach (01:35)
There are loads of fantastic ideas around online for great healthy snacks for your kids and lots of them are absolutely gorgeous to look at and very insta-worthy but I'm not going to talk through those ideas here you can google those yourself. instead I'm going to advocate for the approach which kept me sane with my own kids and which I've also used in school which is a pick and mix snack approach. It's not rocket science, it's absolutely not my invention, but I do hope it will be helpful.
So I'm not talking about Woolworths pick and mix, unfortunately, but I'm also not talking about the kind of pick and mix that you see in those gorgeous reels with the incredible batch prepping mums usually in America with their huge American fridges, and they make up these beautiful baskets and boxes of little pouches of different items for their kids, and they've got cute labels with the children's names on them and these tiny little packs. I mean, if that's you, all power to you, I bow down to your effort and enthusiasm, and you absolutely don't need this episode, you can skip it, but I did not have the budget or the time, nor the fridge space, or the head space, frankly, for that matter to do things quite like that.
So what I'm talking about is a much more low-key version of that, more budget friendly, less individual packaging too.
In one of my jobs I set up a tuck shop at a primary school and we used this pick and mix approach there. It was a whole project using year fives to serve food and do business skills and I will do an episode on that at some point because it was actually really great fun. But the basic idea was to have three items a day on offer and children could choose from them. We encouraged them to have either two or three items. Broadly speaking there was always one food that was a starchy carbohydrate type food, one that was a good source of protein and one fruit or veg.
So for example, we might have had half slices of bagel, quarter slices of ham and some apple pieces. Or we might have had a quarter wrap, cream cheese and strawberries or one of their favourites was always popcorn, sunflower seeds and raisins.
Now I'm not suggesting obviously that you do that at home every day, God forbid, but just use that basic idea to get into the fridge and cupboard a selection of things each week that are in these three rough groups. It doesn't have to be that children have all three at every snack. Sometimes when children are asking for a snack, especially quite close to a meal time, a piece of fruit on its own is perfectly good enough.
But when you can, a snack that has a bit of balance has a better chance of keeping them satisfied until the next meal. So the idea is to get in three to five items from each of those three groups when you do your food shop, so that during that week, either you or your children can put together some different combinations from the items to make up some balanced snacks. And then the next week, keep some of the favourites and swap out some of the others for different ones for a bit of variety.
So I'll run through some of the ideas that I've used either with my own kids or at the school and I'll put the list in a show note so that you can come over there and jot down some next time you go shopping if you like the idea. Most of them are pretty easy to put together or you can prep some of them in Tupperwares for kids to assemble for themselves.
So here are the suggestions roughly in those three groups.
So in the broadly starchy carbs group you've got obvious things like toast and crackers but also things like bagels, English muffins in halves are quite nice, pitas cut up into little strips, breadsticks are great for nibbling from one end to the other as long as they're not a very salty one, similarly with pretzels, things like rice cakes and oat cakes, wraps which you can have whole wraps or those mini wraps or cut them into quarters. Handfuls of dry cereal are really good if they're a higher fibre, lower sugar sort of cereal popcorn's great, you can either pop your own or you can get the microwave stuff
I recently saw a brilliant blog post from Nutrition for Kids that I'll link to in the show notes where they used ice cream cones to pile things inside of. That was really cool. So that's your sort of broadly starchy components.
And then for your more protein rich group, the obvious ones are things like cheese or ham, there's also things like hummus or other kind of beany spreads. S mall yogurts can be great, obviously keeping an on the sugar levels on the individual yogurts but they can be a great snack. Handfuls of nuts like cashews, almonds are great or seeds like sunflower seeds or pumpkin seeds or a mixture of the two. Cream cheese is great for spreading on stuff but also for gluing things together and the same with peanut butter or almond butter. Obviously you can get those little individual cheeses but you can just chop up little cubes of cheese yourself. And the same with things like leftover cooked meats, ⁓ also things like those little chicken satay's, you can buy those in the shops already made if you want to. And then tinned tuna or salmon are great because you can just keep them in the cupboard you don't need to do anything with them and and then a spoonful of those are great on a snack. And then also hard-boiled eggs, if your children like hard-boiled eggs you can cook a batch up at the weekend and keep them in the fridge and they're ready to go.
If you've got vegetarians in the house, then air fried chickpeas that you just make up at the weekend and put into a container are fantastic. And also those mini falafel are brilliant.
Milkshake or hot chocolate contains a decent amount of dairy milk or something like a soya milk that has slightly higher protein in or things like Actimel or the drinking yogurts can be great too. Again keep an eye on the sugar but loads of those have got a decent amount of protein and some good bacteria to boot.
So that's the sort of protein-y group.
And then finally your fruit or veg group. I don't need to tell you what fruit and veg looks like. But here are some suggestions of ones you might not have thought of. So obviously, you you've got your favourites like apples, bananas, carrot sticks, celery, cucumber. Pepper strips are great to prep ahead. Sugar snap peas or mange tout are usually pretty popular. Cherry tomatoes, easy peel or satsumas. Things like grapes, sultanas, raisins or apricots.
Don't overlook canned fruit, canned pineapple or peaches, if you can get them in juice rather than in syrup, are brilliant.
Frozen berries are also great and they're usually a lot cheaper. You can also freeze your own grapes or berries and you can eat them from frozen. Obviously keep an eye on choking hazards with younger children but I'll link in the show notes to the episode where we talked about freezing berries.
Bananas are obviously great just as they are but they're also really great frozen. You can dip them in a bit of dark chocolate if you want to, can shove them on a stick or you can blend them into what they call nice cream but basically ice cream. Stick some chocolate chips in it, jobs a good'un
And then for on the go, there's some convenience versions of some of these things. So like pouches of puree or smoothie. Do check the labels on those a lot of them do contain an awful lot of sugar and not as much fruit as you'd hope, but some of them are really great.
And the same goes for jelly, you can get low sugar ones in the shop or you can make your own at home you can make them with fruit juice with either gelatin or agar-agar if you're a vegetarian and they can be great for mixing with fruit to make it more fun.
So there's some suggestions for the fruit and veg group.
So obviously that was a huge list, I'm not suggesting you buy all of those things. But like I say, it's just some ideas to be able to pick out a few each week to assemble yourself or your child to assemble their own, depending on their age and stage. So prep anything that needs to be prepped in advance to be tempting, like carrot sticks or pita slices, and pop them in whatever containers works for you. If you want to have an area of the fridge and a tray on the counter for this week's snacks, you can do if you want to, or could have a little list so that everybody knows what's available to choose from this week.
And as a bonus, this approach actually does build familiarity for children, even with the foods that they don't choose, because they have to consider them each time they don't choose them.
If you really want to, can obviously assemble some of these ingredients beforehand So some examples of that would be mixing some of the dried ingredients together into a trail mix or those cute little hummus snack jars that you see online where you put a bit of hummus in the bottom and then you stick your carrot sticks and pepper slices in on top and then seal the jar up and then people can take them out and dip them in or things like quesadillas or mini muffin pizzas where you're using that starchy base but you're putting a bit of tomato puree in, a little bit of the cheese and one of your vegetables.
So there are some interesting things you can make from some of these ingredients, but honestly, a lot of them can just be people grabbing a handful of each on a plate to make up an easy picky snack.
So I hope you like this pick and mix approach to snack provision. The good thing is it means you only have to think about it once per week and then after that everybody knows what the ingredients are to choose from this week. I'll leave it up to you how you put it into practice whether it's having a pick and mix list for your kids to really get involved with or on busy or tired weeks honestly just using these lists to make your shopping list easier even if you don't do anything special with them. Let me know how you get on and what weird combinations of pick and mix your children come up with I would love to hear. And I'll see you on Monday and in the meantime, happy eating.
Now I'm not suggesting obviously that you do that at home every day, God forbid, but just use that basic idea to get into the fridge and cupboard a selection of things each week that are in these three rough groups. It doesn't have to be that children have all three at every snack. Sometimes when children are asking for a snack, especially quite close to a meal time, a piece of fruit on its own is perfectly good enough.
Joanne Roach (00:13)
Hello and welcome to the Food for Kids podcast. I'm Joanne from the Foodies. Today is the first full week of summer holidays for families in England and most of the UK is pretty similar. And as the name, The Six Weeks Holidays suggests, for most families that means somewhere in the region of 40 to 45 days of having the kids at home. There are lots of fun things to do, memories to make, school runs to not miss at all, but there's also quite a lot of work juggling to do, lots of keeping spirits up and activities and boredom and lots and lots and lots of food. So it's nice to not have to think about before school breakfast and packed lunches or dinner money accounts for a bit unless you have a holiday club to go to.
But on the other hand, for many families there is a house full of small people needing to be fed around the clock and the main thing that parents complain about is the constant need for snacks. Not surprising because if you have two kids at home eating two or three snacks a day as well as their meals, this summer you will be providing something in the region of 160 to 250 snacks before they go back to school. You don't obviously want them all to end up being crisps or biscuits and on the other hand you don't want to spend summer with one arm chained to the fridge. So let's come up with some ideas to try and make life a little bit easier, little bit tastier and a little bit healthier with some snack ideas. So let's get into it!
Joanne Roach (01:35)
There are loads of fantastic ideas around online for great healthy snacks for your kids and lots of them are absolutely gorgeous to look at and very insta-worthy but I'm not going to talk through those ideas here you can google those yourself. instead I'm going to advocate for the approach which kept me sane with my own kids and which I've also used in school which is a pick and mix snack approach. It's not rocket science, it's absolutely not my invention, but I do hope it will be helpful.
So I'm not talking about Woolworths pick and mix, unfortunately, but I'm also not talking about the kind of pick and mix that you see in those gorgeous reels with the incredible batch prepping mums usually in America with their huge American fridges, and they make up these beautiful baskets and boxes of little pouches of different items for their kids, and they've got cute labels with the children's names on them and these tiny little packs. I mean, if that's you, all power to you, I bow down to your effort and enthusiasm, and you absolutely don't need this episode, you can skip it, but I did not have the budget or the time, nor the fridge space, or the head space, frankly, for that matter to do things quite like that.
So what I'm talking about is a much more low-key version of that, more budget friendly, less individual packaging too.
In one of my jobs I set up a tuck shop at a primary school and we used this pick and mix approach there. It was a whole project using year fives to serve food and do business skills and I will do an episode on that at some point because it was actually really great fun. But the basic idea was to have three items a day on offer and children could choose from them. We encouraged them to have either two or three items. Broadly speaking there was always one food that was a starchy carbohydrate type food, one that was a good source of protein and one fruit or veg.
So for example, we might have had half slices of bagel, quarter slices of ham and some apple pieces. Or we might have had a quarter wrap, cream cheese and strawberries or one of their favourites was always popcorn, sunflower seeds and raisins.
Now I'm not suggesting obviously that you do that at home every day, God forbid, but just use that basic idea to get into the fridge and cupboard a selection of things each week that are in these three rough groups. It doesn't have to be that children have all three at every snack. Sometimes when children are asking for a snack, especially quite close to a meal time, a piece of fruit on its own is perfectly good enough.
But when you can, a snack that has a bit of balance has a better chance of keeping them satisfied until the next meal. So the idea is to get in three to five items from each of those three groups when you do your food shop, so that during that week, either you or your children can put together some different combinations from the items to make up some balanced snacks. And then the next week, keep some of the favourites and swap out some of the others for different ones for a bit of variety.
So I'll run through some of the ideas that I've used either with my own kids or at the school and I'll put the list in a show note so that you can come over there and jot down some next time you go shopping if you like the idea. Most of them are pretty easy to put together or you can prep some of them in Tupperwares for kids to assemble for themselves.
So here are the suggestions roughly in those three groups.
So in the broadly starchy carbs group you've got obvious things like toast and crackers but also things like bagels, English muffins in halves are quite nice, pitas cut up into little strips, breadsticks are great for nibbling from one end to the other as long as they're not a very salty one, similarly with pretzels, things like rice cakes and oat cakes, wraps which you can have whole wraps or those mini wraps or cut them into quarters. Handfuls of dry cereal are really good if they're a higher fibre, lower sugar sort of cereal popcorn's great, you can either pop your own or you can get the microwave stuff
I recently saw a brilliant blog post from Nutrition for Kids that I'll link to in the show notes where they used ice cream cones to pile things inside of. That was really cool. So that's your sort of broadly starchy components.
And then for your more protein rich group, the obvious ones are things like cheese or ham, there's also things like hummus or other kind of beany spreads. S mall yogurts can be great, obviously keeping an on the sugar levels on the individual yogurts but they can be a great snack. Handfuls of nuts like cashews, almonds are great or seeds like sunflower seeds or pumpkin seeds or a mixture of the two. Cream cheese is great for spreading on stuff but also for gluing things together and the same with peanut butter or almond butter. Obviously you can get those little individual cheeses but you can just chop up little cubes of cheese yourself. And the same with things like leftover cooked meats, ⁓ also things like those little chicken satay's, you can buy those in the shops already made if you want to. And then tinned tuna or salmon are great because you can just keep them in the cupboard you don't need to do anything with them and and then a spoonful of those are great on a snack. And then also hard-boiled eggs, if your children like hard-boiled eggs you can cook a batch up at the weekend and keep them in the fridge and they're ready to go.
If you've got vegetarians in the house, then air fried chickpeas that you just make up at the weekend and put into a container are fantastic. And also those mini falafel are brilliant.
Milkshake or hot chocolate contains a decent amount of dairy milk or something like a soya milk that has slightly higher protein in or things like Actimel or the drinking yogurts can be great too. Again keep an eye on the sugar but loads of those have got a decent amount of protein and some good bacteria to boot.
So that's the sort of protein-y group.
And then finally your fruit or veg group. I don't need to tell you what fruit and veg looks like. But here are some suggestions of ones you might not have thought of. So obviously, you you've got your favourites like apples, bananas, carrot sticks, celery, cucumber. Pepper strips are great to prep ahead. Sugar snap peas or mange tout are usually pretty popular. Cherry tomatoes, easy peel or satsumas. Things like grapes, sultanas, raisins or apricots.
Don't overlook canned fruit, canned pineapple or peaches, if you can get them in juice rather than in syrup, are brilliant.
Frozen berries are also great and they're usually a lot cheaper. You can also freeze your own grapes or berries and you can eat them from frozen. Obviously keep an eye on choking hazards with younger children but I'll link in the show notes to the episode where we talked about freezing berries.
Bananas are obviously great just as they are but they're also really great frozen. You can dip them in a bit of dark chocolate if you want to, can shove them on a stick or you can blend them into what they call nice cream but basically ice cream. Stick some chocolate chips in it, jobs a good'un
And then for on the go, there's some convenience versions of some of these things. So like pouches of puree or smoothie. Do check the labels on those a lot of them do contain an awful lot of sugar and not as much fruit as you'd hope, but some of them are really great.
And the same goes for jelly, you can get low sugar ones in the shop or you can make your own at home you can make them with fruit juice with either gelatin or agar-agar if you're a vegetarian and they can be great for mixing with fruit to make it more fun.
So there's some suggestions for the fruit and veg group.
So obviously that was a huge list, I'm not suggesting you buy all of those things. But like I say, it's just some ideas to be able to pick out a few each week to assemble yourself or your child to assemble their own, depending on their age and stage. So prep anything that needs to be prepped in advance to be tempting, like carrot sticks or pita slices, and pop them in whatever containers works for you. If you want to have an area of the fridge and a tray on the counter for this week's snacks, you can do if you want to, or could have a little list so that everybody knows what's available to choose from this week.
And as a bonus, this approach actually does build familiarity for children, even with the foods that they don't choose, because they have to consider them each time they don't choose them.
If you really want to, can obviously assemble some of these ingredients beforehand So some examples of that would be mixing some of the dried ingredients together into a trail mix or those cute little hummus snack jars that you see online where you put a bit of hummus in the bottom and then you stick your carrot sticks and pepper slices in on top and then seal the jar up and then people can take them out and dip them in or things like quesadillas or mini muffin pizzas where you're using that starchy base but you're putting a bit of tomato puree in, a little bit of the cheese and one of your vegetables.
So there are some interesting things you can make from some of these ingredients, but honestly, a lot of them can just be people grabbing a handful of each on a plate to make up an easy picky snack.
So I hope you like this pick and mix approach to snack provision. The good thing is it means you only have to think about it once per week and then after that everybody knows what the ingredients are to choose from this week. I'll leave it up to you how you put it into practice whether it's having a pick and mix list for your kids to really get involved with or on busy or tired weeks honestly just using these lists to make your shopping list easier even if you don't do anything special with them. Let me know how you get on and what weird combinations of pick and mix your children come up with I would love to hear. And I'll see you on Monday and in the meantime, happy eating.
But when you can, a snack that has a bit of balance has a better chance of keeping them satisfied until the next meal. So the idea is to get in three to five items from each of those three groups when you do your food shop, so that during that week, either you or your children can put together some different combinations from the items to make up some balanced snacks. And then the next week, keep some of the favourites and swap out some of the others for different ones for a bit of variety.
Joanne Roach (00:13)
Hello and welcome to the Food for Kids podcast. I'm Joanne from the Foodies. Today is the first full week of summer holidays for families in England and most of the UK is pretty similar. And as the name, The Six Weeks Holidays suggests, for most families that means somewhere in the region of 40 to 45 days of having the kids at home. There are lots of fun things to do, memories to make, school runs to not miss at all, but there's also quite a lot of work juggling to do, lots of keeping spirits up and activities and boredom and lots and lots and lots of food. So it's nice to not have to think about before school breakfast and packed lunches or dinner money accounts for a bit unless you have a holiday club to go to.
But on the other hand, for many families there is a house full of small people needing to be fed around the clock and the main thing that parents complain about is the constant need for snacks. Not surprising because if you have two kids at home eating two or three snacks a day as well as their meals, this summer you will be providing something in the region of 160 to 250 snacks before they go back to school. You don't obviously want them all to end up being crisps or biscuits and on the other hand you don't want to spend summer with one arm chained to the fridge. So let's come up with some ideas to try and make life a little bit easier, little bit tastier and a little bit healthier with some snack ideas. So let's get into it!
Joanne Roach (01:35)
There are loads of fantastic ideas around online for great healthy snacks for your kids and lots of them are absolutely gorgeous to look at and very insta-worthy but I'm not going to talk through those ideas here you can google those yourself. instead I'm going to advocate for the approach which kept me sane with my own kids and which I've also used in school which is a pick and mix snack approach. It's not rocket science, it's absolutely not my invention, but I do hope it will be helpful.
So I'm not talking about Woolworths pick and mix, unfortunately, but I'm also not talking about the kind of pick and mix that you see in those gorgeous reels with the incredible batch prepping mums usually in America with their huge American fridges, and they make up these beautiful baskets and boxes of little pouches of different items for their kids, and they've got cute labels with the children's names on them and these tiny little packs. I mean, if that's you, all power to you, I bow down to your effort and enthusiasm, and you absolutely don't need this episode, you can skip it, but I did not have the budget or the time, nor the fridge space, or the head space, frankly, for that matter to do things quite like that.
So what I'm talking about is a much more low-key version of that, more budget friendly, less individual packaging too.
In one of my jobs I set up a tuck shop at a primary school and we used this pick and mix approach there. It was a whole project using year fives to serve food and do business skills and I will do an episode on that at some point because it was actually really great fun. But the basic idea was to have three items a day on offer and children could choose from them. We encouraged them to have either two or three items. Broadly speaking there was always one food that was a starchy carbohydrate type food, one that was a good source of protein and one fruit or veg.
So for example, we might have had half slices of bagel, quarter slices of ham and some apple pieces. Or we might have had a quarter wrap, cream cheese and strawberries or one of their favourites was always popcorn, sunflower seeds and raisins.
Now I'm not suggesting obviously that you do that at home every day, God forbid, but just use that basic idea to get into the fridge and cupboard a selection of things each week that are in these three rough groups. It doesn't have to be that children have all three at every snack. Sometimes when children are asking for a snack, especially quite close to a meal time, a piece of fruit on its own is perfectly good enough.
But when you can, a snack that has a bit of balance has a better chance of keeping them satisfied until the next meal. So the idea is to get in three to five items from each of those three groups when you do your food shop, so that during that week, either you or your children can put together some different combinations from the items to make up some balanced snacks. And then the next week, keep some of the favourites and swap out some of the others for different ones for a bit of variety.
So I'll run through some of the ideas that I've used either with my own kids or at the school and I'll put the list in a show note so that you can come over there and jot down some next time you go shopping if you like the idea. Most of them are pretty easy to put together or you can prep some of them in Tupperwares for kids to assemble for themselves.
So here are the suggestions roughly in those three groups.
So in the broadly starchy carbs group you've got obvious things like toast and crackers but also things like bagels, English muffins in halves are quite nice, pitas cut up into little strips, breadsticks are great for nibbling from one end to the other as long as they're not a very salty one, similarly with pretzels, things like rice cakes and oat cakes, wraps which you can have whole wraps or those mini wraps or cut them into quarters. Handfuls of dry cereal are really good if they're a higher fibre, lower sugar sort of cereal popcorn's great, you can either pop your own or you can get the microwave stuff
I recently saw a brilliant blog post from Nutrition for Kids that I'll link to in the show notes where they used ice cream cones to pile things inside of. That was really cool. So that's your sort of broadly starchy components.
And then for your more protein rich group, the obvious ones are things like cheese or ham, there's also things like hummus or other kind of beany spreads. S mall yogurts can be great, obviously keeping an on the sugar levels on the individual yogurts but they can be a great snack. Handfuls of nuts like cashews, almonds are great or seeds like sunflower seeds or pumpkin seeds or a mixture of the two. Cream cheese is great for spreading on stuff but also for gluing things together and the same with peanut butter or almond butter. Obviously you can get those little individual cheeses but you can just chop up little cubes of cheese yourself. And the same with things like leftover cooked meats, ⁓ also things like those little chicken satay's, you can buy those in the shops already made if you want to. And then tinned tuna or salmon are great because you can just keep them in the cupboard you don't need to do anything with them and and then a spoonful of those are great on a snack. And then also hard-boiled eggs, if your children like hard-boiled eggs you can cook a batch up at the weekend and keep them in the fridge and they're ready to go.
If you've got vegetarians in the house, then air fried chickpeas that you just make up at the weekend and put into a container are fantastic. And also those mini falafel are brilliant.
Milkshake or hot chocolate contains a decent amount of dairy milk or something like a soya milk that has slightly higher protein in or things like Actimel or the drinking yogurts can be great too. Again keep an eye on the sugar but loads of those have got a decent amount of protein and some good bacteria to boot.
So that's the sort of protein-y group.
And then finally your fruit or veg group. I don't need to tell you what fruit and veg looks like. But here are some suggestions of ones you might not have thought of. So obviously, you you've got your favourites like apples, bananas, carrot sticks, celery, cucumber. Pepper strips are great to prep ahead. Sugar snap peas or mange tout are usually pretty popular. Cherry tomatoes, easy peel or satsumas. Things like grapes, sultanas, raisins or apricots.
Don't overlook canned fruit, canned pineapple or peaches, if you can get them in juice rather than in syrup, are brilliant.
Frozen berries are also great and they're usually a lot cheaper. You can also freeze your own grapes or berries and you can eat them from frozen. Obviously keep an eye on choking hazards with younger children but I'll link in the show notes to the episode where we talked about freezing berries.
Bananas are obviously great just as they are but they're also really great frozen. You can dip them in a bit of dark chocolate if you want to, can shove them on a stick or you can blend them into what they call nice cream but basically ice cream. Stick some chocolate chips in it, jobs a good'un
And then for on the go, there's some convenience versions of some of these things. So like pouches of puree or smoothie. Do check the labels on those a lot of them do contain an awful lot of sugar and not as much fruit as you'd hope, but some of them are really great.
And the same goes for jelly, you can get low sugar ones in the shop or you can make your own at home you can make them with fruit juice with either gelatin or agar-agar if you're a vegetarian and they can be great for mixing with fruit to make it more fun.
So there's some suggestions for the fruit and veg group.
So obviously that was a huge list, I'm not suggesting you buy all of those things. But like I say, it's just some ideas to be able to pick out a few each week to assemble yourself or your child to assemble their own, depending on their age and stage. So prep anything that needs to be prepped in advance to be tempting, like carrot sticks or pita slices, and pop them in whatever containers works for you. If you want to have an area of the fridge and a tray on the counter for this week's snacks, you can do if you want to, or could have a little list so that everybody knows what's available to choose from this week.
And as a bonus, this approach actually does build familiarity for children, even with the foods that they don't choose, because they have to consider them each time they don't choose them.
