By Sam Milner
When it comes to getting your kids to eat healthily, it can be a real challenge. You want your kids eating well, but your kids say they don’t like this fruit or that veg, and, at the same time, there aren’t always enough hours in the day to cook from scratch with lots of veg piled in. Eating healthily can sometimes feel expensive too. A lot of the time we have all these foods that are cheaper but are not healthy. It can be really hard to strike that perfect balance between healthy foods and making budget-friendly meals.
Here are my top tips to help:
Buy Seasonal Veg – Focusing on seasonal veg can save you money on your shop and make it stretch further if you’re on a budget. For example, in the new year there will be lots of root veg and you can batch cook some soup to freeze or focus on meals that are in season. Or in the summer you can batch cook some cherry tomatoes with feta and make a Mediterranean sauce for the freezer.
Hidden Veg Recipes – there are loads of recipes you can hide veg in – meaning your kids are getting loads of goodness but are none the wiser that it’s healthy! What I love to do is roast butternut squash in the air fryer with garlic and then transform it into a cheese sauce. You can also add in other root vegetables too. It’s super simple to make too – you just need blend the squash, so you have a purée and it’s the perfect base for a creamy sauce. In-fact you can do something similar with all the recipes where you would add pasta sauce, such as a lasagne. Grab one of the mediterranean veg packs from the supermarket. They come with prepped courgette, tomatoes, garlic and red peppers. Air fry and then, once soft, blend with some passata. You then have a veggie loaded sauce.
Make A Plan – it’s easy to just go to the supermarket for your weekly shop and not have a plan. You shop blindly and think I will have a bit of this and a bit of that. But we often as consumers don’t compare what we are eating vs what we already have in. We are also often then more tempted by unhealthy foods if we buy in this way. Instead, write a list of the things you need every week for healthy snacks and breakfast as those lists often don’t change. Then focus on healthy dinners. Plan the next 7 days of dinners and add the ingredients to your shopping list. Then cross out anything you have in already that you don’t need to buy. Then you have a cheaper, healthier, more focused shopping list.
Get them excited about vegetables – the best way to do this is to get kids involved in making the meal. If they love one particular vegetable, let’s say carrots, for example, take carrots to the next level. Let them peel and help you prep the carrots. Seeing how they are cooked will get them even more excited about the veg. Each week buy a bag of carrots, give them some recipe ideas and have fun making different recipes together. For instance, make carrot chips in the air fryer and let them choose what seasoning they would like on them. Explain that a honey glaze on carrots is magical and that you would love their help making them for this Sunday’s roast. Then ask them what their second favourite vegetable is and rinse and repeat.
Make the most of offers on meat – meat is an important part of a healthy diet. there are always deals to be had on cheap meat. Whether that is stocking up on supermarket yellow stickers, buying what’s in season or seeing what deals the butchers currently has on. If you want a Sunday roast and the cost worries you, then you can opt for a cheap whole chicken and get more meals out of it, or the butchers favourite is a pork leg joint. A boneless pork leg is often the cheapest roasting meat and pork tastes so good. Seasonal times like Christmas, Easter and Father’s Day are also fantastic for meat deals. You can grab reduced price/stock clearance deals after the event and store them in the freezer for later.
Sam Milner is the co-author of The Complete Air Fryer Cooking Guide: Times and Temperatures which includes the times and temperatures for all the popular air fryer veg when cooking kids veg for dinner. Make it more fun and let them tell you how long to cook their veg for dinner!