Years ago I had seven preteens in the house, often plus whatever friends they had invited to stay for dinner without warning.
I'm suddenly feeding a much bigger household again, including growing kids, and grocery prices being what they are, I've been remembering all the little tricks I used back then.
Most advice about stretching a food budget seems to focus on making the main dish cheaper; use less meat, substitute something cheaper, make beans instead, etc. I did some of that, obviously, but mostly I didn't stretch the main dish. I stretched the meal around it.
If I had enough chicken for the casserole I normally made, I made the casserole. If we were having hamburgers, everybody still got a hamburger. I just made sure the expensive part of dinner wasn't responsible for filling seven or ten or twelve hungry stomachs all by itself.
One of my best tricks was simply feeding the first wave of hunger before dinner. I'd hand out apples about an hour beforehand. A kid who has eaten an apple is still perfectly capable of eating dinner, they’re just no longer approaching it like a starved wolf.
On hamburger night I'd cut an entire bag of potatoes into oven fries, skins and all, shake them in a bag with some oil, salt and pepper, and cover as many cookie sheets as the oven would hold. Then I’d make sure the fries were always ready before the hamburgers. The kids would descend upon them. By the time the hamburgers were ready, one hamburger apiece, plus vegetables and whatever else we were having, was plenty.
Sometimes a casserole was mysteriously "taking forever.” Especially if the kids invited some extra kids to dinner unexpectedly. "Oh well. Here are some biscuits while you're waiting. And applesauce. There are cheese sandwiches too." After everybody had been eating for a while I’d bring out the casserole. "Oh, finally! The casserole is done."
Then out came the perfectly ordinary casserole, with green beans and more biscuits. Nobody thought dinner was stingy. As far as the kids were concerned, they'd been eating for half an hour.
I kept Jiffy corn muffin mixes by the dozen. It was insurance against just that sort of thing. "Oh, how nice! You invited three friends to stay for dinner!" We're having cornbread. And some other stuff. Until then here’s some peanut butter and bread and apples.
Pasta always got what I privately called decorative vegetables, usually the inexpensive dollar frozen bags. The whole bag, maybe two. Peas, broccoli, carrots, mixed vegetables, whatever went with it. Yes, they made the pasta colorful. They also mysteriously produced several additional servings without taking anything out of the original meal. Spaghetti got spinach, usually. Then, at dinner time, a veg or fruit of a different color was on the plate too. Tonight, we are having chicken and noodles. There will be at least a whole bag of frozen peas in there. And then I’ll slice tomatoes on the plate, maybe some applesauce will show up. The plate will be full, full of colors, good tastes, and no one will know I used two small chicken breasts for nine people.
Pickles were another great one. Not a precious little jar of fancy pickles but a giant cheap gallon jar of dill pickles you get in the ‘commercial food’ aisle at the grocery store.
Hand those out and kids will happily eat what amounts to an entire big cucumber in pickle form. Nobody has to ask whether they can have another one, the answer will be yes, go for it. There are approximately nine thousand pickles. Here’s some cold water to wash them down. Supper will be ready in 20 minutes.
That was actually an important part of the system: some things on the table should feel unlimited. Bread, biscuits, cornbread, potatoes, or apples. Also applesauce, pickles and rice. Whatever was inexpensive that week and that the kids actually liked.
I baked an ungodly amount of bread in those days. I don't intend to resume that particular level of insanity, and God bless cheap grocery-store wheat bread. But biscuits and cornbread are still wonderful because at 5 PM you can look at dinner, realize it isn't going to be enough, and manufacture a substantial addition from pantry ingredients.
Don’t sleep on generic bisquick biscuits served with cheap applesauce as a pre-dinner snack. Actually, desserts and snacks work the same way.
Today I had a gigantic zucchini I bought at the farmers market for a dollar. I grated it into a huge batch of snack cake with eggs, flour, brown sugar and two cans of fruit that had been ignored in my pantry forever. I baked some in cast-iron skillets for people to eat today and a big sheet pan that I'm cutting into lunchbox squares. It isn't a nutritional powerhouse but it's a nice homemade snack made mostly from inexpensive things I already had, and it means I’m not pestered for expensive boughten snacks.
And that's really the thing I'm remembering now. I don’t make the normal nutritious meal smaller if you don't have to. I make the meal bigger around it.
Two chicken breasts can look pretty inadequate if dinner is two chicken breasts divided among a crowd. Two chicken breasts chopped into a big pan of creamy noodles with peas and other vegetables, accompanied by bread, a different-colored fruit or vegetable on the side, and snack cake afterward, is a very generous dinner. The chicken is still there. The vegetables are still there. Nobody's being handed half a hamburger and told to be grateful. You're just supplying some of the calories hungry growing people need with inexpensive foods instead of expecting meat, cheese, or the main dish to provide all of them.
And if the kids are absolutely ravenous, put the cheap, filling, good thing in front of them first. They aren't being tricked. They can still eat as much dinner as they want. You're just recognizing that a starving teenager will eat an expensive four dollar hamburger with exactly the same enthusiasm with which they'll eat a fifty- cent oven fried potato.
When we get together now, the kids don’t talk about how we ate "poor people food.". They do ask about their favorite dishes. Their friends liked staying for dinner. There was usually a lot of food on the table, and an unexpected kid was welcome.
That's what I was actually trying to accomplish. Not "How little can I spend feeding these kids?" More like "How can I make sure nobody at my table experiences dinner as scarce?"