If you really want to, can obviously assemble some of these ingredients beforehand So some examples of that would be mixing some of the dried ingredients together into a trail mix or those cute little hummus snack jars that you see online where you put a bit of hummus in the bottom and then you stick your carrot sticks and pepper slices in on top and then seal the jar up and then people can take them out and dip them in or things like quesadillas or mini muffin pizzas where you're using that starchy base but you're putting a bit of tomato puree in, a little bit of the cheese and one of your vegetables.
So there are some interesting things you can make from some of these ingredients, but honestly, a lot of them can just be people grabbing a handful of each on a plate to make up an easy picky snack.
So I hope you like this pick and mix approach to snack provision. The good thing is it means you only have to think about it once per week and then after that everybody knows what the ingredients are to choose from this week. I'll leave it up to you how you put it into practice whether it's having a pick and mix list for your kids to really get involved with or on busy or tired weeks honestly just using these lists to make your shopping list easier even if you don't do anything special with them. Let me know how you get on and what weird combinations of pick and mix your children come up with I would love to hear. And I'll see you on Monday and in the meantime, happy eating.
So I'll run through some of the ideas that I've used either with my own kids or at the school and I'll put the list in a show note so that you can come over there and jot down some next time you go shopping if you like the idea. Most of them are pretty easy to put together or you can prep some of them in Tupperwares for kids to assemble for themselves.
Joanne Roach (00:13)
Hello and welcome to the Food for Kids podcast. I'm Joanne from the Foodies. Today is the first full week of summer holidays for families in England and most of the UK is pretty similar. And as the name, The Six Weeks Holidays suggests, for most families that means somewhere in the region of 40 to 45 days of having the kids at home. There are lots of fun things to do, memories to make, school runs to not miss at all, but there's also quite a lot of work juggling to do, lots of keeping spirits up and activities and boredom and lots and lots and lots of food. So it's nice to not have to think about before school breakfast and packed lunches or dinner money accounts for a bit unless you have a holiday club to go to.
But on the other hand, for many families there is a house full of small people needing to be fed around the clock and the main thing that parents complain about is the constant need for snacks. Not surprising because if you have two kids at home eating two or three snacks a day as well as their meals, this summer you will be providing something in the region of 160 to 250 snacks before they go back to school. You don't obviously want them all to end up being crisps or biscuits and on the other hand you don't want to spend summer with one arm chained to the fridge. So let's come up with some ideas to try and make life a little bit easier, little bit tastier and a little bit healthier with some snack ideas. So let's get into it!
Joanne Roach (01:35)
There are loads of fantastic ideas around online for great healthy snacks for your kids and lots of them are absolutely gorgeous to look at and very insta-worthy but I'm not going to talk through those ideas here you can google those yourself. instead I'm going to advocate for the approach which kept me sane with my own kids and which I've also used in school which is a pick and mix snack approach. It's not rocket science, it's absolutely not my invention, but I do hope it will be helpful.
So I'm not talking about Woolworths pick and mix, unfortunately, but I'm also not talking about the kind of pick and mix that you see in those gorgeous reels with the incredible batch prepping mums usually in America with their huge American fridges, and they make up these beautiful baskets and boxes of little pouches of different items for their kids, and they've got cute labels with the children's names on them and these tiny little packs. I mean, if that's you, all power to you, I bow down to your effort and enthusiasm, and you absolutely don't need this episode, you can skip it, but I did not have the budget or the time, nor the fridge space, or the head space, frankly, for that matter to do things quite like that.
So what I'm talking about is a much more low-key version of that, more budget friendly, less individual packaging too.
In one of my jobs I set up a tuck shop at a primary school and we used this pick and mix approach there. It was a whole project using year fives to serve food and do business skills and I will do an episode on that at some point because it was actually really great fun. But the basic idea was to have three items a day on offer and children could choose from them. We encouraged them to have either two or three items. Broadly speaking there was always one food that was a starchy carbohydrate type food, one that was a good source of protein and one fruit or veg.
So for example, we might have had half slices of bagel, quarter slices of ham and some apple pieces. Or we might have had a quarter wrap, cream cheese and strawberries or one of their favourites was always popcorn, sunflower seeds and raisins.
Now I'm not suggesting obviously that you do that at home every day, God forbid, but just use that basic idea to get into the fridge and cupboard a selection of things each week that are in these three rough groups. It doesn't have to be that children have all three at every snack. Sometimes when children are asking for a snack, especially quite close to a meal time, a piece of fruit on its own is perfectly good enough.
But when you can, a snack that has a bit of balance has a better chance of keeping them satisfied until the next meal. So the idea is to get in three to five items from each of those three groups when you do your food shop, so that during that week, either you or your children can put together some different combinations from the items to make up some balanced snacks. And then the next week, keep some of the favourites and swap out some of the others for different ones for a bit of variety.
So I'll run through some of the ideas that I've used either with my own kids or at the school and I'll put the list in a show note so that you can come over there and jot down some next time you go shopping if you like the idea. Most of them are pretty easy to put together or you can prep some of them in Tupperwares for kids to assemble for themselves.
So here are the suggestions roughly in those three groups.
So in the broadly starchy carbs group you've got obvious things like toast and crackers but also things like bagels, English muffins in halves are quite nice, pitas cut up into little strips, breadsticks are great for nibbling from one end to the other as long as they're not a very salty one, similarly with pretzels, things like rice cakes and oat cakes, wraps which you can have whole wraps or those mini wraps or cut them into quarters. Handfuls of dry cereal are really good if they're a higher fibre, lower sugar sort of cereal popcorn's great, you can either pop your own or you can get the microwave stuff
I recently saw a brilliant blog post from Nutrition for Kids that I'll link to in the show notes where they used ice cream cones to pile things inside of. That was really cool. So that's your sort of broadly starchy components.
And then for your more protein rich group, the obvious ones are things like cheese or ham, there's also things like hummus or other kind of beany spreads. S mall yogurts can be great, obviously keeping an on the sugar levels on the individual yogurts but they can be a great snack. Handfuls of nuts like cashews, almonds are great or seeds like sunflower seeds or pumpkin seeds or a mixture of the two. Cream cheese is great for spreading on stuff but also for gluing things together and the same with peanut butter or almond butter. Obviously you can get those little individual cheeses but you can just chop up little cubes of cheese yourself. And the same with things like leftover cooked meats, ⁓ also things like those little chicken satay's, you can buy those in the shops already made if you want to. And then tinned tuna or salmon are great because you can just keep them in the cupboard you don't need to do anything with them and and then a spoonful of those are great on a snack. And then also hard-boiled eggs, if your children like hard-boiled eggs you can cook a batch up at the weekend and keep them in the fridge and they're ready to go.
If you've got vegetarians in the house, then air fried chickpeas that you just make up at the weekend and put into a container are fantastic. And also those mini falafel are brilliant.
Milkshake or hot chocolate contains a decent amount of dairy milk or something like a soya milk that has slightly higher protein in or things like Actimel or the drinking yogurts can be great too. Again keep an eye on the sugar but loads of those have got a decent amount of protein and some good bacteria to boot.
So that's the sort of protein-y group.
And then finally your fruit or veg group. I don't need to tell you what fruit and veg looks like. But here are some suggestions of ones you might not have thought of. So obviously, you you've got your favourites like apples, bananas, carrot sticks, celery, cucumber. Pepper strips are great to prep ahead. Sugar snap peas or mange tout are usually pretty popular. Cherry tomatoes, easy peel or satsumas. Things like grapes, sultanas, raisins or apricots.
Don't overlook canned fruit, canned pineapple or peaches, if you can get them in juice rather than in syrup, are brilliant.
Frozen berries are also great and they're usually a lot cheaper. You can also freeze your own grapes or berries and you can eat them from frozen. Obviously keep an eye on choking hazards with younger children but I'll link in the show notes to the episode where we talked about freezing berries.
Bananas are obviously great just as they are but they're also really great frozen. You can dip them in a bit of dark chocolate if you want to, can shove them on a stick or you can blend them into what they call nice cream but basically ice cream. Stick some chocolate chips in it, jobs a good'un
And then for on the go, there's some convenience versions of some of these things. So like pouches of puree or smoothie. Do check the labels on those a lot of them do contain an awful lot of sugar and not as much fruit as you'd hope, but some of them are really great.
And the same goes for jelly, you can get low sugar ones in the shop or you can make your own at home you can make them with fruit juice with either gelatin or agar-agar if you're a vegetarian and they can be great for mixing with fruit to make it more fun.
So there's some suggestions for the fruit and veg group.
So obviously that was a huge list, I'm not suggesting you buy all of those things. But like I say, it's just some ideas to be able to pick out a few each week to assemble yourself or your child to assemble their own, depending on their age and stage. So prep anything that needs to be prepped in advance to be tempting, like carrot sticks or pita slices, and pop them in whatever containers works for you. If you want to have an area of the fridge and a tray on the counter for this week's snacks, you can do if you want to, or could have a little list so that everybody knows what's available to choose from this week.
And as a bonus, this approach actually does build familiarity for children, even with the foods that they don't choose, because they have to consider them each time they don't choose them.
If you really want to, can obviously assemble some of these ingredients beforehand So some examples of that would be mixing some of the dried ingredients together into a trail mix or those cute little hummus snack jars that you see online where you put a bit of hummus in the bottom and then you stick your carrot sticks and pepper slices in on top and then seal the jar up and then people can take them out and dip them in or things like quesadillas or mini muffin pizzas where you're using that starchy base but you're putting a bit of tomato puree in, a little bit of the cheese and one of your vegetables.
So there are some interesting things you can make from some of these ingredients, but honestly, a lot of them can just be people grabbing a handful of each on a plate to make up an easy picky snack.
So I hope you like this pick and mix approach to snack provision. The good thing is it means you only have to think about it once per week and then after that everybody knows what the ingredients are to choose from this week. I'll leave it up to you how you put it into practice whether it's having a pick and mix list for your kids to really get involved with or on busy or tired weeks honestly just using these lists to make your shopping list easier even if you don't do anything special with them. Let me know how you get on and what weird combinations of pick and mix your children come up with I would love to hear. And I'll see you on Monday and in the meantime, happy eating.
So here are the suggestions roughly in those three groups.
Joanne Roach (00:13)
Hello and welcome to the Food for Kids podcast. I'm Joanne from the Foodies. Today is the first full week of summer holidays for families in England and most of the UK is pretty similar. And as the name, The Six Weeks Holidays suggests, for most families that means somewhere in the region of 40 to 45 days of having the kids at home. There are lots of fun things to do, memories to make, school runs to not miss at all, but there's also quite a lot of work juggling to do, lots of keeping spirits up and activities and boredom and lots and lots and lots of food. So it's nice to not have to think about before school breakfast and packed lunches or dinner money accounts for a bit unless you have a holiday club to go to.
But on the other hand, for many families there is a house full of small people needing to be fed around the clock and the main thing that parents complain about is the constant need for snacks. Not surprising because if you have two kids at home eating two or three snacks a day as well as their meals, this summer you will be providing something in the region of 160 to 250 snacks before they go back to school. You don't obviously want them all to end up being crisps or biscuits and on the other hand you don't want to spend summer with one arm chained to the fridge. So let's come up with some ideas to try and make life a little bit easier, little bit tastier and a little bit healthier with some snack ideas. So let's get into it!
Joanne Roach (01:35)
There are loads of fantastic ideas around online for great healthy snacks for your kids and lots of them are absolutely gorgeous to look at and very insta-worthy but I'm not going to talk through those ideas here you can google those yourself. instead I'm going to advocate for the approach which kept me sane with my own kids and which I've also used in school which is a pick and mix snack approach. It's not rocket science, it's absolutely not my invention, but I do hope it will be helpful.
So I'm not talking about Woolworths pick and mix, unfortunately, but I'm also not talking about the kind of pick and mix that you see in those gorgeous reels with the incredible batch prepping mums usually in America with their huge American fridges, and they make up these beautiful baskets and boxes of little pouches of different items for their kids, and they've got cute labels with the children's names on them and these tiny little packs. I mean, if that's you, all power to you, I bow down to your effort and enthusiasm, and you absolutely don't need this episode, you can skip it, but I did not have the budget or the time, nor the fridge space, or the head space, frankly, for that matter to do things quite like that.
So what I'm talking about is a much more low-key version of that, more budget friendly, less individual packaging too.
In one of my jobs I set up a tuck shop at a primary school and we used this pick and mix approach there. It was a whole project using year fives to serve food and do business skills and I will do an episode on that at some point because it was actually really great fun. But the basic idea was to have three items a day on offer and children could choose from them. We encouraged them to have either two or three items. Broadly speaking there was always one food that was a starchy carbohydrate type food, one that was a good source of protein and one fruit or veg.
So for example, we might have had half slices of bagel, quarter slices of ham and some apple pieces. Or we might have had a quarter wrap, cream cheese and strawberries or one of their favourites was always popcorn, sunflower seeds and raisins.
Now I'm not suggesting obviously that you do that at home every day, God forbid, but just use that basic idea to get into the fridge and cupboard a selection of things each week that are in these three rough groups. It doesn't have to be that children have all three at every snack. Sometimes when children are asking for a snack, especially quite close to a meal time, a piece of fruit on its own is perfectly good enough.
But when you can, a snack that has a bit of balance has a better chance of keeping them satisfied until the next meal. So the idea is to get in three to five items from each of those three groups when you do your food shop, so that during that week, either you or your children can put together some different combinations from the items to make up some balanced snacks. And then the next week, keep some of the favourites and swap out some of the others for different ones for a bit of variety.
So I'll run through some of the ideas that I've used either with my own kids or at the school and I'll put the list in a show note so that you can come over there and jot down some next time you go shopping if you like the idea. Most of them are pretty easy to put together or you can prep some of them in Tupperwares for kids to assemble for themselves.
So here are the suggestions roughly in those three groups.
So in the broadly starchy carbs group you've got obvious things like toast and crackers but also things like bagels, English muffins in halves are quite nice, pitas cut up into little strips, breadsticks are great for nibbling from one end to the other as long as they're not a very salty one, similarly with pretzels, things like rice cakes and oat cakes, wraps which you can have whole wraps or those mini wraps or cut them into quarters. Handfuls of dry cereal are really good if they're a higher fibre, lower sugar sort of cereal popcorn's great, you can either pop your own or you can get the microwave stuff
I recently saw a brilliant blog post from Nutrition for Kids that I'll link to in the show notes where they used ice cream cones to pile things inside of. That was really cool. So that's your sort of broadly starchy components.
And then for your more protein rich group, the obvious ones are things like cheese or ham, there's also things like hummus or other kind of beany spreads. S mall yogurts can be great, obviously keeping an on the sugar levels on the individual yogurts but they can be a great snack. Handfuls of nuts like cashews, almonds are great or seeds like sunflower seeds or pumpkin seeds or a mixture of the two. Cream cheese is great for spreading on stuff but also for gluing things together and the same with peanut butter or almond butter. Obviously you can get those little individual cheeses but you can just chop up little cubes of cheese yourself. And the same with things like leftover cooked meats, ⁓ also things like those little chicken satay's, you can buy those in the shops already made if you want to. And then tinned tuna or salmon are great because you can just keep them in the cupboard you don't need to do anything with them and and then a spoonful of those are great on a snack. And then also hard-boiled eggs, if your children like hard-boiled eggs you can cook a batch up at the weekend and keep them in the fridge and they're ready to go.
If you've got vegetarians in the house, then air fried chickpeas that you just make up at the weekend and put into a container are fantastic. And also those mini falafel are brilliant.
Milkshake or hot chocolate contains a decent amount of dairy milk or something like a soya milk that has slightly higher protein in or things like Actimel or the drinking yogurts can be great too. Again keep an eye on the sugar but loads of those have got a decent amount of protein and some good bacteria to boot.
So that's the sort of protein-y group.
And then finally your fruit or veg group. I don't need to tell you what fruit and veg looks like. But here are some suggestions of ones you might not have thought of. So obviously, you you've got your favourites like apples, bananas, carrot sticks, celery, cucumber. Pepper strips are great to prep ahead. Sugar snap peas or mange tout are usually pretty popular. Cherry tomatoes, easy peel or satsumas. Things like grapes, sultanas, raisins or apricots.
Don't overlook canned fruit, canned pineapple or peaches, if you can get them in juice rather than in syrup, are brilliant.
Frozen berries are also great and they're usually a lot cheaper. You can also freeze your own grapes or berries and you can eat them from frozen. Obviously keep an eye on choking hazards with younger children but I'll link in the show notes to the episode where we talked about freezing berries.
Bananas are obviously great just as they are but they're also really great frozen. You can dip them in a bit of dark chocolate if you want to, can shove them on a stick or you can blend them into what they call nice cream but basically ice cream. Stick some chocolate chips in it, jobs a good'un
And then for on the go, there's some convenience versions of some of these things. So like pouches of puree or smoothie. Do check the labels on those a lot of them do contain an awful lot of sugar and not as much fruit as you'd hope, but some of them are really great.
And the same goes for jelly, you can get low sugar ones in the shop or you can make your own at home you can make them with fruit juice with either gelatin or agar-agar if you're a vegetarian and they can be great for mixing with fruit to make it more fun.
So there's some suggestions for the fruit and veg group.
So obviously that was a huge list, I'm not suggesting you buy all of those things. But like I say, it's just some ideas to be able to pick out a few each week to assemble yourself or your child to assemble their own, depending on their age and stage. So prep anything that needs to be prepped in advance to be tempting, like carrot sticks or pita slices, and pop them in whatever containers works for you. If you want to have an area of the fridge and a tray on the counter for this week's snacks, you can do if you want to, or could have a little list so that everybody knows what's available to choose from this week.
And as a bonus, this approach actually does build familiarity for children, even with the foods that they don't choose, because they have to consider them each time they don't choose them.
If you really want to, can obviously assemble some of these ingredients beforehand So some examples of that would be mixing some of the dried ingredients together into a trail mix or those cute little hummus snack jars that you see online where you put a bit of hummus in the bottom and then you stick your carrot sticks and pepper slices in on top and then seal the jar up and then people can take them out and dip them in or things like quesadillas or mini muffin pizzas where you're using that starchy base but you're putting a bit of tomato puree in, a little bit of the cheese and one of your vegetables.
So there are some interesting things you can make from some of these ingredients, but honestly, a lot of them can just be people grabbing a handful of each on a plate to make up an easy picky snack.
So I hope you like this pick and mix approach to snack provision. The good thing is it means you only have to think about it once per week and then after that everybody knows what the ingredients are to choose from this week. I'll leave it up to you how you put it into practice whether it's having a pick and mix list for your kids to really get involved with or on busy or tired weeks honestly just using these lists to make your shopping list easier even if you don't do anything special with them. Let me know how you get on and what weird combinations of pick and mix your children come up with I would love to hear. And I'll see you on Monday and in the meantime, happy eating.
So in the broadly starchy carbs group you've got obvious things like toast and crackers but also things like bagels, English muffins in halves are quite nice, pitas cut up into little strips, breadsticks are great for nibbling from one end to the other as long as they're not a very salty one, similarly with pretzels, things like rice cakes and oat cakes, wraps which you can have whole wraps or those mini wraps or cut them into quarters. Handfuls of dry cereal are really good if they're a higher fibre, lower sugar sort of cereal popcorn's great, you can either pop your own or you can get the microwave stuff
Joanne Roach (00:13)
Hello and welcome to the Food for Kids podcast. I'm Joanne from the Foodies. Today is the first full week of summer holidays for families in England and most of the UK is pretty similar. And as the name, The Six Weeks Holidays suggests, for most families that means somewhere in the region of 40 to 45 days of having the kids at home. There are lots of fun things to do, memories to make, school runs to not miss at all, but there's also quite a lot of work juggling to do, lots of keeping spirits up and activities and boredom and lots and lots and lots of food. So it's nice to not have to think about before school breakfast and packed lunches or dinner money accounts for a bit unless you have a holiday club to go to.
But on the other hand, for many families there is a house full of small people needing to be fed around the clock and the main thing that parents complain about is the constant need for snacks. Not surprising because if you have two kids at home eating two or three snacks a day as well as their meals, this summer you will be providing something in the region of 160 to 250 snacks before they go back to school. You don't obviously want them all to end up being crisps or biscuits and on the other hand you don't want to spend summer with one arm chained to the fridge. So let's come up with some ideas to try and make life a little bit easier, little bit tastier and a little bit healthier with some snack ideas. So let's get into it!
Joanne Roach (01:35)
There are loads of fantastic ideas around online for great healthy snacks for your kids and lots of them are absolutely gorgeous to look at and very insta-worthy but I'm not going to talk through those ideas here you can google those yourself. instead I'm going to advocate for the approach which kept me sane with my own kids and which I've also used in school which is a pick and mix snack approach. It's not rocket science, it's absolutely not my invention, but I do hope it will be helpful.
So I'm not talking about Woolworths pick and mix, unfortunately, but I'm also not talking about the kind of pick and mix that you see in those gorgeous reels with the incredible batch prepping mums usually in America with their huge American fridges, and they make up these beautiful baskets and boxes of little pouches of different items for their kids, and they've got cute labels with the children's names on them and these tiny little packs. I mean, if that's you, all power to you, I bow down to your effort and enthusiasm, and you absolutely don't need this episode, you can skip it, but I did not have the budget or the time, nor the fridge space, or the head space, frankly, for that matter to do things quite like that.
So what I'm talking about is a much more low-key version of that, more budget friendly, less individual packaging too.
In one of my jobs I set up a tuck shop at a primary school and we used this pick and mix approach there. It was a whole project using year fives to serve food and do business skills and I will do an episode on that at some point because it was actually really great fun. But the basic idea was to have three items a day on offer and children could choose from them. We encouraged them to have either two or three items. Broadly speaking there was always one food that was a starchy carbohydrate type food, one that was a good source of protein and one fruit or veg.
So for example, we might have had half slices of bagel, quarter slices of ham and some apple pieces. Or we might have had a quarter wrap, cream cheese and strawberries or one of their favourites was always popcorn, sunflower seeds and raisins.
Now I'm not suggesting obviously that you do that at home every day, God forbid, but just use that basic idea to get into the fridge and cupboard a selection of things each week that are in these three rough groups. It doesn't have to be that children have all three at every snack. Sometimes when children are asking for a snack, especially quite close to a meal time, a piece of fruit on its own is perfectly good enough.
But when you can, a snack that has a bit of balance has a better chance of keeping them satisfied until the next meal. So the idea is to get in three to five items from each of those three groups when you do your food shop, so that during that week, either you or your children can put together some different combinations from the items to make up some balanced snacks. And then the next week, keep some of the favourites and swap out some of the others for different ones for a bit of variety.
So I'll run through some of the ideas that I've used either with my own kids or at the school and I'll put the list in a show note so that you can come over there and jot down some next time you go shopping if you like the idea. Most of them are pretty easy to put together or you can prep some of them in Tupperwares for kids to assemble for themselves.
So here are the suggestions roughly in those three groups.
So in the broadly starchy carbs group you've got obvious things like toast and crackers but also things like bagels, English muffins in halves are quite nice, pitas cut up into little strips, breadsticks are great for nibbling from one end to the other as long as they're not a very salty one, similarly with pretzels, things like rice cakes and oat cakes, wraps which you can have whole wraps or those mini wraps or cut them into quarters. Handfuls of dry cereal are really good if they're a higher fibre, lower sugar sort of cereal popcorn's great, you can either pop your own or you can get the microwave stuff
I recently saw a brilliant blog post from Nutrition for Kids that I'll link to in the show notes where they used ice cream cones to pile things inside of. That was really cool. So that's your sort of broadly starchy components.
And then for your more protein rich group, the obvious ones are things like cheese or ham, there's also things like hummus or other kind of beany spreads. S mall yogurts can be great, obviously keeping an on the sugar levels on the individual yogurts but they can be a great snack. Handfuls of nuts like cashews, almonds are great or seeds like sunflower seeds or pumpkin seeds or a mixture of the two. Cream cheese is great for spreading on stuff but also for gluing things together and the same with peanut butter or almond butter. Obviously you can get those little individual cheeses but you can just chop up little cubes of cheese yourself. And the same with things like leftover cooked meats, ⁓ also things like those little chicken satay's, you can buy those in the shops already made if you want to. And then tinned tuna or salmon are great because you can just keep them in the cupboard you don't need to do anything with them and and then a spoonful of those are great on a snack. And then also hard-boiled eggs, if your children like hard-boiled eggs you can cook a batch up at the weekend and keep them in the fridge and they're ready to go.
If you've got vegetarians in the house, then air fried chickpeas that you just make up at the weekend and put into a container are fantastic. And also those mini falafel are brilliant.
Milkshake or hot chocolate contains a decent amount of dairy milk or something like a soya milk that has slightly higher protein in or things like Actimel or the drinking yogurts can be great too. Again keep an eye on the sugar but loads of those have got a decent amount of protein and some good bacteria to boot.
So that's the sort of protein-y group.
And then finally your fruit or veg group. I don't need to tell you what fruit and veg looks like. But here are some suggestions of ones you might not have thought of. So obviously, you you've got your favourites like apples, bananas, carrot sticks, celery, cucumber. Pepper strips are great to prep ahead. Sugar snap peas or mange tout are usually pretty popular. Cherry tomatoes, easy peel or satsumas. Things like grapes, sultanas, raisins or apricots.
Don't overlook canned fruit, canned pineapple or peaches, if you can get them in juice rather than in syrup, are brilliant.
Frozen berries are also great and they're usually a lot cheaper. You can also freeze your own grapes or berries and you can eat them from frozen. Obviously keep an eye on choking hazards with younger children but I'll link in the show notes to the episode where we talked about freezing berries.
Bananas are obviously great just as they are but they're also really great frozen. You can dip them in a bit of dark chocolate if you want to, can shove them on a stick or you can blend them into what they call nice cream but basically ice cream. Stick some chocolate chips in it, jobs a good'un
And then for on the go, there's some convenience versions of some of these things. So like pouches of puree or smoothie. Do check the labels on those a lot of them do contain an awful lot of sugar and not as much fruit as you'd hope, but some of them are really great.
And the same goes for jelly, you can get low sugar ones in the shop or you can make your own at home you can make them with fruit juice with either gelatin or agar-agar if you're a vegetarian and they can be great for mixing with fruit to make it more fun.
So there's some suggestions for the fruit and veg group.
So obviously that was a huge list, I'm not suggesting you buy all of those things. But like I say, it's just some ideas to be able to pick out a few each week to assemble yourself or your child to assemble their own, depending on their age and stage. So prep anything that needs to be prepped in advance to be tempting, like carrot sticks or pita slices, and pop them in whatever containers works for you. If you want to have an area of the fridge and a tray on the counter for this week's snacks, you can do if you want to, or could have a little list so that everybody knows what's available to choose from this week.
And as a bonus, this approach actually does build familiarity for children, even with the foods that they don't choose, because they have to consider them each time they don't choose them.
If you really want to, can obviously assemble some of these ingredients beforehand So some examples of that would be mixing some of the dried ingredients together into a trail mix or those cute little hummus snack jars that you see online where you put a bit of hummus in the bottom and then you stick your carrot sticks and pepper slices in on top and then seal the jar up and then people can take them out and dip them in or things like quesadillas or mini muffin pizzas where you're using that starchy base but you're putting a bit of tomato puree in, a little bit of the cheese and one of your vegetables.
So there are some interesting things you can make from some of these ingredients, but honestly, a lot of them can just be people grabbing a handful of each on a plate to make up an easy picky snack.
So I hope you like this pick and mix approach to snack provision. The good thing is it means you only have to think about it once per week and then after that everybody knows what the ingredients are to choose from this week. I'll leave it up to you how you put it into practice whether it's having a pick and mix list for your kids to really get involved with or on busy or tired weeks honestly just using these lists to make your shopping list easier even if you don't do anything special with them. Let me know how you get on and what weird combinations of pick and mix your children come up with I would love to hear. And I'll see you on Monday and in the meantime, happy eating.
I recently saw a brilliant blog post from Nutrition for Kids that I'll link to in the show notes where they used ice cream cones to pile things inside of. That was really cool. So that's your sort of broadly starchy components.
Joanne Roach (00:13)
Hello and welcome to the Food for Kids podcast. I'm Joanne from the Foodies. Today is the first full week of summer holidays for families in England and most of the UK is pretty similar. And as the name, The Six Weeks Holidays suggests, for most families that means somewhere in the region of 40 to 45 days of having the kids at home. There are lots of fun things to do, memories to make, school runs to not miss at all, but there's also quite a lot of work juggling to do, lots of keeping spirits up and activities and boredom and lots and lots and lots of food. So it's nice to not have to think about before school breakfast and packed lunches or dinner money accounts for a bit unless you have a holiday club to go to.
But on the other hand, for many families there is a house full of small people needing to be fed around the clock and the main thing that parents complain about is the constant need for snacks. Not surprising because if you have two kids at home eating two or three snacks a day as well as their meals, this summer you will be providing something in the region of 160 to 250 snacks before they go back to school. You don't obviously want them all to end up being crisps or biscuits and on the other hand you don't want to spend summer with one arm chained to the fridge. So let's come up with some ideas to try and make life a little bit easier, little bit tastier and a little bit healthier with some snack ideas. So let's get into it!
Joanne Roach (01:35)
There are loads of fantastic ideas around online for great healthy snacks for your kids and lots of them are absolutely gorgeous to look at and very insta-worthy but I'm not going to talk through those ideas here you can google those yourself. instead I'm going to advocate for the approach which kept me sane with my own kids and which I've also used in school which is a pick and mix snack approach. It's not rocket science, it's absolutely not my invention, but I do hope it will be helpful.
So I'm not talking about Woolworths pick and mix, unfortunately, but I'm also not talking about the kind of pick and mix that you see in those gorgeous reels with the incredible batch prepping mums usually in America with their huge American fridges, and they make up these beautiful baskets and boxes of little pouches of different items for their kids, and they've got cute labels with the children's names on them and these tiny little packs. I mean, if that's you, all power to you, I bow down to your effort and enthusiasm, and you absolutely don't need this episode, you can skip it, but I did not have the budget or the time, nor the fridge space, or the head space, frankly, for that matter to do things quite like that.
So what I'm talking about is a much more low-key version of that, more budget friendly, less individual packaging too.
In one of my jobs I set up a tuck shop at a primary school and we used this pick and mix approach there. It was a whole project using year fives to serve food and do business skills and I will do an episode on that at some point because it was actually really great fun. But the basic idea was to have three items a day on offer and children could choose from them. We encouraged them to have either two or three items. Broadly speaking there was always one food that was a starchy carbohydrate type food, one that was a good source of protein and one fruit or veg.
So for example, we might have had half slices of bagel, quarter slices of ham and some apple pieces. Or we might have had a quarter wrap, cream cheese and strawberries or one of their favourites was always popcorn, sunflower seeds and raisins.
Now I'm not suggesting obviously that you do that at home every day, God forbid, but just use that basic idea to get into the fridge and cupboard a selection of things each week that are in these three rough groups. It doesn't have to be that children have all three at every snack. Sometimes when children are asking for a snack, especially quite close to a meal time, a piece of fruit on its own is perfectly good enough.
But when you can, a snack that has a bit of balance has a better chance of keeping them satisfied until the next meal. So the idea is to get in three to five items from each of those three groups when you do your food shop, so that during that week, either you or your children can put together some different combinations from the items to make up some balanced snacks. And then the next week, keep some of the favourites and swap out some of the others for different ones for a bit of variety.
So I'll run through some of the ideas that I've used either with my own kids or at the school and I'll put the list in a show note so that you can come over there and jot down some next time you go shopping if you like the idea. Most of them are pretty easy to put together or you can prep some of them in Tupperwares for kids to assemble for themselves.
So here are the suggestions roughly in those three groups.
So in the broadly starchy carbs group you've got obvious things like toast and crackers but also things like bagels, English muffins in halves are quite nice, pitas cut up into little strips, breadsticks are great for nibbling from one end to the other as long as they're not a very salty one, similarly with pretzels, things like rice cakes and oat cakes, wraps which you can have whole wraps or those mini wraps or cut them into quarters. Handfuls of dry cereal are really good if they're a higher fibre, lower sugar sort of cereal popcorn's great, you can either pop your own or you can get the microwave stuff
I recently saw a brilliant blog post from Nutrition for Kids that I'll link to in the show notes where they used ice cream cones to pile things inside of. That was really cool. So that's your sort of broadly starchy components.
And then for your more protein rich group, the obvious ones are things like cheese or ham, there's also things like hummus or other kind of beany spreads. S mall yogurts can be great, obviously keeping an on the sugar levels on the individual yogurts but they can be a great snack. Handfuls of nuts like cashews, almonds are great or seeds like sunflower seeds or pumpkin seeds or a mixture of the two. Cream cheese is great for spreading on stuff but also for gluing things together and the same with peanut butter or almond butter. Obviously you can get those little individual cheeses but you can just chop up little cubes of cheese yourself. And the same with things like leftover cooked meats, ⁓ also things like those little chicken satay's, you can buy those in the shops already made if you want to. And then tinned tuna or salmon are great because you can just keep them in the cupboard you don't need to do anything with them and and then a spoonful of those are great on a snack. And then also hard-boiled eggs, if your children like hard-boiled eggs you can cook a batch up at the weekend and keep them in the fridge and they're ready to go.
If you've got vegetarians in the house, then air fried chickpeas that you just make up at the weekend and put into a container are fantastic. And also those mini falafel are brilliant.
Milkshake or hot chocolate contains a decent amount of dairy milk or something like a soya milk that has slightly higher protein in or things like Actimel or the drinking yogurts can be great too. Again keep an eye on the sugar but loads of those have got a decent amount of protein and some good bacteria to boot.
So that's the sort of protein-y group.
And then finally your fruit or veg group. I don't need to tell you what fruit and veg looks like. But here are some suggestions of ones you might not have thought of. So obviously, you you've got your favourites like apples, bananas, carrot sticks, celery, cucumber. Pepper strips are great to prep ahead. Sugar snap peas or mange tout are usually pretty popular. Cherry tomatoes, easy peel or satsumas. Things like grapes, sultanas, raisins or apricots.
Don't overlook canned fruit, canned pineapple or peaches, if you can get them in juice rather than in syrup, are brilliant.
Frozen berries are also great and they're usually a lot cheaper. You can also freeze your own grapes or berries and you can eat them from frozen. Obviously keep an eye on choking hazards with younger children but I'll link in the show notes to the episode where we talked about freezing berries.
Bananas are obviously great just as they are but they're also really great frozen. You can dip them in a bit of dark chocolate if you want to, can shove them on a stick or you can blend them into what they call nice cream but basically ice cream. Stick some chocolate chips in it, jobs a good'un
And then for on the go, there's some convenience versions of some of these things. So like pouches of puree or smoothie. Do check the labels on those a lot of them do contain an awful lot of sugar and not as much fruit as you'd hope, but some of them are really great.
And the same goes for jelly, you can get low sugar ones in the shop or you can make your own at home you can make them with fruit juice with either gelatin or agar-agar if you're a vegetarian and they can be great for mixing with fruit to make it more fun.
So there's some suggestions for the fruit and veg group.
So obviously that was a huge list, I'm not suggesting you buy all of those things. But like I say, it's just some ideas to be able to pick out a few each week to assemble yourself or your child to assemble their own, depending on their age and stage. So prep anything that needs to be prepped in advance to be tempting, like carrot sticks or pita slices, and pop them in whatever containers works for you. If you want to have an area of the fridge and a tray on the counter for this week's snacks, you can do if you want to, or could have a little list so that everybody knows what's available to choose from this week.
And as a bonus, this approach actually does build familiarity for children, even with the foods that they don't choose, because they have to consider them each time they don't choose them.
If you really want to, can obviously assemble some of these ingredients beforehand So some examples of that would be mixing some of the dried ingredients together into a trail mix or those cute little hummus snack jars that you see online where you put a bit of hummus in the bottom and then you stick your carrot sticks and pepper slices in on top and then seal the jar up and then people can take them out and dip them in or things like quesadillas or mini muffin pizzas where you're using that starchy base but you're putting a bit of tomato puree in, a little bit of the cheese and one of your vegetables.
So there are some interesting things you can make from some of these ingredients, but honestly, a lot of them can just be people grabbing a handful of each on a plate to make up an easy picky snack.
So I hope you like this pick and mix approach to snack provision. The good thing is it means you only have to think about it once per week and then after that everybody knows what the ingredients are to choose from this week. I'll leave it up to you how you put it into practice whether it's having a pick and mix list for your kids to really get involved with or on busy or tired weeks honestly just using these lists to make your shopping list easier even if you don't do anything special with them. Let me know how you get on and what weird combinations of pick and mix your children come up with I would love to hear. And I'll see you on Monday and in the meantime, happy eating.
And then for your more protein rich group, the obvious ones are things like cheese or ham, there's also things like hummus or other kind of beany spreads. S mall yogurts can be great, obviously keeping an on the sugar levels on the individual yogurts but they can be a great snack. Handfuls of nuts like cashews, almonds are great or seeds like sunflower seeds or pumpkin seeds or a mixture of the two. Cream cheese is great for spreading on stuff but also for gluing things together and the same with peanut butter or almond butter. Obviously you can get those little individual cheeses but you can just chop up little cubes of cheese yourself. And the same with things like leftover cooked meats, ⁓ also things like those little chicken satay's, you can buy those in the shops already made if you want to. And then tinned tuna or salmon are great because you can just keep them in the cupboard you don't need to do anything with them and and then a spoonful of those are great on a snack. And then also hard-boiled eggs, if your children like hard-boiled eggs you can cook a batch up at the weekend and keep them in the fridge and they're ready to go.
Joanne Roach (00:13)
Hello and welcome to the Food for Kids podcast. I'm Joanne from the Foodies. Today is the first full week of summer holidays for families in England and most of the UK is pretty similar. And as the name, The Six Weeks Holidays suggests, for most families that means somewhere in the region of 40 to 45 days of having the kids at home. There are lots of fun things to do, memories to make, school runs to not miss at all, but there's also quite a lot of work juggling to do, lots of keeping spirits up and activities and boredom and lots and lots and lots of food. So it's nice to not have to think about before school breakfast and packed lunches or dinner money accounts for a bit unless you have a holiday club to go to.
But on the other hand, for many families there is a house full of small people needing to be fed around the clock and the main thing that parents complain about is the constant need for snacks. Not surprising because if you have two kids at home eating two or three snacks a day as well as their meals, this summer you will be providing something in the region of 160 to 250 snacks before they go back to school. You don't obviously want them all to end up being crisps or biscuits and on the other hand you don't want to spend summer with one arm chained to the fridge. So let's come up with some ideas to try and make life a little bit easier, little bit tastier and a little bit healthier with some snack ideas. So let's get into it!
Joanne Roach (01:35)
There are loads of fantastic ideas around online for great healthy snacks for your kids and lots of them are absolutely gorgeous to look at and very insta-worthy but I'm not going to talk through those ideas here you can google those yourself. instead I'm going to advocate for the approach which kept me sane with my own kids and which I've also used in school which is a pick and mix snack approach. It's not rocket science, it's absolutely not my invention, but I do hope it will be helpful.
So I'm not talking about Woolworths pick and mix, unfortunately, but I'm also not talking about the kind of pick and mix that you see in those gorgeous reels with the incredible batch prepping mums usually in America with their huge American fridges, and they make up these beautiful baskets and boxes of little pouches of different items for their kids, and they've got cute labels with the children's names on them and these tiny little packs. I mean, if that's you, all power to you, I bow down to your effort and enthusiasm, and you absolutely don't need this episode, you can skip it, but I did not have the budget or the time, nor the fridge space, or the head space, frankly, for that matter to do things quite like that.
So what I'm talking about is a much more low-key version of that, more budget friendly, less individual packaging too.
In one of my jobs I set up a tuck shop at a primary school and we used this pick and mix approach there. It was a whole project using year fives to serve food and do business skills and I will do an episode on that at some point because it was actually really great fun. But the basic idea was to have three items a day on offer and children could choose from them. We encouraged them to have either two or three items. Broadly speaking there was always one food that was a starchy carbohydrate type food, one that was a good source of protein and one fruit or veg.
So for example, we might have had half slices of bagel, quarter slices of ham and some apple pieces. Or we might have had a quarter wrap, cream cheese and strawberries or one of their favourites was always popcorn, sunflower seeds and raisins.
Now I'm not suggesting obviously that you do that at home every day, God forbid, but just use that basic idea to get into the fridge and cupboard a selection of things each week that are in these three rough groups. It doesn't have to be that children have all three at every snack. Sometimes when children are asking for a snack, especially quite close to a meal time, a piece of fruit on its own is perfectly good enough.
But when you can, a snack that has a bit of balance has a better chance of keeping them satisfied until the next meal. So the idea is to get in three to five items from each of those three groups when you do your food shop, so that during that week, either you or your children can put together some different combinations from the items to make up some balanced snacks. And then the next week, keep some of the favourites and swap out some of the others for different ones for a bit of variety.
So I'll run through some of the ideas that I've used either with my own kids or at the school and I'll put the list in a show note so that you can come over there and jot down some next time you go shopping if you like the idea. Most of them are pretty easy to put together or you can prep some of them in Tupperwares for kids to assemble for themselves.
So here are the suggestions roughly in those three groups.
So in the broadly starchy carbs group you've got obvious things like toast and crackers but also things like bagels, English muffins in halves are quite nice, pitas cut up into little strips, breadsticks are great for nibbling from one end to the other as long as they're not a very salty one, similarly with pretzels, things like rice cakes and oat cakes, wraps which you can have whole wraps or those mini wraps or cut them into quarters. Handfuls of dry cereal are really good if they're a higher fibre, lower sugar sort of cereal popcorn's great, you can either pop your own or you can get the microwave stuff
I recently saw a brilliant blog post from Nutrition for Kids that I'll link to in the show notes where they used ice cream cones to pile things inside of. That was really cool. So that's your sort of broadly starchy components.
And then for your more protein rich group, the obvious ones are things like cheese or ham, there's also things like hummus or other kind of beany spreads. S mall yogurts can be great, obviously keeping an on the sugar levels on the individual yogurts but they can be a great snack. Handfuls of nuts like cashews, almonds are great or seeds like sunflower seeds or pumpkin seeds or a mixture of the two. Cream cheese is great for spreading on stuff but also for gluing things together and the same with peanut butter or almond butter. Obviously you can get those little individual cheeses but you can just chop up little cubes of cheese yourself. And the same with things like leftover cooked meats, ⁓ also things like those little chicken satay's, you can buy those in the shops already made if you want to. And then tinned tuna or salmon are great because you can just keep them in the cupboard you don't need to do anything with them and and then a spoonful of those are great on a snack. And then also hard-boiled eggs, if your children like hard-boiled eggs you can cook a batch up at the weekend and keep them in the fridge and they're ready to go.
If you've got vegetarians in the house, then air fried chickpeas that you just make up at the weekend and put into a container are fantastic. And also those mini falafel are brilliant.
Milkshake or hot chocolate contains a decent amount of dairy milk or something like a soya milk that has slightly higher protein in or things like Actimel or the drinking yogurts can be great too. Again keep an eye on the sugar but loads of those have got a decent amount of protein and some good bacteria to boot.
So that's the sort of protein-y group.
And then finally your fruit or veg group. I don't need to tell you what fruit and veg looks like. But here are some suggestions of ones you might not have thought of. So obviously, you you've got your favourites like apples, bananas, carrot sticks, celery, cucumber. Pepper strips are great to prep ahead. Sugar snap peas or mange tout are usually pretty popular. Cherry tomatoes, easy peel or satsumas. Things like grapes, sultanas, raisins or apricots.
Don't overlook canned fruit, canned pineapple or peaches, if you can get them in juice rather than in syrup, are brilliant.
Frozen berries are also great and they're usually a lot cheaper. You can also freeze your own grapes or berries and you can eat them from frozen. Obviously keep an eye on choking hazards with younger children but I'll link in the show notes to the episode where we talked about freezing berries.
Bananas are obviously great just as they are but they're also really great frozen. You can dip them in a bit of dark chocolate if you want to, can shove them on a stick or you can blend them into what they call nice cream but basically ice cream. Stick some chocolate chips in it, jobs a good'un
And then for on the go, there's some convenience versions of some of these things. So like pouches of puree or smoothie. Do check the labels on those a lot of them do contain an awful lot of sugar and not as much fruit as you'd hope, but some of them are really great.
And the same goes for jelly, you can get low sugar ones in the shop or you can make your own at home you can make them with fruit juice with either gelatin or agar-agar if you're a vegetarian and they can be great for mixing with fruit to make it more fun.
So there's some suggestions for the fruit and veg group.
So obviously that was a huge list, I'm not suggesting you buy all of those things. But like I say, it's just some ideas to be able to pick out a few each week to assemble yourself or your child to assemble their own, depending on their age and stage. So prep anything that needs to be prepped in advance to be tempting, like carrot sticks or pita slices, and pop them in whatever containers works for you. If you want to have an area of the fridge and a tray on the counter for this week's snacks, you can do if you want to, or could have a little list so that everybody knows what's available to choose from this week.
And as a bonus, this approach actually does build familiarity for children, even with the foods that they don't choose, because they have to consider them each time they don't choose them.
If you really want to, can obviously assemble some of these ingredients beforehand So some examples of that would be mixing some of the dried ingredients together into a trail mix or those cute little hummus snack jars that you see online where you put a bit of hummus in the bottom and then you stick your carrot sticks and pepper slices in on top and then seal the jar up and then people can take them out and dip them in or things like quesadillas or mini muffin pizzas where you're using that starchy base but you're putting a bit of tomato puree in, a little bit of the cheese and one of your vegetables.
So there are some interesting things you can make from some of these ingredients, but honestly, a lot of them can just be people grabbing a handful of each on a plate to make up an easy picky snack.
So I hope you like this pick and mix approach to snack provision. The good thing is it means you only have to think about it once per week and then after that everybody knows what the ingredients are to choose from this week. I'll leave it up to you how you put it into practice whether it's having a pick and mix list for your kids to really get involved with or on busy or tired weeks honestly just using these lists to make your shopping list easier even if you don't do anything special with them. Let me know how you get on and what weird combinations of pick and mix your children come up with I would love to hear. And I'll see you on Monday and in the meantime, happy eating.
If you've got vegetarians in the house, then air fried chickpeas that you just make up at the weekend and put into a container are fantastic. And also those mini falafel are brilliant.
Joanne Roach (00:13)
Hello and welcome to the Food for Kids podcast. I'm Joanne from the Foodies. Today is the first full week of summer holidays for families in England and most of the UK is pretty similar. And as the name, The Six Weeks Holidays suggests, for most families that means somewhere in the region of 40 to 45 days of having the kids at home. There are lots of fun things to do, memories to make, school runs to not miss at all, but there's also quite a lot of work juggling to do, lots of keeping spirits up and activities and boredom and lots and lots and lots of food. So it's nice to not have to think about before school breakfast and packed lunches or dinner money accounts for a bit unless you have a holiday club to go to.
But on the other hand, for many families there is a house full of small people needing to be fed around the clock and the main thing that parents complain about is the constant need for snacks. Not surprising because if you have two kids at home eating two or three snacks a day as well as their meals, this summer you will be providing something in the region of 160 to 250 snacks before they go back to school. You don't obviously want them all to end up being crisps or biscuits and on the other hand you don't want to spend summer with one arm chained to the fridge. So let's come up with some ideas to try and make life a little bit easier, little bit tastier and a little bit healthier with some snack ideas. So let's get into it!
Joanne Roach (01:35)
There are loads of fantastic ideas around online for great healthy snacks for your kids and lots of them are absolutely gorgeous to look at and very insta-worthy but I'm not going to talk through those ideas here you can google those yourself. instead I'm going to advocate for the approach which kept me sane with my own kids and which I've also used in school which is a pick and mix snack approach. It's not rocket science, it's absolutely not my invention, but I do hope it will be helpful.
So I'm not talking about Woolworths pick and mix, unfortunately, but I'm also not talking about the kind of pick and mix that you see in those gorgeous reels with the incredible batch prepping mums usually in America with their huge American fridges, and they make up these beautiful baskets and boxes of little pouches of different items for their kids, and they've got cute labels with the children's names on them and these tiny little packs. I mean, if that's you, all power to you, I bow down to your effort and enthusiasm, and you absolutely don't need this episode, you can skip it, but I did not have the budget or the time, nor the fridge space, or the head space, frankly, for that matter to do things quite like that.
So what I'm talking about is a much more low-key version of that, more budget friendly, less individual packaging too.
In one of my jobs I set up a tuck shop at a primary school and we used this pick and mix approach there. It was a whole project using year fives to serve food and do business skills and I will do an episode on that at some point because it was actually really great fun. But the basic idea was to have three items a day on offer and children could choose from them. We encouraged them to have either two or three items. Broadly speaking there was always one food that was a starchy carbohydrate type food, one that was a good source of protein and one fruit or veg.
So for example, we might have had half slices of bagel, quarter slices of ham and some apple pieces. Or we might have had a quarter wrap, cream cheese and strawberries or one of their favourites was always popcorn, sunflower seeds and raisins.
Now I'm not suggesting obviously that you do that at home every day, God forbid, but just use that basic idea to get into the fridge and cupboard a selection of things each week that are in these three rough groups. It doesn't have to be that children have all three at every snack. Sometimes when children are asking for a snack, especially quite close to a meal time, a piece of fruit on its own is perfectly good enough.
But when you can, a snack that has a bit of balance has a better chance of keeping them satisfied until the next meal. So the idea is to get in three to five items from each of those three groups when you do your food shop, so that during that week, either you or your children can put together some different combinations from the items to make up some balanced snacks. And then the next week, keep some of the favourites and swap out some of the others for different ones for a bit of variety.
So I'll run through some of the ideas that I've used either with my own kids or at the school and I'll put the list in a show note so that you can come over there and jot down some next time you go shopping if you like the idea. Most of them are pretty easy to put together or you can prep some of them in Tupperwares for kids to assemble for themselves.
So here are the suggestions roughly in those three groups.
So in the broadly starchy carbs group you've got obvious things like toast and crackers but also things like bagels, English muffins in halves are quite nice, pitas cut up into little strips, breadsticks are great for nibbling from one end to the other as long as they're not a very salty one, similarly with pretzels, things like rice cakes and oat cakes, wraps which you can have whole wraps or those mini wraps or cut them into quarters. Handfuls of dry cereal are really good if they're a higher fibre, lower sugar sort of cereal popcorn's great, you can either pop your own or you can get the microwave stuff
I recently saw a brilliant blog post from Nutrition for Kids that I'll link to in the show notes where they used ice cream cones to pile things inside of. That was really cool. So that's your sort of broadly starchy components.
And then for your more protein rich group, the obvious ones are things like cheese or ham, there's also things like hummus or other kind of beany spreads. S mall yogurts can be great, obviously keeping an on the sugar levels on the individual yogurts but they can be a great snack. Handfuls of nuts like cashews, almonds are great or seeds like sunflower seeds or pumpkin seeds or a mixture of the two. Cream cheese is great for spreading on stuff but also for gluing things together and the same with peanut butter or almond butter. Obviously you can get those little individual cheeses but you can just chop up little cubes of cheese yourself. And the same with things like leftover cooked meats, ⁓ also things like those little chicken satay's, you can buy those in the shops already made if you want to. And then tinned tuna or salmon are great because you can just keep them in the cupboard you don't need to do anything with them and and then a spoonful of those are great on a snack. And then also hard-boiled eggs, if your children like hard-boiled eggs you can cook a batch up at the weekend and keep them in the fridge and they're ready to go.
If you've got vegetarians in the house, then air fried chickpeas that you just make up at the weekend and put into a container are fantastic. And also those mini falafel are brilliant.
Milkshake or hot chocolate contains a decent amount of dairy milk or something like a soya milk that has slightly higher protein in or things like Actimel or the drinking yogurts can be great too. Again keep an eye on the sugar but loads of those have got a decent amount of protein and some good bacteria to boot.
So that's the sort of protein-y group.
And then finally your fruit or veg group. I don't need to tell you what fruit and veg looks like. But here are some suggestions of ones you might not have thought of. So obviously, you you've got your favourites like apples, bananas, carrot sticks, celery, cucumber. Pepper strips are great to prep ahead. Sugar snap peas or mange tout are usually pretty popular. Cherry tomatoes, easy peel or satsumas. Things like grapes, sultanas, raisins or apricots.
Don't overlook canned fruit, canned pineapple or peaches, if you can get them in juice rather than in syrup, are brilliant.
Frozen berries are also great and they're usually a lot cheaper. You can also freeze your own grapes or berries and you can eat them from frozen. Obviously keep an eye on choking hazards with younger children but I'll link in the show notes to the episode where we talked about freezing berries.
Bananas are obviously great just as they are but they're also really great frozen. You can dip them in a bit of dark chocolate if you want to, can shove them on a stick or you can blend them into what they call nice cream but basically ice cream. Stick some chocolate chips in it, jobs a good'un
And then for on the go, there's some convenience versions of some of these things. So like pouches of puree or smoothie. Do check the labels on those a lot of them do contain an awful lot of sugar and not as much fruit as you'd hope, but some of them are really great.
And the same goes for jelly, you can get low sugar ones in the shop or you can make your own at home you can make them with fruit juice with either gelatin or agar-agar if you're a vegetarian and they can be great for mixing with fruit to make it more fun.
So there's some suggestions for the fruit and veg group.
So obviously that was a huge list, I'm not suggesting you buy all of those things. But like I say, it's just some ideas to be able to pick out a few each week to assemble yourself or your child to assemble their own, depending on their age and stage. So prep anything that needs to be prepped in advance to be tempting, like carrot sticks or pita slices, and pop them in whatever containers works for you. If you want to have an area of the fridge and a tray on the counter for this week's snacks, you can do if you want to, or could have a little list so that everybody knows what's available to choose from this week.
And as a bonus, this approach actually does build familiarity for children, even with the foods that they don't choose, because they have to consider them each time they don't choose them.
If you really want to, can obviously assemble some of these ingredients beforehand So some examples of that would be mixing some of the dried ingredients together into a trail mix or those cute little hummus snack jars that you see online where you put a bit of hummus in the bottom and then you stick your carrot sticks and pepper slices in on top and then seal the jar up and then people can take them out and dip them in or things like quesadillas or mini muffin pizzas where you're using that starchy base but you're putting a bit of tomato puree in, a little bit of the cheese and one of your vegetables.
So there are some interesting things you can make from some of these ingredients, but honestly, a lot of them can just be people grabbing a handful of each on a plate to make up an easy picky snack.
So I hope you like this pick and mix approach to snack provision. The good thing is it means you only have to think about it once per week and then after that everybody knows what the ingredients are to choose from this week. I'll leave it up to you how you put it into practice whether it's having a pick and mix list for your kids to really get involved with or on busy or tired weeks honestly just using these lists to make your shopping list easier even if you don't do anything special with them. Let me know how you get on and what weird combinations of pick and mix your children come up with I would love to hear. And I'll see you on Monday and in the meantime, happy eating.
Milkshake or hot chocolate contains a decent amount of dairy milk or something like a soya milk that has slightly higher protein in or things like Actimel or the drinking yogurts can be great too. Again keep an eye on the sugar but loads of those have got a decent amount of protein and some good bacteria to boot.
Joanne Roach (00:13)
Hello and welcome to the Food for Kids podcast. I'm Joanne from the Foodies. Today is the first full week of summer holidays for families in England and most of the UK is pretty similar. And as the name, The Six Weeks Holidays suggests, for most families that means somewhere in the region of 40 to 45 days of having the kids at home. There are lots of fun things to do, memories to make, school runs to not miss at all, but there's also quite a lot of work juggling to do, lots of keeping spirits up and activities and boredom and lots and lots and lots of food. So it's nice to not have to think about before school breakfast and packed lunches or dinner money accounts for a bit unless you have a holiday club to go to.
But on the other hand, for many families there is a house full of small people needing to be fed around the clock and the main thing that parents complain about is the constant need for snacks. Not surprising because if you have two kids at home eating two or three snacks a day as well as their meals, this summer you will be providing something in the region of 160 to 250 snacks before they go back to school. You don't obviously want them all to end up being crisps or biscuits and on the other hand you don't want to spend summer with one arm chained to the fridge. So let's come up with some ideas to try and make life a little bit easier, little bit tastier and a little bit healthier with some snack ideas. So let's get into it!
Joanne Roach (01:35)
There are loads of fantastic ideas around online for great healthy snacks for your kids and lots of them are absolutely gorgeous to look at and very insta-worthy but I'm not going to talk through those ideas here you can google those yourself. instead I'm going to advocate for the approach which kept me sane with my own kids and which I've also used in school which is a pick and mix snack approach. It's not rocket science, it's absolutely not my invention, but I do hope it will be helpful.
So I'm not talking about Woolworths pick and mix, unfortunately, but I'm also not talking about the kind of pick and mix that you see in those gorgeous reels with the incredible batch prepping mums usually in America with their huge American fridges, and they make up these beautiful baskets and boxes of little pouches of different items for their kids, and they've got cute labels with the children's names on them and these tiny little packs. I mean, if that's you, all power to you, I bow down to your effort and enthusiasm, and you absolutely don't need this episode, you can skip it, but I did not have the budget or the time, nor the fridge space, or the head space, frankly, for that matter to do things quite like that.
So what I'm talking about is a much more low-key version of that, more budget friendly, less individual packaging too.
In one of my jobs I set up a tuck shop at a primary school and we used this pick and mix approach there. It was a whole project using year fives to serve food and do business skills and I will do an episode on that at some point because it was actually really great fun. But the basic idea was to have three items a day on offer and children could choose from them. We encouraged them to have either two or three items. Broadly speaking there was always one food that was a starchy carbohydrate type food, one that was a good source of protein and one fruit or veg.
So for example, we might have had half slices of bagel, quarter slices of ham and some apple pieces. Or we might have had a quarter wrap, cream cheese and strawberries or one of their favourites was always popcorn, sunflower seeds and raisins.
Now I'm not suggesting obviously that you do that at home every day, God forbid, but just use that basic idea to get into the fridge and cupboard a selection of things each week that are in these three rough groups. It doesn't have to be that children have all three at every snack. Sometimes when children are asking for a snack, especially quite close to a meal time, a piece of fruit on its own is perfectly good enough.
But when you can, a snack that has a bit of balance has a better chance of keeping them satisfied until the next meal. So the idea is to get in three to five items from each of those three groups when you do your food shop, so that during that week, either you or your children can put together some different combinations from the items to make up some balanced snacks. And then the next week, keep some of the favourites and swap out some of the others for different ones for a bit of variety.
So I'll run through some of the ideas that I've used either with my own kids or at the school and I'll put the list in a show note so that you can come over there and jot down some next time you go shopping if you like the idea. Most of them are pretty easy to put together or you can prep some of them in Tupperwares for kids to assemble for themselves.
So here are the suggestions roughly in those three groups.
So in the broadly starchy carbs group you've got obvious things like toast and crackers but also things like bagels, English muffins in halves are quite nice, pitas cut up into little strips, breadsticks are great for nibbling from one end to the other as long as they're not a very salty one, similarly with pretzels, things like rice cakes and oat cakes, wraps which you can have whole wraps or those mini wraps or cut them into quarters. Handfuls of dry cereal are really good if they're a higher fibre, lower sugar sort of cereal popcorn's great, you can either pop your own or you can get the microwave stuff
I recently saw a brilliant blog post from Nutrition for Kids that I'll link to in the show notes where they used ice cream cones to pile things inside of. That was really cool. So that's your sort of broadly starchy components.
And then for your more protein rich group, the obvious ones are things like cheese or ham, there's also things like hummus or other kind of beany spreads. S mall yogurts can be great, obviously keeping an on the sugar levels on the individual yogurts but they can be a great snack. Handfuls of nuts like cashews, almonds are great or seeds like sunflower seeds or pumpkin seeds or a mixture of the two. Cream cheese is great for spreading on stuff but also for gluing things together and the same with peanut butter or almond butter. Obviously you can get those little individual cheeses but you can just chop up little cubes of cheese yourself. And the same with things like leftover cooked meats, ⁓ also things like those little chicken satay's, you can buy those in the shops already made if you want to. And then tinned tuna or salmon are great because you can just keep them in the cupboard you don't need to do anything with them and and then a spoonful of those are great on a snack. And then also hard-boiled eggs, if your children like hard-boiled eggs you can cook a batch up at the weekend and keep them in the fridge and they're ready to go.
If you've got vegetarians in the house, then air fried chickpeas that you just make up at the weekend and put into a container are fantastic. And also those mini falafel are brilliant.
Milkshake or hot chocolate contains a decent amount of dairy milk or something like a soya milk that has slightly higher protein in or things like Actimel or the drinking yogurts can be great too. Again keep an eye on the sugar but loads of those have got a decent amount of protein and some good bacteria to boot.
So that's the sort of protein-y group.
And then finally your fruit or veg group. I don't need to tell you what fruit and veg looks like. But here are some suggestions of ones you might not have thought of. So obviously, you you've got your favourites like apples, bananas, carrot sticks, celery, cucumber. Pepper strips are great to prep ahead. Sugar snap peas or mange tout are usually pretty popular. Cherry tomatoes, easy peel or satsumas. Things like grapes, sultanas, raisins or apricots.
Don't overlook canned fruit, canned pineapple or peaches, if you can get them in juice rather than in syrup, are brilliant.
Frozen berries are also great and they're usually a lot cheaper. You can also freeze your own grapes or berries and you can eat them from frozen. Obviously keep an eye on choking hazards with younger children but I'll link in the show notes to the episode where we talked about freezing berries.
Bananas are obviously great just as they are but they're also really great frozen. You can dip them in a bit of dark chocolate if you want to, can shove them on a stick or you can blend them into what they call nice cream but basically ice cream. Stick some chocolate chips in it, jobs a good'un
And then for on the go, there's some convenience versions of some of these things. So like pouches of puree or smoothie. Do check the labels on those a lot of them do contain an awful lot of sugar and not as much fruit as you'd hope, but some of them are really great.
And the same goes for jelly, you can get low sugar ones in the shop or you can make your own at home you can make them with fruit juice with either gelatin or agar-agar if you're a vegetarian and they can be great for mixing with fruit to make it more fun.
So there's some suggestions for the fruit and veg group.
So obviously that was a huge list, I'm not suggesting you buy all of those things. But like I say, it's just some ideas to be able to pick out a few each week to assemble yourself or your child to assemble their own, depending on their age and stage. So prep anything that needs to be prepped in advance to be tempting, like carrot sticks or pita slices, and pop them in whatever containers works for you. If you want to have an area of the fridge and a tray on the counter for this week's snacks, you can do if you want to, or could have a little list so that everybody knows what's available to choose from this week.
And as a bonus, this approach actually does build familiarity for children, even with the foods that they don't choose, because they have to consider them each time they don't choose them.
If you really want to, can obviously assemble some of these ingredients beforehand So some examples of that would be mixing some of the dried ingredients together into a trail mix or those cute little hummus snack jars that you see online where you put a bit of hummus in the bottom and then you stick your carrot sticks and pepper slices in on top and then seal the jar up and then people can take them out and dip them in or things like quesadillas or mini muffin pizzas where you're using that starchy base but you're putting a bit of tomato puree in, a little bit of the cheese and one of your vegetables.
So there are some interesting things you can make from some of these ingredients, but honestly, a lot of them can just be people grabbing a handful of each on a plate to make up an easy picky snack.
So I hope you like this pick and mix approach to snack provision. The good thing is it means you only have to think about it once per week and then after that everybody knows what the ingredients are to choose from this week. I'll leave it up to you how you put it into practice whether it's having a pick and mix list for your kids to really get involved with or on busy or tired weeks honestly just using these lists to make your shopping list easier even if you don't do anything special with them. Let me know how you get on and what weird combinations of pick and mix your children come up with I would love to hear. And I'll see you on Monday and in the meantime, happy eating.
So that's the sort of protein-y group.
Joanne Roach (00:13)
Hello and welcome to the Food for Kids podcast. I'm Joanne from the Foodies. Today is the first full week of summer holidays for families in England and most of the UK is pretty similar. And as the name, The Six Weeks Holidays suggests, for most families that means somewhere in the region of 40 to 45 days of having the kids at home. There are lots of fun things to do, memories to make, school runs to not miss at all, but there's also quite a lot of work juggling to do, lots of keeping spirits up and activities and boredom and lots and lots and lots of food. So it's nice to not have to think about before school breakfast and packed lunches or dinner money accounts for a bit unless you have a holiday club to go to.
But on the other hand, for many families there is a house full of small people needing to be fed around the clock and the main thing that parents complain about is the constant need for snacks. Not surprising because if you have two kids at home eating two or three snacks a day as well as their meals, this summer you will be providing something in the region of 160 to 250 snacks before they go back to school. You don't obviously want them all to end up being crisps or biscuits and on the other hand you don't want to spend summer with one arm chained to the fridge. So let's come up with some ideas to try and make life a little bit easier, little bit tastier and a little bit healthier with some snack ideas. So let's get into it!
Joanne Roach (01:35)
There are loads of fantastic ideas around online for great healthy snacks for your kids and lots of them are absolutely gorgeous to look at and very insta-worthy but I'm not going to talk through those ideas here you can google those yourself. instead I'm going to advocate for the approach which kept me sane with my own kids and which I've also used in school which is a pick and mix snack approach. It's not rocket science, it's absolutely not my invention, but I do hope it will be helpful.
So I'm not talking about Woolworths pick and mix, unfortunately, but I'm also not talking about the kind of pick and mix that you see in those gorgeous reels with the incredible batch prepping mums usually in America with their huge American fridges, and they make up these beautiful baskets and boxes of little pouches of different items for their kids, and they've got cute labels with the children's names on them and these tiny little packs. I mean, if that's you, all power to you, I bow down to your effort and enthusiasm, and you absolutely don't need this episode, you can skip it, but I did not have the budget or the time, nor the fridge space, or the head space, frankly, for that matter to do things quite like that.
So what I'm talking about is a much more low-key version of that, more budget friendly, less individual packaging too.
In one of my jobs I set up a tuck shop at a primary school and we used this pick and mix approach there. It was a whole project using year fives to serve food and do business skills and I will do an episode on that at some point because it was actually really great fun. But the basic idea was to have three items a day on offer and children could choose from them. We encouraged them to have either two or three items. Broadly speaking there was always one food that was a starchy carbohydrate type food, one that was a good source of protein and one fruit or veg.
So for example, we might have had half slices of bagel, quarter slices of ham and some apple pieces. Or we might have had a quarter wrap, cream cheese and strawberries or one of their favourites was always popcorn, sunflower seeds and raisins.
Now I'm not suggesting obviously that you do that at home every day, God forbid, but just use that basic idea to get into the fridge and cupboard a selection of things each week that are in these three rough groups. It doesn't have to be that children have all three at every snack. Sometimes when children are asking for a snack, especially quite close to a meal time, a piece of fruit on its own is perfectly good enough.
But when you can, a snack that has a bit of balance has a better chance of keeping them satisfied until the next meal. So the idea is to get in three to five items from each of those three groups when you do your food shop, so that during that week, either you or your children can put together some different combinations from the items to make up some balanced snacks. And then the next week, keep some of the favourites and swap out some of the others for different ones for a bit of variety.
So I'll run through some of the ideas that I've used either with my own kids or at the school and I'll put the list in a show note so that you can come over there and jot down some next time you go shopping if you like the idea. Most of them are pretty easy to put together or you can prep some of them in Tupperwares for kids to assemble for themselves.
So here are the suggestions roughly in those three groups.
So in the broadly starchy carbs group you've got obvious things like toast and crackers but also things like bagels, English muffins in halves are quite nice, pitas cut up into little strips, breadsticks are great for nibbling from one end to the other as long as they're not a very salty one, similarly with pretzels, things like rice cakes and oat cakes, wraps which you can have whole wraps or those mini wraps or cut them into quarters. Handfuls of dry cereal are really good if they're a higher fibre, lower sugar sort of cereal popcorn's great, you can either pop your own or you can get the microwave stuff
I recently saw a brilliant blog post from Nutrition for Kids that I'll link to in the show notes where they used ice cream cones to pile things inside of. That was really cool. So that's your sort of broadly starchy components.
And then for your more protein rich group, the obvious ones are things like cheese or ham, there's also things like hummus or other kind of beany spreads. S mall yogurts can be great, obviously keeping an on the sugar levels on the individual yogurts but they can be a great snack. Handfuls of nuts like cashews, almonds are great or seeds like sunflower seeds or pumpkin seeds or a mixture of the two. Cream cheese is great for spreading on stuff but also for gluing things together and the same with peanut butter or almond butter. Obviously you can get those little individual cheeses but you can just chop up little cubes of cheese yourself. And the same with things like leftover cooked meats, ⁓ also things like those little chicken satay's, you can buy those in the shops already made if you want to. And then tinned tuna or salmon are great because you can just keep them in the cupboard you don't need to do anything with them and and then a spoonful of those are great on a snack. And then also hard-boiled eggs, if your children like hard-boiled eggs you can cook a batch up at the weekend and keep them in the fridge and they're ready to go.
If you've got vegetarians in the house, then air fried chickpeas that you just make up at the weekend and put into a container are fantastic. And also those mini falafel are brilliant.
Milkshake or hot chocolate contains a decent amount of dairy milk or something like a soya milk that has slightly higher protein in or things like Actimel or the drinking yogurts can be great too. Again keep an eye on the sugar but loads of those have got a decent amount of protein and some good bacteria to boot.
So that's the sort of protein-y group.
And then finally your fruit or veg group. I don't need to tell you what fruit and veg looks like. But here are some suggestions of ones you might not have thought of. So obviously, you you've got your favourites like apples, bananas, carrot sticks, celery, cucumber. Pepper strips are great to prep ahead. Sugar snap peas or mange tout are usually pretty popular. Cherry tomatoes, easy peel or satsumas. Things like grapes, sultanas, raisins or apricots.
Don't overlook canned fruit, canned pineapple or peaches, if you can get them in juice rather than in syrup, are brilliant.
Frozen berries are also great and they're usually a lot cheaper. You can also freeze your own grapes or berries and you can eat them from frozen. Obviously keep an eye on choking hazards with younger children but I'll link in the show notes to the episode where we talked about freezing berries.
Bananas are obviously great just as they are but they're also really great frozen. You can dip them in a bit of dark chocolate if you want to, can shove them on a stick or you can blend them into what they call nice cream but basically ice cream. Stick some chocolate chips in it, jobs a good'un
And then for on the go, there's some convenience versions of some of these things. So like pouches of puree or smoothie. Do check the labels on those a lot of them do contain an awful lot of sugar and not as much fruit as you'd hope, but some of them are really great.
And the same goes for jelly, you can get low sugar ones in the shop or you can make your own at home you can make them with fruit juice with either gelatin or agar-agar if you're a vegetarian and they can be great for mixing with fruit to make it more fun.
So there's some suggestions for the fruit and veg group.
So obviously that was a huge list, I'm not suggesting you buy all of those things. But like I say, it's just some ideas to be able to pick out a few each week to assemble yourself or your child to assemble their own, depending on their age and stage. So prep anything that needs to be prepped in advance to be tempting, like carrot sticks or pita slices, and pop them in whatever containers works for you. If you want to have an area of the fridge and a tray on the counter for this week's snacks, you can do if you want to, or could have a little list so that everybody knows what's available to choose from this week.
And as a bonus, this approach actually does build familiarity for children, even with the foods that they don't choose, because they have to consider them each time they don't choose them.
If you really want to, can obviously assemble some of these ingredients beforehand So some examples of that would be mixing some of the dried ingredients together into a trail mix or those cute little hummus snack jars that you see online where you put a bit of hummus in the bottom and then you stick your carrot sticks and pepper slices in on top and then seal the jar up and then people can take them out and dip them in or things like quesadillas or mini muffin pizzas where you're using that starchy base but you're putting a bit of tomato puree in, a little bit of the cheese and one of your vegetables.
So there are some interesting things you can make from some of these ingredients, but honestly, a lot of them can just be people grabbing a handful of each on a plate to make up an easy picky snack.
So I hope you like this pick and mix approach to snack provision. The good thing is it means you only have to think about it once per week and then after that everybody knows what the ingredients are to choose from this week. I'll leave it up to you how you put it into practice whether it's having a pick and mix list for your kids to really get involved with or on busy or tired weeks honestly just using these lists to make your shopping list easier even if you don't do anything special with them. Let me know how you get on and what weird combinations of pick and mix your children come up with I would love to hear. And I'll see you on Monday and in the meantime, happy eating.
And then finally your fruit or veg group. I don't need to tell you what fruit and veg looks like. But here are some suggestions of ones you might not have thought of. So obviously, you you've got your favourites like apples, bananas, carrot sticks, celery, cucumber. Pepper strips are great to prep ahead. Sugar snap peas or mange tout are usually pretty popular. Cherry tomatoes, easy peel or satsumas. Things like grapes, sultanas, raisins or apricots.
Joanne Roach (00:13)
Hello and welcome to the Food for Kids podcast. I'm Joanne from the Foodies. Today is the first full week of summer holidays for families in England and most of the UK is pretty similar. And as the name, The Six Weeks Holidays suggests, for most families that means somewhere in the region of 40 to 45 days of having the kids at home. There are lots of fun things to do, memories to make, school runs to not miss at all, but there's also quite a lot of work juggling to do, lots of keeping spirits up and activities and boredom and lots and lots and lots of food. So it's nice to not have to think about before school breakfast and packed lunches or dinner money accounts for a bit unless you have a holiday club to go to.
But on the other hand, for many families there is a house full of small people needing to be fed around the clock and the main thing that parents complain about is the constant need for snacks. Not surprising because if you have two kids at home eating two or three snacks a day as well as their meals, this summer you will be providing something in the region of 160 to 250 snacks before they go back to school. You don't obviously want them all to end up being crisps or biscuits and on the other hand you don't want to spend summer with one arm chained to the fridge. So let's come up with some ideas to try and make life a little bit easier, little bit tastier and a little bit healthier with some snack ideas. So let's get into it!
Joanne Roach (01:35)
There are loads of fantastic ideas around online for great healthy snacks for your kids and lots of them are absolutely gorgeous to look at and very insta-worthy but I'm not going to talk through those ideas here you can google those yourself. instead I'm going to advocate for the approach which kept me sane with my own kids and which I've also used in school which is a pick and mix snack approach. It's not rocket science, it's absolutely not my invention, but I do hope it will be helpful.
So I'm not talking about Woolworths pick and mix, unfortunately, but I'm also not talking about the kind of pick and mix that you see in those gorgeous reels with the incredible batch prepping mums usually in America with their huge American fridges, and they make up these beautiful baskets and boxes of little pouches of different items for their kids, and they've got cute labels with the children's names on them and these tiny little packs. I mean, if that's you, all power to you, I bow down to your effort and enthusiasm, and you absolutely don't need this episode, you can skip it, but I did not have the budget or the time, nor the fridge space, or the head space, frankly, for that matter to do things quite like that.
So what I'm talking about is a much more low-key version of that, more budget friendly, less individual packaging too.
In one of my jobs I set up a tuck shop at a primary school and we used this pick and mix approach there. It was a whole project using year fives to serve food and do business skills and I will do an episode on that at some point because it was actually really great fun. But the basic idea was to have three items a day on offer and children could choose from them. We encouraged them to have either two or three items. Broadly speaking there was always one food that was a starchy carbohydrate type food, one that was a good source of protein and one fruit or veg.
So for example, we might have had half slices of bagel, quarter slices of ham and some apple pieces. Or we might have had a quarter wrap, cream cheese and strawberries or one of their favourites was always popcorn, sunflower seeds and raisins.
Now I'm not suggesting obviously that you do that at home every day, God forbid, but just use that basic idea to get into the fridge and cupboard a selection of things each week that are in these three rough groups. It doesn't have to be that children have all three at every snack. Sometimes when children are asking for a snack, especially quite close to a meal time, a piece of fruit on its own is perfectly good enough.
But when you can, a snack that has a bit of balance has a better chance of keeping them satisfied until the next meal. So the idea is to get in three to five items from each of those three groups when you do your food shop, so that during that week, either you or your children can put together some different combinations from the items to make up some balanced snacks. And then the next week, keep some of the favourites and swap out some of the others for different ones for a bit of variety.
So I'll run through some of the ideas that I've used either with my own kids or at the school and I'll put the list in a show note so that you can come over there and jot down some next time you go shopping if you like the idea. Most of them are pretty easy to put together or you can prep some of them in Tupperwares for kids to assemble for themselves.
So here are the suggestions roughly in those three groups.
So in the broadly starchy carbs group you've got obvious things like toast and crackers but also things like bagels, English muffins in halves are quite nice, pitas cut up into little strips, breadsticks are great for nibbling from one end to the other as long as they're not a very salty one, similarly with pretzels, things like rice cakes and oat cakes, wraps which you can have whole wraps or those mini wraps or cut them into quarters. Handfuls of dry cereal are really good if they're a higher fibre, lower sugar sort of cereal popcorn's great, you can either pop your own or you can get the microwave stuff
I recently saw a brilliant blog post from Nutrition for Kids that I'll link to in the show notes where they used ice cream cones to pile things inside of. That was really cool. So that's your sort of broadly starchy components.
And then for your more protein rich group, the obvious ones are things like cheese or ham, there's also things like hummus or other kind of beany spreads. S mall yogurts can be great, obviously keeping an on the sugar levels on the individual yogurts but they can be a great snack. Handfuls of nuts like cashews, almonds are great or seeds like sunflower seeds or pumpkin seeds or a mixture of the two. Cream cheese is great for spreading on stuff but also for gluing things together and the same with peanut butter or almond butter. Obviously you can get those little individual cheeses but you can just chop up little cubes of cheese yourself. And the same with things like leftover cooked meats, ⁓ also things like those little chicken satay's, you can buy those in the shops already made if you want to. And then tinned tuna or salmon are great because you can just keep them in the cupboard you don't need to do anything with them and and then a spoonful of those are great on a snack. And then also hard-boiled eggs, if your children like hard-boiled eggs you can cook a batch up at the weekend and keep them in the fridge and they're ready to go.
If you've got vegetarians in the house, then air fried chickpeas that you just make up at the weekend and put into a container are fantastic. And also those mini falafel are brilliant.
Milkshake or hot chocolate contains a decent amount of dairy milk or something like a soya milk that has slightly higher protein in or things like Actimel or the drinking yogurts can be great too. Again keep an eye on the sugar but loads of those have got a decent amount of protein and some good bacteria to boot.
So that's the sort of protein-y group.
And then finally your fruit or veg group. I don't need to tell you what fruit and veg looks like. But here are some suggestions of ones you might not have thought of. So obviously, you you've got your favourites like apples, bananas, carrot sticks, celery, cucumber. Pepper strips are great to prep ahead. Sugar snap peas or mange tout are usually pretty popular. Cherry tomatoes, easy peel or satsumas. Things like grapes, sultanas, raisins or apricots.
Don't overlook canned fruit, canned pineapple or peaches, if you can get them in juice rather than in syrup, are brilliant.
Frozen berries are also great and they're usually a lot cheaper. You can also freeze your own grapes or berries and you can eat them from frozen. Obviously keep an eye on choking hazards with younger children but I'll link in the show notes to the episode where we talked about freezing berries.
Bananas are obviously great just as they are but they're also really great frozen. You can dip them in a bit of dark chocolate if you want to, can shove them on a stick or you can blend them into what they call nice cream but basically ice cream. Stick some chocolate chips in it, jobs a good'un
And then for on the go, there's some convenience versions of some of these things. So like pouches of puree or smoothie. Do check the labels on those a lot of them do contain an awful lot of sugar and not as much fruit as you'd hope, but some of them are really great.
And the same goes for jelly, you can get low sugar ones in the shop or you can make your own at home you can make them with fruit juice with either gelatin or agar-agar if you're a vegetarian and they can be great for mixing with fruit to make it more fun.
So there's some suggestions for the fruit and veg group.
So obviously that was a huge list, I'm not suggesting you buy all of those things. But like I say, it's just some ideas to be able to pick out a few each week to assemble yourself or your child to assemble their own, depending on their age and stage. So prep anything that needs to be prepped in advance to be tempting, like carrot sticks or pita slices, and pop them in whatever containers works for you. If you want to have an area of the fridge and a tray on the counter for this week's snacks, you can do if you want to, or could have a little list so that everybody knows what's available to choose from this week.
And as a bonus, this approach actually does build familiarity for children, even with the foods that they don't choose, because they have to consider them each time they don't choose them.
If you really want to, can obviously assemble some of these ingredients beforehand So some examples of that would be mixing some of the dried ingredients together into a trail mix or those cute little hummus snack jars that you see online where you put a bit of hummus in the bottom and then you stick your carrot sticks and pepper slices in on top and then seal the jar up and then people can take them out and dip them in or things like quesadillas or mini muffin pizzas where you're using that starchy base but you're putting a bit of tomato puree in, a little bit of the cheese and one of your vegetables.
So there are some interesting things you can make from some of these ingredients, but honestly, a lot of them can just be people grabbing a handful of each on a plate to make up an easy picky snack.
So I hope you like this pick and mix approach to snack provision. The good thing is it means you only have to think about it once per week and then after that everybody knows what the ingredients are to choose from this week. I'll leave it up to you how you put it into practice whether it's having a pick and mix list for your kids to really get involved with or on busy or tired weeks honestly just using these lists to make your shopping list easier even if you don't do anything special with them. Let me know how you get on and what weird combinations of pick and mix your children come up with I would love to hear. And I'll see you on Monday and in the meantime, happy eating.
Don't overlook canned fruit, canned pineapple or peaches, if you can get them in juice rather than in syrup, are brilliant.
Joanne Roach (00:13)
Hello and welcome to the Food for Kids podcast. I'm Joanne from the Foodies. Today is the first full week of summer holidays for families in England and most of the UK is pretty similar. And as the name, The Six Weeks Holidays suggests, for most families that means somewhere in the region of 40 to 45 days of having the kids at home. There are lots of fun things to do, memories to make, school runs to not miss at all, but there's also quite a lot of work juggling to do, lots of keeping spirits up and activities and boredom and lots and lots and lots of food. So it's nice to not have to think about before school breakfast and packed lunches or dinner money accounts for a bit unless you have a holiday club to go to.
But on the other hand, for many families there is a house full of small people needing to be fed around the clock and the main thing that parents complain about is the constant need for snacks. Not surprising because if you have two kids at home eating two or three snacks a day as well as their meals, this summer you will be providing something in the region of 160 to 250 snacks before they go back to school. You don't obviously want them all to end up being crisps or biscuits and on the other hand you don't want to spend summer with one arm chained to the fridge. So let's come up with some ideas to try and make life a little bit easier, little bit tastier and a little bit healthier with some snack ideas. So let's get into it!
Joanne Roach (01:35)
There are loads of fantastic ideas around online for great healthy snacks for your kids and lots of them are absolutely gorgeous to look at and very insta-worthy but I'm not going to talk through those ideas here you can google those yourself. instead I'm going to advocate for the approach which kept me sane with my own kids and which I've also used in school which is a pick and mix snack approach. It's not rocket science, it's absolutely not my invention, but I do hope it will be helpful.
So I'm not talking about Woolworths pick and mix, unfortunately, but I'm also not talking about the kind of pick and mix that you see in those gorgeous reels with the incredible batch prepping mums usually in America with their huge American fridges, and they make up these beautiful baskets and boxes of little pouches of different items for their kids, and they've got cute labels with the children's names on them and these tiny little packs. I mean, if that's you, all power to you, I bow down to your effort and enthusiasm, and you absolutely don't need this episode, you can skip it, but I did not have the budget or the time, nor the fridge space, or the head space, frankly, for that matter to do things quite like that.
So what I'm talking about is a much more low-key version of that, more budget friendly, less individual packaging too.
In one of my jobs I set up a tuck shop at a primary school and we used this pick and mix approach there. It was a whole project using year fives to serve food and do business skills and I will do an episode on that at some point because it was actually really great fun. But the basic idea was to have three items a day on offer and children could choose from them. We encouraged them to have either two or three items. Broadly speaking there was always one food that was a starchy carbohydrate type food, one that was a good source of protein and one fruit or veg.
So for example, we might have had half slices of bagel, quarter slices of ham and some apple pieces. Or we might have had a quarter wrap, cream cheese and strawberries or one of their favourites was always popcorn, sunflower seeds and raisins.
Now I'm not suggesting obviously that you do that at home every day, God forbid, but just use that basic idea to get into the fridge and cupboard a selection of things each week that are in these three rough groups. It doesn't have to be that children have all three at every snack. Sometimes when children are asking for a snack, especially quite close to a meal time, a piece of fruit on its own is perfectly good enough.
But when you can, a snack that has a bit of balance has a better chance of keeping them satisfied until the next meal. So the idea is to get in three to five items from each of those three groups when you do your food shop, so that during that week, either you or your children can put together some different combinations from the items to make up some balanced snacks. And then the next week, keep some of the favourites and swap out some of the others for different ones for a bit of variety.
So I'll run through some of the ideas that I've used either with my own kids or at the school and I'll put the list in a show note so that you can come over there and jot down some next time you go shopping if you like the idea. Most of them are pretty easy to put together or you can prep some of them in Tupperwares for kids to assemble for themselves.
So here are the suggestions roughly in those three groups.
So in the broadly starchy carbs group you've got obvious things like toast and crackers but also things like bagels, English muffins in halves are quite nice, pitas cut up into little strips, breadsticks are great for nibbling from one end to the other as long as they're not a very salty one, similarly with pretzels, things like rice cakes and oat cakes, wraps which you can have whole wraps or those mini wraps or cut them into quarters. Handfuls of dry cereal are really good if they're a higher fibre, lower sugar sort of cereal popcorn's great, you can either pop your own or you can get the microwave stuff
I recently saw a brilliant blog post from Nutrition for Kids that I'll link to in the show notes where they used ice cream cones to pile things inside of. That was really cool. So that's your sort of broadly starchy components.
And then for your more protein rich group, the obvious ones are things like cheese or ham, there's also things like hummus or other kind of beany spreads. S mall yogurts can be great, obviously keeping an on the sugar levels on the individual yogurts but they can be a great snack. Handfuls of nuts like cashews, almonds are great or seeds like sunflower seeds or pumpkin seeds or a mixture of the two. Cream cheese is great for spreading on stuff but also for gluing things together and the same with peanut butter or almond butter. Obviously you can get those little individual cheeses but you can just chop up little cubes of cheese yourself. And the same with things like leftover cooked meats, ⁓ also things like those little chicken satay's, you can buy those in the shops already made if you want to. And then tinned tuna or salmon are great because you can just keep them in the cupboard you don't need to do anything with them and and then a spoonful of those are great on a snack. And then also hard-boiled eggs, if your children like hard-boiled eggs you can cook a batch up at the weekend and keep them in the fridge and they're ready to go.
If you've got vegetarians in the house, then air fried chickpeas that you just make up at the weekend and put into a container are fantastic. And also those mini falafel are brilliant.
Milkshake or hot chocolate contains a decent amount of dairy milk or something like a soya milk that has slightly higher protein in or things like Actimel or the drinking yogurts can be great too. Again keep an eye on the sugar but loads of those have got a decent amount of protein and some good bacteria to boot.
So that's the sort of protein-y group.
And then finally your fruit or veg group. I don't need to tell you what fruit and veg looks like. But here are some suggestions of ones you might not have thought of. So obviously, you you've got your favourites like apples, bananas, carrot sticks, celery, cucumber. Pepper strips are great to prep ahead. Sugar snap peas or mange tout are usually pretty popular. Cherry tomatoes, easy peel or satsumas. Things like grapes, sultanas, raisins or apricots.
Don't overlook canned fruit, canned pineapple or peaches, if you can get them in juice rather than in syrup, are brilliant.
Frozen berries are also great and they're usually a lot cheaper. You can also freeze your own grapes or berries and you can eat them from frozen. Obviously keep an eye on choking hazards with younger children but I'll link in the show notes to the episode where we talked about freezing berries.
Bananas are obviously great just as they are but they're also really great frozen. You can dip them in a bit of dark chocolate if you want to, can shove them on a stick or you can blend them into what they call nice cream but basically ice cream. Stick some chocolate chips in it, jobs a good'un
And then for on the go, there's some convenience versions of some of these things. So like pouches of puree or smoothie. Do check the labels on those a lot of them do contain an awful lot of sugar and not as much fruit as you'd hope, but some of them are really great.
And the same goes for jelly, you can get low sugar ones in the shop or you can make your own at home you can make them with fruit juice with either gelatin or agar-agar if you're a vegetarian and they can be great for mixing with fruit to make it more fun.
So there's some suggestions for the fruit and veg group.
So obviously that was a huge list, I'm not suggesting you buy all of those things. But like I say, it's just some ideas to be able to pick out a few each week to assemble yourself or your child to assemble their own, depending on their age and stage. So prep anything that needs to be prepped in advance to be tempting, like carrot sticks or pita slices, and pop them in whatever containers works for you. If you want to have an area of the fridge and a tray on the counter for this week's snacks, you can do if you want to, or could have a little list so that everybody knows what's available to choose from this week.
And as a bonus, this approach actually does build familiarity for children, even with the foods that they don't choose, because they have to consider them each time they don't choose them.
If you really want to, can obviously assemble some of these ingredients beforehand So some examples of that would be mixing some of the dried ingredients together into a trail mix or those cute little hummus snack jars that you see online where you put a bit of hummus in the bottom and then you stick your carrot sticks and pepper slices in on top and then seal the jar up and then people can take them out and dip them in or things like quesadillas or mini muffin pizzas where you're using that starchy base but you're putting a bit of tomato puree in, a little bit of the cheese and one of your vegetables.
So there are some interesting things you can make from some of these ingredients, but honestly, a lot of them can just be people grabbing a handful of each on a plate to make up an easy picky snack.
So I hope you like this pick and mix approach to snack provision. The good thing is it means you only have to think about it once per week and then after that everybody knows what the ingredients are to choose from this week. I'll leave it up to you how you put it into practice whether it's having a pick and mix list for your kids to really get involved with or on busy or tired weeks honestly just using these lists to make your shopping list easier even if you don't do anything special with them. Let me know how you get on and what weird combinations of pick and mix your children come up with I would love to hear. And I'll see you on Monday and in the meantime, happy eating.
Frozen berries are also great and they're usually a lot cheaper. You can also freeze your own grapes or berries and you can eat them from frozen. Obviously keep an eye on choking hazards with younger children but I'll link in the show notes to the episode where we talked about freezing berries.
Joanne Roach (00:13)
Hello and welcome to the Food for Kids podcast. I'm Joanne from the Foodies. Today is the first full week of summer holidays for families in England and most of the UK is pretty similar. And as the name, The Six Weeks Holidays suggests, for most families that means somewhere in the region of 40 to 45 days of having the kids at home. There are lots of fun things to do, memories to make, school runs to not miss at all, but there's also quite a lot of work juggling to do, lots of keeping spirits up and activities and boredom and lots and lots and lots of food. So it's nice to not have to think about before school breakfast and packed lunches or dinner money accounts for a bit unless you have a holiday club to go to.
But on the other hand, for many families there is a house full of small people needing to be fed around the clock and the main thing that parents complain about is the constant need for snacks. Not surprising because if you have two kids at home eating two or three snacks a day as well as their meals, this summer you will be providing something in the region of 160 to 250 snacks before they go back to school. You don't obviously want them all to end up being crisps or biscuits and on the other hand you don't want to spend summer with one arm chained to the fridge. So let's come up with some ideas to try and make life a little bit easier, little bit tastier and a little bit healthier with some snack ideas. So let's get into it!
Joanne Roach (01:35)
There are loads of fantastic ideas around online for great healthy snacks for your kids and lots of them are absolutely gorgeous to look at and very insta-worthy but I'm not going to talk through those ideas here you can google those yourself. instead I'm going to advocate for the approach which kept me sane with my own kids and which I've also used in school which is a pick and mix snack approach. It's not rocket science, it's absolutely not my invention, but I do hope it will be helpful.
So I'm not talking about Woolworths pick and mix, unfortunately, but I'm also not talking about the kind of pick and mix that you see in those gorgeous reels with the incredible batch prepping mums usually in America with their huge American fridges, and they make up these beautiful baskets and boxes of little pouches of different items for their kids, and they've got cute labels with the children's names on them and these tiny little packs. I mean, if that's you, all power to you, I bow down to your effort and enthusiasm, and you absolutely don't need this episode, you can skip it, but I did not have the budget or the time, nor the fridge space, or the head space, frankly, for that matter to do things quite like that.
So what I'm talking about is a much more low-key version of that, more budget friendly, less individual packaging too.
In one of my jobs I set up a tuck shop at a primary school and we used this pick and mix approach there. It was a whole project using year fives to serve food and do business skills and I will do an episode on that at some point because it was actually really great fun. But the basic idea was to have three items a day on offer and children could choose from them. We encouraged them to have either two or three items. Broadly speaking there was always one food that was a starchy carbohydrate type food, one that was a good source of protein and one fruit or veg.
So for example, we might have had half slices of bagel, quarter slices of ham and some apple pieces. Or we might have had a quarter wrap, cream cheese and strawberries or one of their favourites was always popcorn, sunflower seeds and raisins.
Now I'm not suggesting obviously that you do that at home every day, God forbid, but just use that basic idea to get into the fridge and cupboard a selection of things each week that are in these three rough groups. It doesn't have to be that children have all three at every snack. Sometimes when children are asking for a snack, especially quite close to a meal time, a piece of fruit on its own is perfectly good enough.
But when you can, a snack that has a bit of balance has a better chance of keeping them satisfied until the next meal. So the idea is to get in three to five items from each of those three groups when you do your food shop, so that during that week, either you or your children can put together some different combinations from the items to make up some balanced snacks. And then the next week, keep some of the favourites and swap out some of the others for different ones for a bit of variety.
So I'll run through some of the ideas that I've used either with my own kids or at the school and I'll put the list in a show note so that you can come over there and jot down some next time you go shopping if you like the idea. Most of them are pretty easy to put together or you can prep some of them in Tupperwares for kids to assemble for themselves.
So here are the suggestions roughly in those three groups.
So in the broadly starchy carbs group you've got obvious things like toast and crackers but also things like bagels, English muffins in halves are quite nice, pitas cut up into little strips, breadsticks are great for nibbling from one end to the other as long as they're not a very salty one, similarly with pretzels, things like rice cakes and oat cakes, wraps which you can have whole wraps or those mini wraps or cut them into quarters. Handfuls of dry cereal are really good if they're a higher fibre, lower sugar sort of cereal popcorn's great, you can either pop your own or you can get the microwave stuff
I recently saw a brilliant blog post from Nutrition for Kids that I'll link to in the show notes where they used ice cream cones to pile things inside of. That was really cool. So that's your sort of broadly starchy components.
And then for your more protein rich group, the obvious ones are things like cheese or ham, there's also things like hummus or other kind of beany spreads. S mall yogurts can be great, obviously keeping an on the sugar levels on the individual yogurts but they can be a great snack. Handfuls of nuts like cashews, almonds are great or seeds like sunflower seeds or pumpkin seeds or a mixture of the two. Cream cheese is great for spreading on stuff but also for gluing things together and the same with peanut butter or almond butter. Obviously you can get those little individual cheeses but you can just chop up little cubes of cheese yourself. And the same with things like leftover cooked meats, ⁓ also things like those little chicken satay's, you can buy those in the shops already made if you want to. And then tinned tuna or salmon are great because you can just keep them in the cupboard you don't need to do anything with them and and then a spoonful of those are great on a snack. And then also hard-boiled eggs, if your children like hard-boiled eggs you can cook a batch up at the weekend and keep them in the fridge and they're ready to go.
If you've got vegetarians in the house, then air fried chickpeas that you just make up at the weekend and put into a container are fantastic. And also those mini falafel are brilliant.
Milkshake or hot chocolate contains a decent amount of dairy milk or something like a soya milk that has slightly higher protein in or things like Actimel or the drinking yogurts can be great too. Again keep an eye on the sugar but loads of those have got a decent amount of protein and some good bacteria to boot.
So that's the sort of protein-y group.
And then finally your fruit or veg group. I don't need to tell you what fruit and veg looks like. But here are some suggestions of ones you might not have thought of. So obviously, you you've got your favourites like apples, bananas, carrot sticks, celery, cucumber. Pepper strips are great to prep ahead. Sugar snap peas or mange tout are usually pretty popular. Cherry tomatoes, easy peel or satsumas. Things like grapes, sultanas, raisins or apricots.
Don't overlook canned fruit, canned pineapple or peaches, if you can get them in juice rather than in syrup, are brilliant.
Frozen berries are also great and they're usually a lot cheaper. You can also freeze your own grapes or berries and you can eat them from frozen. Obviously keep an eye on choking hazards with younger children but I'll link in the show notes to the episode where we talked about freezing berries.
Bananas are obviously great just as they are but they're also really great frozen. You can dip them in a bit of dark chocolate if you want to, can shove them on a stick or you can blend them into what they call nice cream but basically ice cream. Stick some chocolate chips in it, jobs a good'un
And then for on the go, there's some convenience versions of some of these things. So like pouches of puree or smoothie. Do check the labels on those a lot of them do contain an awful lot of sugar and not as much fruit as you'd hope, but some of them are really great.
And the same goes for jelly, you can get low sugar ones in the shop or you can make your own at home you can make them with fruit juice with either gelatin or agar-agar if you're a vegetarian and they can be great for mixing with fruit to make it more fun.
So there's some suggestions for the fruit and veg group.
So obviously that was a huge list, I'm not suggesting you buy all of those things. But like I say, it's just some ideas to be able to pick out a few each week to assemble yourself or your child to assemble their own, depending on their age and stage. So prep anything that needs to be prepped in advance to be tempting, like carrot sticks or pita slices, and pop them in whatever containers works for you. If you want to have an area of the fridge and a tray on the counter for this week's snacks, you can do if you want to, or could have a little list so that everybody knows what's available to choose from this week.
And as a bonus, this approach actually does build familiarity for children, even with the foods that they don't choose, because they have to consider them each time they don't choose them.
If you really want to, can obviously assemble some of these ingredients beforehand So some examples of that would be mixing some of the dried ingredients together into a trail mix or those cute little hummus snack jars that you see online where you put a bit of hummus in the bottom and then you stick your carrot sticks and pepper slices in on top and then seal the jar up and then people can take them out and dip them in or things like quesadillas or mini muffin pizzas where you're using that starchy base but you're putting a bit of tomato puree in, a little bit of the cheese and one of your vegetables.
So there are some interesting things you can make from some of these ingredients, but honestly, a lot of them can just be people grabbing a handful of each on a plate to make up an easy picky snack.
So I hope you like this pick and mix approach to snack provision. The good thing is it means you only have to think about it once per week and then after that everybody knows what the ingredients are to choose from this week. I'll leave it up to you how you put it into practice whether it's having a pick and mix list for your kids to really get involved with or on busy or tired weeks honestly just using these lists to make your shopping list easier even if you don't do anything special with them. Let me know how you get on and what weird combinations of pick and mix your children come up with I would love to hear. And I'll see you on Monday and in the meantime, happy eating.
Bananas are obviously great just as they are but they're also really great frozen. You can dip them in a bit of dark chocolate if you want to, can shove them on a stick or you can blend them into what they call nice cream but basically ice cream. Stick some chocolate chips in it, jobs a good'un
Joanne Roach (00:13)
Hello and welcome to the Food for Kids podcast. I'm Joanne from the Foodies. Today is the first full week of summer holidays for families in England and most of the UK is pretty similar. And as the name, The Six Weeks Holidays suggests, for most families that means somewhere in the region of 40 to 45 days of having the kids at home. There are lots of fun things to do, memories to make, school runs to not miss at all, but there's also quite a lot of work juggling to do, lots of keeping spirits up and activities and boredom and lots and lots and lots of food. So it's nice to not have to think about before school breakfast and packed lunches or dinner money accounts for a bit unless you have a holiday club to go to.
But on the other hand, for many families there is a house full of small people needing to be fed around the clock and the main thing that parents complain about is the constant need for snacks. Not surprising because if you have two kids at home eating two or three snacks a day as well as their meals, this summer you will be providing something in the region of 160 to 250 snacks before they go back to school. You don't obviously want them all to end up being crisps or biscuits and on the other hand you don't want to spend summer with one arm chained to the fridge. So let's come up with some ideas to try and make life a little bit easier, little bit tastier and a little bit healthier with some snack ideas. So let's get into it!
Joanne Roach (01:35)
There are loads of fantastic ideas around online for great healthy snacks for your kids and lots of them are absolutely gorgeous to look at and very insta-worthy but I'm not going to talk through those ideas here you can google those yourself. instead I'm going to advocate for the approach which kept me sane with my own kids and which I've also used in school which is a pick and mix snack approach. It's not rocket science, it's absolutely not my invention, but I do hope it will be helpful.
So I'm not talking about Woolworths pick and mix, unfortunately, but I'm also not talking about the kind of pick and mix that you see in those gorgeous reels with the incredible batch prepping mums usually in America with their huge American fridges, and they make up these beautiful baskets and boxes of little pouches of different items for their kids, and they've got cute labels with the children's names on them and these tiny little packs. I mean, if that's you, all power to you, I bow down to your effort and enthusiasm, and you absolutely don't need this episode, you can skip it, but I did not have the budget or the time, nor the fridge space, or the head space, frankly, for that matter to do things quite like that.
So what I'm talking about is a much more low-key version of that, more budget friendly, less individual packaging too.
In one of my jobs I set up a tuck shop at a primary school and we used this pick and mix approach there. It was a whole project using year fives to serve food and do business skills and I will do an episode on that at some point because it was actually really great fun. But the basic idea was to have three items a day on offer and children could choose from them. We encouraged them to have either two or three items. Broadly speaking there was always one food that was a starchy carbohydrate type food, one that was a good source of protein and one fruit or veg.
So for example, we might have had half slices of bagel, quarter slices of ham and some apple pieces. Or we might have had a quarter wrap, cream cheese and strawberries or one of their favourites was always popcorn, sunflower seeds and raisins.
Now I'm not suggesting obviously that you do that at home every day, God forbid, but just use that basic idea to get into the fridge and cupboard a selection of things each week that are in these three rough groups. It doesn't have to be that children have all three at every snack. Sometimes when children are asking for a snack, especially quite close to a meal time, a piece of fruit on its own is perfectly good enough.
But when you can, a snack that has a bit of balance has a better chance of keeping them satisfied until the next meal. So the idea is to get in three to five items from each of those three groups when you do your food shop, so that during that week, either you or your children can put together some different combinations from the items to make up some balanced snacks. And then the next week, keep some of the favourites and swap out some of the others for different ones for a bit of variety.
So I'll run through some of the ideas that I've used either with my own kids or at the school and I'll put the list in a show note so that you can come over there and jot down some next time you go shopping if you like the idea. Most of them are pretty easy to put together or you can prep some of them in Tupperwares for kids to assemble for themselves.
So here are the suggestions roughly in those three groups.
So in the broadly starchy carbs group you've got obvious things like toast and crackers but also things like bagels, English muffins in halves are quite nice, pitas cut up into little strips, breadsticks are great for nibbling from one end to the other as long as they're not a very salty one, similarly with pretzels, things like rice cakes and oat cakes, wraps which you can have whole wraps or those mini wraps or cut them into quarters. Handfuls of dry cereal are really good if they're a higher fibre, lower sugar sort of cereal popcorn's great, you can either pop your own or you can get the microwave stuff
I recently saw a brilliant blog post from Nutrition for Kids that I'll link to in the show notes where they used ice cream cones to pile things inside of. That was really cool. So that's your sort of broadly starchy components.
And then for your more protein rich group, the obvious ones are things like cheese or ham, there's also things like hummus or other kind of beany spreads. S mall yogurts can be great, obviously keeping an on the sugar levels on the individual yogurts but they can be a great snack. Handfuls of nuts like cashews, almonds are great or seeds like sunflower seeds or pumpkin seeds or a mixture of the two. Cream cheese is great for spreading on stuff but also for gluing things together and the same with peanut butter or almond butter. Obviously you can get those little individual cheeses but you can just chop up little cubes of cheese yourself. And the same with things like leftover cooked meats, ⁓ also things like those little chicken satay's, you can buy those in the shops already made if you want to. And then tinned tuna or salmon are great because you can just keep them in the cupboard you don't need to do anything with them and and then a spoonful of those are great on a snack. And then also hard-boiled eggs, if your children like hard-boiled eggs you can cook a batch up at the weekend and keep them in the fridge and they're ready to go.
If you've got vegetarians in the house, then air fried chickpeas that you just make up at the weekend and put into a container are fantastic. And also those mini falafel are brilliant.
Milkshake or hot chocolate contains a decent amount of dairy milk or something like a soya milk that has slightly higher protein in or things like Actimel or the drinking yogurts can be great too. Again keep an eye on the sugar but loads of those have got a decent amount of protein and some good bacteria to boot.
So that's the sort of protein-y group.
And then finally your fruit or veg group. I don't need to tell you what fruit and veg looks like. But here are some suggestions of ones you might not have thought of. So obviously, you you've got your favourites like apples, bananas, carrot sticks, celery, cucumber. Pepper strips are great to prep ahead. Sugar snap peas or mange tout are usually pretty popular. Cherry tomatoes, easy peel or satsumas. Things like grapes, sultanas, raisins or apricots.
Don't overlook canned fruit, canned pineapple or peaches, if you can get them in juice rather than in syrup, are brilliant.
Frozen berries are also great and they're usually a lot cheaper. You can also freeze your own grapes or berries and you can eat them from frozen. Obviously keep an eye on choking hazards with younger children but I'll link in the show notes to the episode where we talked about freezing berries.
Bananas are obviously great just as they are but they're also really great frozen. You can dip them in a bit of dark chocolate if you want to, can shove them on a stick or you can blend them into what they call nice cream but basically ice cream. Stick some chocolate chips in it, jobs a good'un
And then for on the go, there's some convenience versions of some of these things. So like pouches of puree or smoothie. Do check the labels on those a lot of them do contain an awful lot of sugar and not as much fruit as you'd hope, but some of them are really great.
And the same goes for jelly, you can get low sugar ones in the shop or you can make your own at home you can make them with fruit juice with either gelatin or agar-agar if you're a vegetarian and they can be great for mixing with fruit to make it more fun.
So there's some suggestions for the fruit and veg group.
So obviously that was a huge list, I'm not suggesting you buy all of those things. But like I say, it's just some ideas to be able to pick out a few each week to assemble yourself or your child to assemble their own, depending on their age and stage. So prep anything that needs to be prepped in advance to be tempting, like carrot sticks or pita slices, and pop them in whatever containers works for you. If you want to have an area of the fridge and a tray on the counter for this week's snacks, you can do if you want to, or could have a little list so that everybody knows what's available to choose from this week.
And as a bonus, this approach actually does build familiarity for children, even with the foods that they don't choose, because they have to consider them each time they don't choose them.
If you really want to, can obviously assemble some of these ingredients beforehand So some examples of that would be mixing some of the dried ingredients together into a trail mix or those cute little hummus snack jars that you see online where you put a bit of hummus in the bottom and then you stick your carrot sticks and pepper slices in on top and then seal the jar up and then people can take them out and dip them in or things like quesadillas or mini muffin pizzas where you're using that starchy base but you're putting a bit of tomato puree in, a little bit of the cheese and one of your vegetables.
So there are some interesting things you can make from some of these ingredients, but honestly, a lot of them can just be people grabbing a handful of each on a plate to make up an easy picky snack.
So I hope you like this pick and mix approach to snack provision. The good thing is it means you only have to think about it once per week and then after that everybody knows what the ingredients are to choose from this week. I'll leave it up to you how you put it into practice whether it's having a pick and mix list for your kids to really get involved with or on busy or tired weeks honestly just using these lists to make your shopping list easier even if you don't do anything special with them. Let me know how you get on and what weird combinations of pick and mix your children come up with I would love to hear. And I'll see you on Monday and in the meantime, happy eating.
And then for on the go, there's some convenience versions of some of these things. So like pouches of puree or smoothie. Do check the labels on those a lot of them do contain an awful lot of sugar and not as much fruit as you'd hope, but some of them are really great.
Joanne Roach (00:13)
Hello and welcome to the Food for Kids podcast. I'm Joanne from the Foodies. Today is the first full week of summer holidays for families in England and most of the UK is pretty similar. And as the name, The Six Weeks Holidays suggests, for most families that means somewhere in the region of 40 to 45 days of having the kids at home. There are lots of fun things to do, memories to make, school runs to not miss at all, but there's also quite a lot of work juggling to do, lots of keeping spirits up and activities and boredom and lots and lots and lots of food. So it's nice to not have to think about before school breakfast and packed lunches or dinner money accounts for a bit unless you have a holiday club to go to.
But on the other hand, for many families there is a house full of small people needing to be fed around the clock and the main thing that parents complain about is the constant need for snacks. Not surprising because if you have two kids at home eating two or three snacks a day as well as their meals, this summer you will be providing something in the region of 160 to 250 snacks before they go back to school. You don't obviously want them all to end up being crisps or biscuits and on the other hand you don't want to spend summer with one arm chained to the fridge. So let's come up with some ideas to try and make life a little bit easier, little bit tastier and a little bit healthier with some snack ideas. So let's get into it!
Joanne Roach (01:35)
There are loads of fantastic ideas around online for great healthy snacks for your kids and lots of them are absolutely gorgeous to look at and very insta-worthy but I'm not going to talk through those ideas here you can google those yourself. instead I'm going to advocate for the approach which kept me sane with my own kids and which I've also used in school which is a pick and mix snack approach. It's not rocket science, it's absolutely not my invention, but I do hope it will be helpful.
So I'm not talking about Woolworths pick and mix, unfortunately, but I'm also not talking about the kind of pick and mix that you see in those gorgeous reels with the incredible batch prepping mums usually in America with their huge American fridges, and they make up these beautiful baskets and boxes of little pouches of different items for their kids, and they've got cute labels with the children's names on them and these tiny little packs. I mean, if that's you, all power to you, I bow down to your effort and enthusiasm, and you absolutely don't need this episode, you can skip it, but I did not have the budget or the time, nor the fridge space, or the head space, frankly, for that matter to do things quite like that.
So what I'm talking about is a much more low-key version of that, more budget friendly, less individual packaging too.
In one of my jobs I set up a tuck shop at a primary school and we used this pick and mix approach there. It was a whole project using year fives to serve food and do business skills and I will do an episode on that at some point because it was actually really great fun. But the basic idea was to have three items a day on offer and children could choose from them. We encouraged them to have either two or three items. Broadly speaking there was always one food that was a starchy carbohydrate type food, one that was a good source of protein and one fruit or veg.
So for example, we might have had half slices of bagel, quarter slices of ham and some apple pieces. Or we might have had a quarter wrap, cream cheese and strawberries or one of their favourites was always popcorn, sunflower seeds and raisins.
Now I'm not suggesting obviously that you do that at home every day, God forbid, but just use that basic idea to get into the fridge and cupboard a selection of things each week that are in these three rough groups. It doesn't have to be that children have all three at every snack. Sometimes when children are asking for a snack, especially quite close to a meal time, a piece of fruit on its own is perfectly good enough.
But when you can, a snack that has a bit of balance has a better chance of keeping them satisfied until the next meal. So the idea is to get in three to five items from each of those three groups when you do your food shop, so that during that week, either you or your children can put together some different combinations from the items to make up some balanced snacks. And then the next week, keep some of the favourites and swap out some of the others for different ones for a bit of variety.
So I'll run through some of the ideas that I've used either with my own kids or at the school and I'll put the list in a show note so that you can come over there and jot down some next time you go shopping if you like the idea. Most of them are pretty easy to put together or you can prep some of them in Tupperwares for kids to assemble for themselves.
So here are the suggestions roughly in those three groups.
So in the broadly starchy carbs group you've got obvious things like toast and crackers but also things like bagels, English muffins in halves are quite nice, pitas cut up into little strips, breadsticks are great for nibbling from one end to the other as long as they're not a very salty one, similarly with pretzels, things like rice cakes and oat cakes, wraps which you can have whole wraps or those mini wraps or cut them into quarters. Handfuls of dry cereal are really good if they're a higher fibre, lower sugar sort of cereal popcorn's great, you can either pop your own or you can get the microwave stuff
I recently saw a brilliant blog post from Nutrition for Kids that I'll link to in the show notes where they used ice cream cones to pile things inside of. That was really cool. So that's your sort of broadly starchy components.
And then for your more protein rich group, the obvious ones are things like cheese or ham, there's also things like hummus or other kind of beany spreads. S mall yogurts can be great, obviously keeping an on the sugar levels on the individual yogurts but they can be a great snack. Handfuls of nuts like cashews, almonds are great or seeds like sunflower seeds or pumpkin seeds or a mixture of the two. Cream cheese is great for spreading on stuff but also for gluing things together and the same with peanut butter or almond butter. Obviously you can get those little individual cheeses but you can just chop up little cubes of cheese yourself. And the same with things like leftover cooked meats, ⁓ also things like those little chicken satay's, you can buy those in the shops already made if you want to. And then tinned tuna or salmon are great because you can just keep them in the cupboard you don't need to do anything with them and and then a spoonful of those are great on a snack. And then also hard-boiled eggs, if your children like hard-boiled eggs you can cook a batch up at the weekend and keep them in the fridge and they're ready to go.
If you've got vegetarians in the house, then air fried chickpeas that you just make up at the weekend and put into a container are fantastic. And also those mini falafel are brilliant.
Milkshake or hot chocolate contains a decent amount of dairy milk or something like a soya milk that has slightly higher protein in or things like Actimel or the drinking yogurts can be great too. Again keep an eye on the sugar but loads of those have got a decent amount of protein and some good bacteria to boot.
So that's the sort of protein-y group.
And then finally your fruit or veg group. I don't need to tell you what fruit and veg looks like. But here are some suggestions of ones you might not have thought of. So obviously, you you've got your favourites like apples, bananas, carrot sticks, celery, cucumber. Pepper strips are great to prep ahead. Sugar snap peas or mange tout are usually pretty popular. Cherry tomatoes, easy peel or satsumas. Things like grapes, sultanas, raisins or apricots.
Don't overlook canned fruit, canned pineapple or peaches, if you can get them in juice rather than in syrup, are brilliant.
Frozen berries are also great and they're usually a lot cheaper. You can also freeze your own grapes or berries and you can eat them from frozen. Obviously keep an eye on choking hazards with younger children but I'll link in the show notes to the episode where we talked about freezing berries.
Bananas are obviously great just as they are but they're also really great frozen. You can dip them in a bit of dark chocolate if you want to, can shove them on a stick or you can blend them into what they call nice cream but basically ice cream. Stick some chocolate chips in it, jobs a good'un
And then for on the go, there's some convenience versions of some of these things. So like pouches of puree or smoothie. Do check the labels on those a lot of them do contain an awful lot of sugar and not as much fruit as you'd hope, but some of them are really great.
And the same goes for jelly, you can get low sugar ones in the shop or you can make your own at home you can make them with fruit juice with either gelatin or agar-agar if you're a vegetarian and they can be great for mixing with fruit to make it more fun.
So there's some suggestions for the fruit and veg group.
So obviously that was a huge list, I'm not suggesting you buy all of those things. But like I say, it's just some ideas to be able to pick out a few each week to assemble yourself or your child to assemble their own, depending on their age and stage. So prep anything that needs to be prepped in advance to be tempting, like carrot sticks or pita slices, and pop them in whatever containers works for you. If you want to have an area of the fridge and a tray on the counter for this week's snacks, you can do if you want to, or could have a little list so that everybody knows what's available to choose from this week.
And as a bonus, this approach actually does build familiarity for children, even with the foods that they don't choose, because they have to consider them each time they don't choose them.
If you really want to, can obviously assemble some of these ingredients beforehand So some examples of that would be mixing some of the dried ingredients together into a trail mix or those cute little hummus snack jars that you see online where you put a bit of hummus in the bottom and then you stick your carrot sticks and pepper slices in on top and then seal the jar up and then people can take them out and dip them in or things like quesadillas or mini muffin pizzas where you're using that starchy base but you're putting a bit of tomato puree in, a little bit of the cheese and one of your vegetables.
So there are some interesting things you can make from some of these ingredients, but honestly, a lot of them can just be people grabbing a handful of each on a plate to make up an easy picky snack.
So I hope you like this pick and mix approach to snack provision. The good thing is it means you only have to think about it once per week and then after that everybody knows what the ingredients are to choose from this week. I'll leave it up to you how you put it into practice whether it's having a pick and mix list for your kids to really get involved with or on busy or tired weeks honestly just using these lists to make your shopping list easier even if you don't do anything special with them. Let me know how you get on and what weird combinations of pick and mix your children come up with I would love to hear. And I'll see you on Monday and in the meantime, happy eating.
And the same goes for jelly, you can get low sugar ones in the shop or you can make your own at home you can make them with fruit juice with either gelatin or agar-agar if you're a vegetarian and they can be great for mixing with fruit to make it more fun.
Joanne Roach (00:13)
Hello and welcome to the Food for Kids podcast. I'm Joanne from the Foodies. Today is the first full week of summer holidays for families in England and most of the UK is pretty similar. And as the name, The Six Weeks Holidays suggests, for most families that means somewhere in the region of 40 to 45 days of having the kids at home. There are lots of fun things to do, memories to make, school runs to not miss at all, but there's also quite a lot of work juggling to do, lots of keeping spirits up and activities and boredom and lots and lots and lots of food. So it's nice to not have to think about before school breakfast and packed lunches or dinner money accounts for a bit unless you have a holiday club to go to.
But on the other hand, for many families there is a house full of small people needing to be fed around the clock and the main thing that parents complain about is the constant need for snacks. Not surprising because if you have two kids at home eating two or three snacks a day as well as their meals, this summer you will be providing something in the region of 160 to 250 snacks before they go back to school. You don't obviously want them all to end up being crisps or biscuits and on the other hand you don't want to spend summer with one arm chained to the fridge. So let's come up with some ideas to try and make life a little bit easier, little bit tastier and a little bit healthier with some snack ideas. So let's get into it!
Joanne Roach (01:35)
There are loads of fantastic ideas around online for great healthy snacks for your kids and lots of them are absolutely gorgeous to look at and very insta-worthy but I'm not going to talk through those ideas here you can google those yourself. instead I'm going to advocate for the approach which kept me sane with my own kids and which I've also used in school which is a pick and mix snack approach. It's not rocket science, it's absolutely not my invention, but I do hope it will be helpful.
So I'm not talking about Woolworths pick and mix, unfortunately, but I'm also not talking about the kind of pick and mix that you see in those gorgeous reels with the incredible batch prepping mums usually in America with their huge American fridges, and they make up these beautiful baskets and boxes of little pouches of different items for their kids, and they've got cute labels with the children's names on them and these tiny little packs. I mean, if that's you, all power to you, I bow down to your effort and enthusiasm, and you absolutely don't need this episode, you can skip it, but I did not have the budget or the time, nor the fridge space, or the head space, frankly, for that matter to do things quite like that.
So what I'm talking about is a much more low-key version of that, more budget friendly, less individual packaging too.
In one of my jobs I set up a tuck shop at a primary school and we used this pick and mix approach there. It was a whole project using year fives to serve food and do business skills and I will do an episode on that at some point because it was actually really great fun. But the basic idea was to have three items a day on offer and children could choose from them. We encouraged them to have either two or three items. Broadly speaking there was always one food that was a starchy carbohydrate type food, one that was a good source of protein and one fruit or veg.
So for example, we might have had half slices of bagel, quarter slices of ham and some apple pieces. Or we might have had a quarter wrap, cream cheese and strawberries or one of their favourites was always popcorn, sunflower seeds and raisins.
Now I'm not suggesting obviously that you do that at home every day, God forbid, but just use that basic idea to get into the fridge and cupboard a selection of things each week that are in these three rough groups. It doesn't have to be that children have all three at every snack. Sometimes when children are asking for a snack, especially quite close to a meal time, a piece of fruit on its own is perfectly good enough.
But when you can, a snack that has a bit of balance has a better chance of keeping them satisfied until the next meal. So the idea is to get in three to five items from each of those three groups when you do your food shop, so that during that week, either you or your children can put together some different combinations from the items to make up some balanced snacks. And then the next week, keep some of the favourites and swap out some of the others for different ones for a bit of variety.
So I'll run through some of the ideas that I've used either with my own kids or at the school and I'll put the list in a show note so that you can come over there and jot down some next time you go shopping if you like the idea. Most of them are pretty easy to put together or you can prep some of them in Tupperwares for kids to assemble for themselves.
So here are the suggestions roughly in those three groups.
So in the broadly starchy carbs group you've got obvious things like toast and crackers but also things like bagels, English muffins in halves are quite nice, pitas cut up into little strips, breadsticks are great for nibbling from one end to the other as long as they're not a very salty one, similarly with pretzels, things like rice cakes and oat cakes, wraps which you can have whole wraps or those mini wraps or cut them into quarters. Handfuls of dry cereal are really good if they're a higher fibre, lower sugar sort of cereal popcorn's great, you can either pop your own or you can get the microwave stuff
I recently saw a brilliant blog post from Nutrition for Kids that I'll link to in the show notes where they used ice cream cones to pile things inside of. That was really cool. So that's your sort of broadly starchy components.
And then for your more protein rich group, the obvious ones are things like cheese or ham, there's also things like hummus or other kind of beany spreads. S mall yogurts can be great, obviously keeping an on the sugar levels on the individual yogurts but they can be a great snack. Handfuls of nuts like cashews, almonds are great or seeds like sunflower seeds or pumpkin seeds or a mixture of the two. Cream cheese is great for spreading on stuff but also for gluing things together and the same with peanut butter or almond butter. Obviously you can get those little individual cheeses but you can just chop up little cubes of cheese yourself. And the same with things like leftover cooked meats, ⁓ also things like those little chicken satay's, you can buy those in the shops already made if you want to. And then tinned tuna or salmon are great because you can just keep them in the cupboard you don't need to do anything with them and and then a spoonful of those are great on a snack. And then also hard-boiled eggs, if your children like hard-boiled eggs you can cook a batch up at the weekend and keep them in the fridge and they're ready to go.
If you've got vegetarians in the house, then air fried chickpeas that you just make up at the weekend and put into a container are fantastic. And also those mini falafel are brilliant.
Milkshake or hot chocolate contains a decent amount of dairy milk or something like a soya milk that has slightly higher protein in or things like Actimel or the drinking yogurts can be great too. Again keep an eye on the sugar but loads of those have got a decent amount of protein and some good bacteria to boot.
So that's the sort of protein-y group.
And then finally your fruit or veg group. I don't need to tell you what fruit and veg looks like. But here are some suggestions of ones you might not have thought of. So obviously, you you've got your favourites like apples, bananas, carrot sticks, celery, cucumber. Pepper strips are great to prep ahead. Sugar snap peas or mange tout are usually pretty popular. Cherry tomatoes, easy peel or satsumas. Things like grapes, sultanas, raisins or apricots.
Don't overlook canned fruit, canned pineapple or peaches, if you can get them in juice rather than in syrup, are brilliant.
Frozen berries are also great and they're usually a lot cheaper. You can also freeze your own grapes or berries and you can eat them from frozen. Obviously keep an eye on choking hazards with younger children but I'll link in the show notes to the episode where we talked about freezing berries.
Bananas are obviously great just as they are but they're also really great frozen. You can dip them in a bit of dark chocolate if you want to, can shove them on a stick or you can blend them into what they call nice cream but basically ice cream. Stick some chocolate chips in it, jobs a good'un
And then for on the go, there's some convenience versions of some of these things. So like pouches of puree or smoothie. Do check the labels on those a lot of them do contain an awful lot of sugar and not as much fruit as you'd hope, but some of them are really great.
And the same goes for jelly, you can get low sugar ones in the shop or you can make your own at home you can make them with fruit juice with either gelatin or agar-agar if you're a vegetarian and they can be great for mixing with fruit to make it more fun.
So there's some suggestions for the fruit and veg group.
So obviously that was a huge list, I'm not suggesting you buy all of those things. But like I say, it's just some ideas to be able to pick out a few each week to assemble yourself or your child to assemble their own, depending on their age and stage. So prep anything that needs to be prepped in advance to be tempting, like carrot sticks or pita slices, and pop them in whatever containers works for you. If you want to have an area of the fridge and a tray on the counter for this week's snacks, you can do if you want to, or could have a little list so that everybody knows what's available to choose from this week.
And as a bonus, this approach actually does build familiarity for children, even with the foods that they don't choose, because they have to consider them each time they don't choose them.
If you really want to, can obviously assemble some of these ingredients beforehand So some examples of that would be mixing some of the dried ingredients together into a trail mix or those cute little hummus snack jars that you see online where you put a bit of hummus in the bottom and then you stick your carrot sticks and pepper slices in on top and then seal the jar up and then people can take them out and dip them in or things like quesadillas or mini muffin pizzas where you're using that starchy base but you're putting a bit of tomato puree in, a little bit of the cheese and one of your vegetables.
So there are some interesting things you can make from some of these ingredients, but honestly, a lot of them can just be people grabbing a handful of each on a plate to make up an easy picky snack.
So I hope you like this pick and mix approach to snack provision. The good thing is it means you only have to think about it once per week and then after that everybody knows what the ingredients are to choose from this week. I'll leave it up to you how you put it into practice whether it's having a pick and mix list for your kids to really get involved with or on busy or tired weeks honestly just using these lists to make your shopping list easier even if you don't do anything special with them. Let me know how you get on and what weird combinations of pick and mix your children come up with I would love to hear. And I'll see you on Monday and in the meantime, happy eating.
So there's some suggestions for the fruit and veg group.
Joanne Roach (00:13)
Hello and welcome to the Food for Kids podcast. I'm Joanne from the Foodies. Today is the first full week of summer holidays for families in England and most of the UK is pretty similar. And as the name, The Six Weeks Holidays suggests, for most families that means somewhere in the region of 40 to 45 days of having the kids at home. There are lots of fun things to do, memories to make, school runs to not miss at all, but there's also quite a lot of work juggling to do, lots of keeping spirits up and activities and boredom and lots and lots and lots of food. So it's nice to not have to think about before school breakfast and packed lunches or dinner money accounts for a bit unless you have a holiday club to go to.
But on the other hand, for many families there is a house full of small people needing to be fed around the clock and the main thing that parents complain about is the constant need for snacks. Not surprising because if you have two kids at home eating two or three snacks a day as well as their meals, this summer you will be providing something in the region of 160 to 250 snacks before they go back to school. You don't obviously want them all to end up being crisps or biscuits and on the other hand you don't want to spend summer with one arm chained to the fridge. So let's come up with some ideas to try and make life a little bit easier, little bit tastier and a little bit healthier with some snack ideas. So let's get into it!
Joanne Roach (01:35)
There are loads of fantastic ideas around online for great healthy snacks for your kids and lots of them are absolutely gorgeous to look at and very insta-worthy but I'm not going to talk through those ideas here you can google those yourself. instead I'm going to advocate for the approach which kept me sane with my own kids and which I've also used in school which is a pick and mix snack approach. It's not rocket science, it's absolutely not my invention, but I do hope it will be helpful.
So I'm not talking about Woolworths pick and mix, unfortunately, but I'm also not talking about the kind of pick and mix that you see in those gorgeous reels with the incredible batch prepping mums usually in America with their huge American fridges, and they make up these beautiful baskets and boxes of little pouches of different items for their kids, and they've got cute labels with the children's names on them and these tiny little packs. I mean, if that's you, all power to you, I bow down to your effort and enthusiasm, and you absolutely don't need this episode, you can skip it, but I did not have the budget or the time, nor the fridge space, or the head space, frankly, for that matter to do things quite like that.
So what I'm talking about is a much more low-key version of that, more budget friendly, less individual packaging too.
In one of my jobs I set up a tuck shop at a primary school and we used this pick and mix approach there. It was a whole project using year fives to serve food and do business skills and I will do an episode on that at some point because it was actually really great fun. But the basic idea was to have three items a day on offer and children could choose from them. We encouraged them to have either two or three items. Broadly speaking there was always one food that was a starchy carbohydrate type food, one that was a good source of protein and one fruit or veg.
So for example, we might have had half slices of bagel, quarter slices of ham and some apple pieces. Or we might have had a quarter wrap, cream cheese and strawberries or one of their favourites was always popcorn, sunflower seeds and raisins.
Now I'm not suggesting obviously that you do that at home every day, God forbid, but just use that basic idea to get into the fridge and cupboard a selection of things each week that are in these three rough groups. It doesn't have to be that children have all three at every snack. Sometimes when children are asking for a snack, especially quite close to a meal time, a piece of fruit on its own is perfectly good enough.
But when you can, a snack that has a bit of balance has a better chance of keeping them satisfied until the next meal. So the idea is to get in three to five items from each of those three groups when you do your food shop, so that during that week, either you or your children can put together some different combinations from the items to make up some balanced snacks. And then the next week, keep some of the favourites and swap out some of the others for different ones for a bit of variety.
So I'll run through some of the ideas that I've used either with my own kids or at the school and I'll put the list in a show note so that you can come over there and jot down some next time you go shopping if you like the idea. Most of them are pretty easy to put together or you can prep some of them in Tupperwares for kids to assemble for themselves.
So here are the suggestions roughly in those three groups.
So in the broadly starchy carbs group you've got obvious things like toast and crackers but also things like bagels, English muffins in halves are quite nice, pitas cut up into little strips, breadsticks are great for nibbling from one end to the other as long as they're not a very salty one, similarly with pretzels, things like rice cakes and oat cakes, wraps which you can have whole wraps or those mini wraps or cut them into quarters. Handfuls of dry cereal are really good if they're a higher fibre, lower sugar sort of cereal popcorn's great, you can either pop your own or you can get the microwave stuff
I recently saw a brilliant blog post from Nutrition for Kids that I'll link to in the show notes where they used ice cream cones to pile things inside of. That was really cool. So that's your sort of broadly starchy components.
And then for your more protein rich group, the obvious ones are things like cheese or ham, there's also things like hummus or other kind of beany spreads. S mall yogurts can be great, obviously keeping an on the sugar levels on the individual yogurts but they can be a great snack. Handfuls of nuts like cashews, almonds are great or seeds like sunflower seeds or pumpkin seeds or a mixture of the two. Cream cheese is great for spreading on stuff but also for gluing things together and the same with peanut butter or almond butter. Obviously you can get those little individual cheeses but you can just chop up little cubes of cheese yourself. And the same with things like leftover cooked meats, ⁓ also things like those little chicken satay's, you can buy those in the shops already made if you want to. And then tinned tuna or salmon are great because you can just keep them in the cupboard you don't need to do anything with them and and then a spoonful of those are great on a snack. And then also hard-boiled eggs, if your children like hard-boiled eggs you can cook a batch up at the weekend and keep them in the fridge and they're ready to go.
If you've got vegetarians in the house, then air fried chickpeas that you just make up at the weekend and put into a container are fantastic. And also those mini falafel are brilliant.
Milkshake or hot chocolate contains a decent amount of dairy milk or something like a soya milk that has slightly higher protein in or things like Actimel or the drinking yogurts can be great too. Again keep an eye on the sugar but loads of those have got a decent amount of protein and some good bacteria to boot.
So that's the sort of protein-y group.
And then finally your fruit or veg group. I don't need to tell you what fruit and veg looks like. But here are some suggestions of ones you might not have thought of. So obviously, you you've got your favourites like apples, bananas, carrot sticks, celery, cucumber. Pepper strips are great to prep ahead. Sugar snap peas or mange tout are usually pretty popular. Cherry tomatoes, easy peel or satsumas. Things like grapes, sultanas, raisins or apricots.
Don't overlook canned fruit, canned pineapple or peaches, if you can get them in juice rather than in syrup, are brilliant.
Frozen berries are also great and they're usually a lot cheaper. You can also freeze your own grapes or berries and you can eat them from frozen. Obviously keep an eye on choking hazards with younger children but I'll link in the show notes to the episode where we talked about freezing berries.
Bananas are obviously great just as they are but they're also really great frozen. You can dip them in a bit of dark chocolate if you want to, can shove them on a stick or you can blend them into what they call nice cream but basically ice cream. Stick some chocolate chips in it, jobs a good'un
And then for on the go, there's some convenience versions of some of these things. So like pouches of puree or smoothie. Do check the labels on those a lot of them do contain an awful lot of sugar and not as much fruit as you'd hope, but some of them are really great.
And the same goes for jelly, you can get low sugar ones in the shop or you can make your own at home you can make them with fruit juice with either gelatin or agar-agar if you're a vegetarian and they can be great for mixing with fruit to make it more fun.
So there's some suggestions for the fruit and veg group.
So obviously that was a huge list, I'm not suggesting you buy all of those things. But like I say, it's just some ideas to be able to pick out a few each week to assemble yourself or your child to assemble their own, depending on their age and stage. So prep anything that needs to be prepped in advance to be tempting, like carrot sticks or pita slices, and pop them in whatever containers works for you. If you want to have an area of the fridge and a tray on the counter for this week's snacks, you can do if you want to, or could have a little list so that everybody knows what's available to choose from this week.
And as a bonus, this approach actually does build familiarity for children, even with the foods that they don't choose, because they have to consider them each time they don't choose them.
If you really want to, can obviously assemble some of these ingredients beforehand So some examples of that would be mixing some of the dried ingredients together into a trail mix or those cute little hummus snack jars that you see online where you put a bit of hummus in the bottom and then you stick your carrot sticks and pepper slices in on top and then seal the jar up and then people can take them out and dip them in or things like quesadillas or mini muffin pizzas where you're using that starchy base but you're putting a bit of tomato puree in, a little bit of the cheese and one of your vegetables.
So there are some interesting things you can make from some of these ingredients, but honestly, a lot of them can just be people grabbing a handful of each on a plate to make up an easy picky snack.
So I hope you like this pick and mix approach to snack provision. The good thing is it means you only have to think about it once per week and then after that everybody knows what the ingredients are to choose from this week. I'll leave it up to you how you put it into practice whether it's having a pick and mix list for your kids to really get involved with or on busy or tired weeks honestly just using these lists to make your shopping list easier even if you don't do anything special with them. Let me know how you get on and what weird combinations of pick and mix your children come up with I would love to hear. And I'll see you on Monday and in the meantime, happy eating.
So obviously that was a huge list, I'm not suggesting you buy all of those things. But like I say, it's just some ideas to be able to pick out a few each week to assemble yourself or your child to assemble their own, depending on their age and stage. So prep anything that needs to be prepped in advance to be tempting, like carrot sticks or pita slices, and pop them in whatever containers works for you. If you want to have an area of the fridge and a tray on the counter for this week's snacks, you can do if you want to, or could have a little list so that everybody knows what's available to choose from this week.
Joanne Roach (00:13)
Hello and welcome to the Food for Kids podcast. I'm Joanne from the Foodies. Today is the first full week of summer holidays for families in England and most of the UK is pretty similar. And as the name, The Six Weeks Holidays suggests, for most families that means somewhere in the region of 40 to 45 days of having the kids at home. There are lots of fun things to do, memories to make, school runs to not miss at all, but there's also quite a lot of work juggling to do, lots of keeping spirits up and activities and boredom and lots and lots and lots of food. So it's nice to not have to think about before school breakfast and packed lunches or dinner money accounts for a bit unless you have a holiday club to go to.
But on the other hand, for many families there is a house full of small people needing to be fed around the clock and the main thing that parents complain about is the constant need for snacks. Not surprising because if you have two kids at home eating two or three snacks a day as well as their meals, this summer you will be providing something in the region of 160 to 250 snacks before they go back to school. You don't obviously want them all to end up being crisps or biscuits and on the other hand you don't want to spend summer with one arm chained to the fridge. So let's come up with some ideas to try and make life a little bit easier, little bit tastier and a little bit healthier with some snack ideas. So let's get into it!
Joanne Roach (01:35)
There are loads of fantastic ideas around online for great healthy snacks for your kids and lots of them are absolutely gorgeous to look at and very insta-worthy but I'm not going to talk through those ideas here you can google those yourself. instead I'm going to advocate for the approach which kept me sane with my own kids and which I've also used in school which is a pick and mix snack approach. It's not rocket science, it's absolutely not my invention, but I do hope it will be helpful.
So I'm not talking about Woolworths pick and mix, unfortunately, but I'm also not talking about the kind of pick and mix that you see in those gorgeous reels with the incredible batch prepping mums usually in America with their huge American fridges, and they make up these beautiful baskets and boxes of little pouches of different items for their kids, and they've got cute labels with the children's names on them and these tiny little packs. I mean, if that's you, all power to you, I bow down to your effort and enthusiasm, and you absolutely don't need this episode, you can skip it, but I did not have the budget or the time, nor the fridge space, or the head space, frankly, for that matter to do things quite like that.
So what I'm talking about is a much more low-key version of that, more budget friendly, less individual packaging too.
In one of my jobs I set up a tuck shop at a primary school and we used this pick and mix approach there. It was a whole project using year fives to serve food and do business skills and I will do an episode on that at some point because it was actually really great fun. But the basic idea was to have three items a day on offer and children could choose from them. We encouraged them to have either two or three items. Broadly speaking there was always one food that was a starchy carbohydrate type food, one that was a good source of protein and one fruit or veg.
So for example, we might have had half slices of bagel, quarter slices of ham and some apple pieces. Or we might have had a quarter wrap, cream cheese and strawberries or one of their favourites was always popcorn, sunflower seeds and raisins.
Now I'm not suggesting obviously that you do that at home every day, God forbid, but just use that basic idea to get into the fridge and cupboard a selection of things each week that are in these three rough groups. It doesn't have to be that children have all three at every snack. Sometimes when children are asking for a snack, especially quite close to a meal time, a piece of fruit on its own is perfectly good enough.
But when you can, a snack that has a bit of balance has a better chance of keeping them satisfied until the next meal. So the idea is to get in three to five items from each of those three groups when you do your food shop, so that during that week, either you or your children can put together some different combinations from the items to make up some balanced snacks. And then the next week, keep some of the favourites and swap out some of the others for different ones for a bit of variety.
So I'll run through some of the ideas that I've used either with my own kids or at the school and I'll put the list in a show note so that you can come over there and jot down some next time you go shopping if you like the idea. Most of them are pretty easy to put together or you can prep some of them in Tupperwares for kids to assemble for themselves.
So here are the suggestions roughly in those three groups.
So in the broadly starchy carbs group you've got obvious things like toast and crackers but also things like bagels, English muffins in halves are quite nice, pitas cut up into little strips, breadsticks are great for nibbling from one end to the other as long as they're not a very salty one, similarly with pretzels, things like rice cakes and oat cakes, wraps which you can have whole wraps or those mini wraps or cut them into quarters. Handfuls of dry cereal are really good if they're a higher fibre, lower sugar sort of cereal popcorn's great, you can either pop your own or you can get the microwave stuff
I recently saw a brilliant blog post from Nutrition for Kids that I'll link to in the show notes where they used ice cream cones to pile things inside of. That was really cool. So that's your sort of broadly starchy components.
And then for your more protein rich group, the obvious ones are things like cheese or ham, there's also things like hummus or other kind of beany spreads. S mall yogurts can be great, obviously keeping an on the sugar levels on the individual yogurts but they can be a great snack. Handfuls of nuts like cashews, almonds are great or seeds like sunflower seeds or pumpkin seeds or a mixture of the two. Cream cheese is great for spreading on stuff but also for gluing things together and the same with peanut butter or almond butter. Obviously you can get those little individual cheeses but you can just chop up little cubes of cheese yourself. And the same with things like leftover cooked meats, ⁓ also things like those little chicken satay's, you can buy those in the shops already made if you want to. And then tinned tuna or salmon are great because you can just keep them in the cupboard you don't need to do anything with them and and then a spoonful of those are great on a snack. And then also hard-boiled eggs, if your children like hard-boiled eggs you can cook a batch up at the weekend and keep them in the fridge and they're ready to go.
If you've got vegetarians in the house, then air fried chickpeas that you just make up at the weekend and put into a container are fantastic. And also those mini falafel are brilliant.
Milkshake or hot chocolate contains a decent amount of dairy milk or something like a soya milk that has slightly higher protein in or things like Actimel or the drinking yogurts can be great too. Again keep an eye on the sugar but loads of those have got a decent amount of protein and some good bacteria to boot.
So that's the sort of protein-y group.
And then finally your fruit or veg group. I don't need to tell you what fruit and veg looks like. But here are some suggestions of ones you might not have thought of. So obviously, you you've got your favourites like apples, bananas, carrot sticks, celery, cucumber. Pepper strips are great to prep ahead. Sugar snap peas or mange tout are usually pretty popular. Cherry tomatoes, easy peel or satsumas. Things like grapes, sultanas, raisins or apricots.
Don't overlook canned fruit, canned pineapple or peaches, if you can get them in juice rather than in syrup, are brilliant.
Frozen berries are also great and they're usually a lot cheaper. You can also freeze your own grapes or berries and you can eat them from frozen. Obviously keep an eye on choking hazards with younger children but I'll link in the show notes to the episode where we talked about freezing berries.
Bananas are obviously great just as they are but they're also really great frozen. You can dip them in a bit of dark chocolate if you want to, can shove them on a stick or you can blend them into what they call nice cream but basically ice cream. Stick some chocolate chips in it, jobs a good'un
And then for on the go, there's some convenience versions of some of these things. So like pouches of puree or smoothie. Do check the labels on those a lot of them do contain an awful lot of sugar and not as much fruit as you'd hope, but some of them are really great.
And the same goes for jelly, you can get low sugar ones in the shop or you can make your own at home you can make them with fruit juice with either gelatin or agar-agar if you're a vegetarian and they can be great for mixing with fruit to make it more fun.
So there's some suggestions for the fruit and veg group.
So obviously that was a huge list, I'm not suggesting you buy all of those things. But like I say, it's just some ideas to be able to pick out a few each week to assemble yourself or your child to assemble their own, depending on their age and stage. So prep anything that needs to be prepped in advance to be tempting, like carrot sticks or pita slices, and pop them in whatever containers works for you. If you want to have an area of the fridge and a tray on the counter for this week's snacks, you can do if you want to, or could have a little list so that everybody knows what's available to choose from this week.
And as a bonus, this approach actually does build familiarity for children, even with the foods that they don't choose, because they have to consider them each time they don't choose them.
If you really want to, can obviously assemble some of these ingredients beforehand So some examples of that would be mixing some of the dried ingredients together into a trail mix or those cute little hummus snack jars that you see online where you put a bit of hummus in the bottom and then you stick your carrot sticks and pepper slices in on top and then seal the jar up and then people can take them out and dip them in or things like quesadillas or mini muffin pizzas where you're using that starchy base but you're putting a bit of tomato puree in, a little bit of the cheese and one of your vegetables.
So there are some interesting things you can make from some of these ingredients, but honestly, a lot of them can just be people grabbing a handful of each on a plate to make up an easy picky snack.
So I hope you like this pick and mix approach to snack provision. The good thing is it means you only have to think about it once per week and then after that everybody knows what the ingredients are to choose from this week. I'll leave it up to you how you put it into practice whether it's having a pick and mix list for your kids to really get involved with or on busy or tired weeks honestly just using these lists to make your shopping list easier even if you don't do anything special with them. Let me know how you get on and what weird combinations of pick and mix your children come up with I would love to hear. And I'll see you on Monday and in the meantime, happy eating.
And as a bonus, this approach actually does build familiarity for children, even with the foods that they don't choose, because they have to consider them each time they don't choose them.
Joanne Roach (00:13)
Hello and welcome to the Food for Kids podcast. I'm Joanne from the Foodies. Today is the first full week of summer holidays for families in England and most of the UK is pretty similar. And as the name, The Six Weeks Holidays suggests, for most families that means somewhere in the region of 40 to 45 days of having the kids at home. There are lots of fun things to do, memories to make, school runs to not miss at all, but there's also quite a lot of work juggling to do, lots of keeping spirits up and activities and boredom and lots and lots and lots of food. So it's nice to not have to think about before school breakfast and packed lunches or dinner money accounts for a bit unless you have a holiday club to go to.
But on the other hand, for many families there is a house full of small people needing to be fed around the clock and the main thing that parents complain about is the constant need for snacks. Not surprising because if you have two kids at home eating two or three snacks a day as well as their meals, this summer you will be providing something in the region of 160 to 250 snacks before they go back to school. You don't obviously want them all to end up being crisps or biscuits and on the other hand you don't want to spend summer with one arm chained to the fridge. So let's come up with some ideas to try and make life a little bit easier, little bit tastier and a little bit healthier with some snack ideas. So let's get into it!
Joanne Roach (01:35)
There are loads of fantastic ideas around online for great healthy snacks for your kids and lots of them are absolutely gorgeous to look at and very insta-worthy but I'm not going to talk through those ideas here you can google those yourself. instead I'm going to advocate for the approach which kept me sane with my own kids and which I've also used in school which is a pick and mix snack approach. It's not rocket science, it's absolutely not my invention, but I do hope it will be helpful.
So I'm not talking about Woolworths pick and mix, unfortunately, but I'm also not talking about the kind of pick and mix that you see in those gorgeous reels with the incredible batch prepping mums usually in America with their huge American fridges, and they make up these beautiful baskets and boxes of little pouches of different items for their kids, and they've got cute labels with the children's names on them and these tiny little packs. I mean, if that's you, all power to you, I bow down to your effort and enthusiasm, and you absolutely don't need this episode, you can skip it, but I did not have the budget or the time, nor the fridge space, or the head space, frankly, for that matter to do things quite like that.
So what I'm talking about is a much more low-key version of that, more budget friendly, less individual packaging too.
In one of my jobs I set up a tuck shop at a primary school and we used this pick and mix approach there. It was a whole project using year fives to serve food and do business skills and I will do an episode on that at some point because it was actually really great fun. But the basic idea was to have three items a day on offer and children could choose from them. We encouraged them to have either two or three items. Broadly speaking there was always one food that was a starchy carbohydrate type food, one that was a good source of protein and one fruit or veg.
So for example, we might have had half slices of bagel, quarter slices of ham and some apple pieces. Or we might have had a quarter wrap, cream cheese and strawberries or one of their favourites was always popcorn, sunflower seeds and raisins.
Now I'm not suggesting obviously that you do that at home every day, God forbid, but just use that basic idea to get into the fridge and cupboard a selection of things each week that are in these three rough groups. It doesn't have to be that children have all three at every snack. Sometimes when children are asking for a snack, especially quite close to a meal time, a piece of fruit on its own is perfectly good enough.
But when you can, a snack that has a bit of balance has a better chance of keeping them satisfied until the next meal. So the idea is to get in three to five items from each of those three groups when you do your food shop, so that during that week, either you or your children can put together some different combinations from the items to make up some balanced snacks. And then the next week, keep some of the favourites and swap out some of the others for different ones for a bit of variety.
So I'll run through some of the ideas that I've used either with my own kids or at the school and I'll put the list in a show note so that you can come over there and jot down some next time you go shopping if you like the idea. Most of them are pretty easy to put together or you can prep some of them in Tupperwares for kids to assemble for themselves.
So here are the suggestions roughly in those three groups.
So in the broadly starchy carbs group you've got obvious things like toast and crackers but also things like bagels, English muffins in halves are quite nice, pitas cut up into little strips, breadsticks are great for nibbling from one end to the other as long as they're not a very salty one, similarly with pretzels, things like rice cakes and oat cakes, wraps which you can have whole wraps or those mini wraps or cut them into quarters. Handfuls of dry cereal are really good if they're a higher fibre, lower sugar sort of cereal popcorn's great, you can either pop your own or you can get the microwave stuff
I recently saw a brilliant blog post from Nutrition for Kids that I'll link to in the show notes where they used ice cream cones to pile things inside of. That was really cool. So that's your sort of broadly starchy components.
And then for your more protein rich group, the obvious ones are things like cheese or ham, there's also things like hummus or other kind of beany spreads. S mall yogurts can be great, obviously keeping an on the sugar levels on the individual yogurts but they can be a great snack. Handfuls of nuts like cashews, almonds are great or seeds like sunflower seeds or pumpkin seeds or a mixture of the two. Cream cheese is great for spreading on stuff but also for gluing things together and the same with peanut butter or almond butter. Obviously you can get those little individual cheeses but you can just chop up little cubes of cheese yourself. And the same with things like leftover cooked meats, ⁓ also things like those little chicken satay's, you can buy those in the shops already made if you want to. And then tinned tuna or salmon are great because you can just keep them in the cupboard you don't need to do anything with them and and then a spoonful of those are great on a snack. And then also hard-boiled eggs, if your children like hard-boiled eggs you can cook a batch up at the weekend and keep them in the fridge and they're ready to go.
If you've got vegetarians in the house, then air fried chickpeas that you just make up at the weekend and put into a container are fantastic. And also those mini falafel are brilliant.
Milkshake or hot chocolate contains a decent amount of dairy milk or something like a soya milk that has slightly higher protein in or things like Actimel or the drinking yogurts can be great too. Again keep an eye on the sugar but loads of those have got a decent amount of protein and some good bacteria to boot.
So that's the sort of protein-y group.
And then finally your fruit or veg group. I don't need to tell you what fruit and veg looks like. But here are some suggestions of ones you might not have thought of. So obviously, you you've got your favourites like apples, bananas, carrot sticks, celery, cucumber. Pepper strips are great to prep ahead. Sugar snap peas or mange tout are usually pretty popular. Cherry tomatoes, easy peel or satsumas. Things like grapes, sultanas, raisins or apricots.
Don't overlook canned fruit, canned pineapple or peaches, if you can get them in juice rather than in syrup, are brilliant.
Frozen berries are also great and they're usually a lot cheaper. You can also freeze your own grapes or berries and you can eat them from frozen. Obviously keep an eye on choking hazards with younger children but I'll link in the show notes to the episode where we talked about freezing berries.
Bananas are obviously great just as they are but they're also really great frozen. You can dip them in a bit of dark chocolate if you want to, can shove them on a stick or you can blend them into what they call nice cream but basically ice cream. Stick some chocolate chips in it, jobs a good'un
And then for on the go, there's some convenience versions of some of these things. So like pouches of puree or smoothie. Do check the labels on those a lot of them do contain an awful lot of sugar and not as much fruit as you'd hope, but some of them are really great.
And the same goes for jelly, you can get low sugar ones in the shop or you can make your own at home you can make them with fruit juice with either gelatin or agar-agar if you're a vegetarian and they can be great for mixing with fruit to make it more fun.
So there's some suggestions for the fruit and veg group.
So obviously that was a huge list, I'm not suggesting you buy all of those things. But like I say, it's just some ideas to be able to pick out a few each week to assemble yourself or your child to assemble their own, depending on their age and stage. So prep anything that needs to be prepped in advance to be tempting, like carrot sticks or pita slices, and pop them in whatever containers works for you. If you want to have an area of the fridge and a tray on the counter for this week's snacks, you can do if you want to, or could have a little list so that everybody knows what's available to choose from this week.
And as a bonus, this approach actually does build familiarity for children, even with the foods that they don't choose, because they have to consider them each time they don't choose them.
If you really want to, can obviously assemble some of these ingredients beforehand So some examples of that would be mixing some of the dried ingredients together into a trail mix or those cute little hummus snack jars that you see online where you put a bit of hummus in the bottom and then you stick your carrot sticks and pepper slices in on top and then seal the jar up and then people can take them out and dip them in or things like quesadillas or mini muffin pizzas where you're using that starchy base but you're putting a bit of tomato puree in, a little bit of the cheese and one of your vegetables.
So there are some interesting things you can make from some of these ingredients, but honestly, a lot of them can just be people grabbing a handful of each on a plate to make up an easy picky snack.
So I hope you like this pick and mix approach to snack provision. The good thing is it means you only have to think about it once per week and then after that everybody knows what the ingredients are to choose from this week. I'll leave it up to you how you put it into practice whether it's having a pick and mix list for your kids to really get involved with or on busy or tired weeks honestly just using these lists to make your shopping list easier even if you don't do anything special with them. Let me know how you get on and what weird combinations of pick and mix your children come up with I would love to hear. And I'll see you on Monday and in the meantime, happy eating.
If you really want to, can obviously assemble some of these ingredients beforehand So some examples of that would be mixing some of the dried ingredients together into a trail mix or those cute little hummus snack jars that you see online where you put a bit of hummus in the bottom and then you stick your carrot sticks and pepper slices in on top and then seal the jar up and then people can take them out and dip them in or things like quesadillas or mini muffin pizzas where you're using that starchy base but you're putting a bit of tomato puree in, a little bit of the cheese and one of your vegetables.
Joanne Roach (00:13)
Hello and welcome to the Food for Kids podcast. I'm Joanne from the Foodies. Today is the first full week of summer holidays for families in England and most of the UK is pretty similar. And as the name, The Six Weeks Holidays suggests, for most families that means somewhere in the region of 40 to 45 days of having the kids at home. There are lots of fun things to do, memories to make, school runs to not miss at all, but there's also quite a lot of work juggling to do, lots of keeping spirits up and activities and boredom and lots and lots and lots of food. So it's nice to not have to think about before school breakfast and packed lunches or dinner money accounts for a bit unless you have a holiday club to go to.
But on the other hand, for many families there is a house full of small people needing to be fed around the clock and the main thing that parents complain about is the constant need for snacks. Not surprising because if you have two kids at home eating two or three snacks a day as well as their meals, this summer you will be providing something in the region of 160 to 250 snacks before they go back to school. You don't obviously want them all to end up being crisps or biscuits and on the other hand you don't want to spend summer with one arm chained to the fridge. So let's come up with some ideas to try and make life a little bit easier, little bit tastier and a little bit healthier with some snack ideas. So let's get into it!
Joanne Roach (01:35)
There are loads of fantastic ideas around online for great healthy snacks for your kids and lots of them are absolutely gorgeous to look at and very insta-worthy but I'm not going to talk through those ideas here you can google those yourself. instead I'm going to advocate for the approach which kept me sane with my own kids and which I've also used in school which is a pick and mix snack approach. It's not rocket science, it's absolutely not my invention, but I do hope it will be helpful.
So I'm not talking about Woolworths pick and mix, unfortunately, but I'm also not talking about the kind of pick and mix that you see in those gorgeous reels with the incredible batch prepping mums usually in America with their huge American fridges, and they make up these beautiful baskets and boxes of little pouches of different items for their kids, and they've got cute labels with the children's names on them and these tiny little packs. I mean, if that's you, all power to you, I bow down to your effort and enthusiasm, and you absolutely don't need this episode, you can skip it, but I did not have the budget or the time, nor the fridge space, or the head space, frankly, for that matter to do things quite like that.
So what I'm talking about is a much more low-key version of that, more budget friendly, less individual packaging too.
In one of my jobs I set up a tuck shop at a primary school and we used this pick and mix approach there. It was a whole project using year fives to serve food and do business skills and I will do an episode on that at some point because it was actually really great fun. But the basic idea was to have three items a day on offer and children could choose from them. We encouraged them to have either two or three items. Broadly speaking there was always one food that was a starchy carbohydrate type food, one that was a good source of protein and one fruit or veg.
So for example, we might have had half slices of bagel, quarter slices of ham and some apple pieces. Or we might have had a quarter wrap, cream cheese and strawberries or one of their favourites was always popcorn, sunflower seeds and raisins.
Now I'm not suggesting obviously that you do that at home every day, God forbid, but just use that basic idea to get into the fridge and cupboard a selection of things each week that are in these three rough groups. It doesn't have to be that children have all three at every snack. Sometimes when children are asking for a snack, especially quite close to a meal time, a piece of fruit on its own is perfectly good enough.
But when you can, a snack that has a bit of balance has a better chance of keeping them satisfied until the next meal. So the idea is to get in three to five items from each of those three groups when you do your food shop, so that during that week, either you or your children can put together some different combinations from the items to make up some balanced snacks. And then the next week, keep some of the favourites and swap out some of the others for different ones for a bit of variety.
So I'll run through some of the ideas that I've used either with my own kids or at the school and I'll put the list in a show note so that you can come over there and jot down some next time you go shopping if you like the idea. Most of them are pretty easy to put together or you can prep some of them in Tupperwares for kids to assemble for themselves.
So here are the suggestions roughly in those three groups.
So in the broadly starchy carbs group you've got obvious things like toast and crackers but also things like bagels, English muffins in halves are quite nice, pitas cut up into little strips, breadsticks are great for nibbling from one end to the other as long as they're not a very salty one, similarly with pretzels, things like rice cakes and oat cakes, wraps which you can have whole wraps or those mini wraps or cut them into quarters. Handfuls of dry cereal are really good if they're a higher fibre, lower sugar sort of cereal popcorn's great, you can either pop your own or you can get the microwave stuff
I recently saw a brilliant blog post from Nutrition for Kids that I'll link to in the show notes where they used ice cream cones to pile things inside of. That was really cool. So that's your sort of broadly starchy components.
And then for your more protein rich group, the obvious ones are things like cheese or ham, there's also things like hummus or other kind of beany spreads. S mall yogurts can be great, obviously keeping an on the sugar levels on the individual yogurts but they can be a great snack. Handfuls of nuts like cashews, almonds are great or seeds like sunflower seeds or pumpkin seeds or a mixture of the two. Cream cheese is great for spreading on stuff but also for gluing things together and the same with peanut butter or almond butter. Obviously you can get those little individual cheeses but you can just chop up little cubes of cheese yourself. And the same with things like leftover cooked meats, ⁓ also things like those little chicken satay's, you can buy those in the shops already made if you want to. And then tinned tuna or salmon are great because you can just keep them in the cupboard you don't need to do anything with them and and then a spoonful of those are great on a snack. And then also hard-boiled eggs, if your children like hard-boiled eggs you can cook a batch up at the weekend and keep them in the fridge and they're ready to go.
If you've got vegetarians in the house, then air fried chickpeas that you just make up at the weekend and put into a container are fantastic. And also those mini falafel are brilliant.
Milkshake or hot chocolate contains a decent amount of dairy milk or something like a soya milk that has slightly higher protein in or things like Actimel or the drinking yogurts can be great too. Again keep an eye on the sugar but loads of those have got a decent amount of protein and some good bacteria to boot.
So that's the sort of protein-y group.
And then finally your fruit or veg group. I don't need to tell you what fruit and veg looks like. But here are some suggestions of ones you might not have thought of. So obviously, you you've got your favourites like apples, bananas, carrot sticks, celery, cucumber. Pepper strips are great to prep ahead. Sugar snap peas or mange tout are usually pretty popular. Cherry tomatoes, easy peel or satsumas. Things like grapes, sultanas, raisins or apricots.
Don't overlook canned fruit, canned pineapple or peaches, if you can get them in juice rather than in syrup, are brilliant.
Frozen berries are also great and they're usually a lot cheaper. You can also freeze your own grapes or berries and you can eat them from frozen. Obviously keep an eye on choking hazards with younger children but I'll link in the show notes to the episode where we talked about freezing berries.
Bananas are obviously great just as they are but they're also really great frozen. You can dip them in a bit of dark chocolate if you want to, can shove them on a stick or you can blend them into what they call nice cream but basically ice cream. Stick some chocolate chips in it, jobs a good'un
And then for on the go, there's some convenience versions of some of these things. So like pouches of puree or smoothie. Do check the labels on those a lot of them do contain an awful lot of sugar and not as much fruit as you'd hope, but some of them are really great.
And the same goes for jelly, you can get low sugar ones in the shop or you can make your own at home you can make them with fruit juice with either gelatin or agar-agar if you're a vegetarian and they can be great for mixing with fruit to make it more fun.
So there's some suggestions for the fruit and veg group.
So obviously that was a huge list, I'm not suggesting you buy all of those things. But like I say, it's just some ideas to be able to pick out a few each week to assemble yourself or your child to assemble their own, depending on their age and stage. So prep anything that needs to be prepped in advance to be tempting, like carrot sticks or pita slices, and pop them in whatever containers works for you. If you want to have an area of the fridge and a tray on the counter for this week's snacks, you can do if you want to, or could have a little list so that everybody knows what's available to choose from this week.
And as a bonus, this approach actually does build familiarity for children, even with the foods that they don't choose, because they have to consider them each time they don't choose them.
If you really want to, can obviously assemble some of these ingredients beforehand So some examples of that would be mixing some of the dried ingredients together into a trail mix or those cute little hummus snack jars that you see online where you put a bit of hummus in the bottom and then you stick your carrot sticks and pepper slices in on top and then seal the jar up and then people can take them out and dip them in or things like quesadillas or mini muffin pizzas where you're using that starchy base but you're putting a bit of tomato puree in, a little bit of the cheese and one of your vegetables.
So there are some interesting things you can make from some of these ingredients, but honestly, a lot of them can just be people grabbing a handful of each on a plate to make up an easy picky snack.
So I hope you like this pick and mix approach to snack provision. The good thing is it means you only have to think about it once per week and then after that everybody knows what the ingredients are to choose from this week. I'll leave it up to you how you put it into practice whether it's having a pick and mix list for your kids to really get involved with or on busy or tired weeks honestly just using these lists to make your shopping list easier even if you don't do anything special with them. Let me know how you get on and what weird combinations of pick and mix your children come up with I would love to hear. And I'll see you on Monday and in the meantime, happy eating.
So there are some interesting things you can make from some of these ingredients, but honestly, a lot of them can just be people grabbing a handful of each on a plate to make up an easy picky snack.
Joanne Roach (00:13)
Hello and welcome to the Food for Kids podcast. I'm Joanne from the Foodies. Today is the first full week of summer holidays for families in England and most of the UK is pretty similar. And as the name, The Six Weeks Holidays suggests, for most families that means somewhere in the region of 40 to 45 days of having the kids at home. There are lots of fun things to do, memories to make, school runs to not miss at all, but there's also quite a lot of work juggling to do, lots of keeping spirits up and activities and boredom and lots and lots and lots of food. So it's nice to not have to think about before school breakfast and packed lunches or dinner money accounts for a bit unless you have a holiday club to go to.
But on the other hand, for many families there is a house full of small people needing to be fed around the clock and the main thing that parents complain about is the constant need for snacks. Not surprising because if you have two kids at home eating two or three snacks a day as well as their meals, this summer you will be providing something in the region of 160 to 250 snacks before they go back to school. You don't obviously want them all to end up being crisps or biscuits and on the other hand you don't want to spend summer with one arm chained to the fridge. So let's come up with some ideas to try and make life a little bit easier, little bit tastier and a little bit healthier with some snack ideas. So let's get into it!
Joanne Roach (01:35)
There are loads of fantastic ideas around online for great healthy snacks for your kids and lots of them are absolutely gorgeous to look at and very insta-worthy but I'm not going to talk through those ideas here you can google those yourself. instead I'm going to advocate for the approach which kept me sane with my own kids and which I've also used in school which is a pick and mix snack approach. It's not rocket science, it's absolutely not my invention, but I do hope it will be helpful.
So I'm not talking about Woolworths pick and mix, unfortunately, but I'm also not talking about the kind of pick and mix that you see in those gorgeous reels with the incredible batch prepping mums usually in America with their huge American fridges, and they make up these beautiful baskets and boxes of little pouches of different items for their kids, and they've got cute labels with the children's names on them and these tiny little packs. I mean, if that's you, all power to you, I bow down to your effort and enthusiasm, and you absolutely don't need this episode, you can skip it, but I did not have the budget or the time, nor the fridge space, or the head space, frankly, for that matter to do things quite like that.
So what I'm talking about is a much more low-key version of that, more budget friendly, less individual packaging too.
In one of my jobs I set up a tuck shop at a primary school and we used this pick and mix approach there. It was a whole project using year fives to serve food and do business skills and I will do an episode on that at some point because it was actually really great fun. But the basic idea was to have three items a day on offer and children could choose from them. We encouraged them to have either two or three items. Broadly speaking there was always one food that was a starchy carbohydrate type food, one that was a good source of protein and one fruit or veg.
So for example, we might have had half slices of bagel, quarter slices of ham and some apple pieces. Or we might have had a quarter wrap, cream cheese and strawberries or one of their favourites was always popcorn, sunflower seeds and raisins.
Now I'm not suggesting obviously that you do that at home every day, God forbid, but just use that basic idea to get into the fridge and cupboard a selection of things each week that are in these three rough groups. It doesn't have to be that children have all three at every snack. Sometimes when children are asking for a snack, especially quite close to a meal time, a piece of fruit on its own is perfectly good enough.
But when you can, a snack that has a bit of balance has a better chance of keeping them satisfied until the next meal. So the idea is to get in three to five items from each of those three groups when you do your food shop, so that during that week, either you or your children can put together some different combinations from the items to make up some balanced snacks. And then the next week, keep some of the favourites and swap out some of the others for different ones for a bit of variety.
So I'll run through some of the ideas that I've used either with my own kids or at the school and I'll put the list in a show note so that you can come over there and jot down some next time you go shopping if you like the idea. Most of them are pretty easy to put together or you can prep some of them in Tupperwares for kids to assemble for themselves.
So here are the suggestions roughly in those three groups.
So in the broadly starchy carbs group you've got obvious things like toast and crackers but also things like bagels, English muffins in halves are quite nice, pitas cut up into little strips, breadsticks are great for nibbling from one end to the other as long as they're not a very salty one, similarly with pretzels, things like rice cakes and oat cakes, wraps which you can have whole wraps or those mini wraps or cut them into quarters. Handfuls of dry cereal are really good if they're a higher fibre, lower sugar sort of cereal popcorn's great, you can either pop your own or you can get the microwave stuff
I recently saw a brilliant blog post from Nutrition for Kids that I'll link to in the show notes where they used ice cream cones to pile things inside of. That was really cool. So that's your sort of broadly starchy components.
And then for your more protein rich group, the obvious ones are things like cheese or ham, there's also things like hummus or other kind of beany spreads. S mall yogurts can be great, obviously keeping an on the sugar levels on the individual yogurts but they can be a great snack. Handfuls of nuts like cashews, almonds are great or seeds like sunflower seeds or pumpkin seeds or a mixture of the two. Cream cheese is great for spreading on stuff but also for gluing things together and the same with peanut butter or almond butter. Obviously you can get those little individual cheeses but you can just chop up little cubes of cheese yourself. And the same with things like leftover cooked meats, ⁓ also things like those little chicken satay's, you can buy those in the shops already made if you want to. And then tinned tuna or salmon are great because you can just keep them in the cupboard you don't need to do anything with them and and then a spoonful of those are great on a snack. And then also hard-boiled eggs, if your children like hard-boiled eggs you can cook a batch up at the weekend and keep them in the fridge and they're ready to go.
If you've got vegetarians in the house, then air fried chickpeas that you just make up at the weekend and put into a container are fantastic. And also those mini falafel are brilliant.
Milkshake or hot chocolate contains a decent amount of dairy milk or something like a soya milk that has slightly higher protein in or things like Actimel or the drinking yogurts can be great too. Again keep an eye on the sugar but loads of those have got a decent amount of protein and some good bacteria to boot.
So that's the sort of protein-y group.
And then finally your fruit or veg group. I don't need to tell you what fruit and veg looks like. But here are some suggestions of ones you might not have thought of. So obviously, you you've got your favourites like apples, bananas, carrot sticks, celery, cucumber. Pepper strips are great to prep ahead. Sugar snap peas or mange tout are usually pretty popular. Cherry tomatoes, easy peel or satsumas. Things like grapes, sultanas, raisins or apricots.
Don't overlook canned fruit, canned pineapple or peaches, if you can get them in juice rather than in syrup, are brilliant.
Frozen berries are also great and they're usually a lot cheaper. You can also freeze your own grapes or berries and you can eat them from frozen. Obviously keep an eye on choking hazards with younger children but I'll link in the show notes to the episode where we talked about freezing berries.
Bananas are obviously great just as they are but they're also really great frozen. You can dip them in a bit of dark chocolate if you want to, can shove them on a stick or you can blend them into what they call nice cream but basically ice cream. Stick some chocolate chips in it, jobs a good'un
And then for on the go, there's some convenience versions of some of these things. So like pouches of puree or smoothie. Do check the labels on those a lot of them do contain an awful lot of sugar and not as much fruit as you'd hope, but some of them are really great.
And the same goes for jelly, you can get low sugar ones in the shop or you can make your own at home you can make them with fruit juice with either gelatin or agar-agar if you're a vegetarian and they can be great for mixing with fruit to make it more fun.
So there's some suggestions for the fruit and veg group.
So obviously that was a huge list, I'm not suggesting you buy all of those things. But like I say, it's just some ideas to be able to pick out a few each week to assemble yourself or your child to assemble their own, depending on their age and stage. So prep anything that needs to be prepped in advance to be tempting, like carrot sticks or pita slices, and pop them in whatever containers works for you. If you want to have an area of the fridge and a tray on the counter for this week's snacks, you can do if you want to, or could have a little list so that everybody knows what's available to choose from this week.
And as a bonus, this approach actually does build familiarity for children, even with the foods that they don't choose, because they have to consider them each time they don't choose them.
If you really want to, can obviously assemble some of these ingredients beforehand So some examples of that would be mixing some of the dried ingredients together into a trail mix or those cute little hummus snack jars that you see online where you put a bit of hummus in the bottom and then you stick your carrot sticks and pepper slices in on top and then seal the jar up and then people can take them out and dip them in or things like quesadillas or mini muffin pizzas where you're using that starchy base but you're putting a bit of tomato puree in, a little bit of the cheese and one of your vegetables.
So there are some interesting things you can make from some of these ingredients, but honestly, a lot of them can just be people grabbing a handful of each on a plate to make up an easy picky snack.
So I hope you like this pick and mix approach to snack provision. The good thing is it means you only have to think about it once per week and then after that everybody knows what the ingredients are to choose from this week. I'll leave it up to you how you put it into practice whether it's having a pick and mix list for your kids to really get involved with or on busy or tired weeks honestly just using these lists to make your shopping list easier even if you don't do anything special with them. Let me know how you get on and what weird combinations of pick and mix your children come up with I would love to hear. And I'll see you on Monday and in the meantime, happy eating.
So I hope you like this pick and mix approach to snack provision. The good thing is it means you only have to think about it once per week and then after that everybody knows what the ingredients are to choose from this week. I'll leave it up to you how you put it into practice whether it's having a pick and mix list for your kids to really get involved with or on busy or tired weeks honestly just using these lists to make your shopping list easier even if you don't do anything special with them. Let me know how you get on and what weird combinations of pick and mix your children come up with I would love to hear. And I'll see you on Monday and in the meantime, happy eating.
Episode Highlights - Easy summer holiday snacks for kids
Chapters
00:00 Introduction
01:35 The pick and mix approach
04:39 Starchy carbs group
05:27 Protein rich group
06:45 Fruit and veg group
08:09 How to use it
09:30 Summary and Outro
That was the episode where we ran through some easy summer holiday snacks for kids
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