Managing a family is no mean feat. Most parents find themselves running around doing something constantly. Whether that’s trying to balance work, the school run, chores, getting your kids to their clubs and hobbies on time or anything else, you’re going to be kepy busy most of the day, every day. This is manageable for most, but you do need to make sure that your family’s meals aren’t declining in quality in the process. Nowadays, a lot of busy parents find themselves leaning towards convenience foods for main family meals on too regular a basis. Junk food, fast food, takeaways, drive thrus, ready meals… sure, these may all allow you to fill your little one’s stomachs with minimal time and effort, but they’re not ideal. These types of foods lack nutrition and can contain too many saturated fats, too much sugar and too much salt. Instead, here are some ways that you can make quality meals around your busy family life.
Meal Plan and Meal Prep
The key to successfully providing your family with healthy meals, day in and day out, is meal planning and meal prepping. Meal planning involves coming up with what you’re going to have for breakfast, lunch and dinner for the week ahead, allowing you to head out and get all of the necessary ingredients in. Meal prepping involves preparing certain elements of the meals when you have time, helping to make cooking them easier and faster when the time comes to actually make the meal.
Make Do With Ingredients You Have
All too often, parents will go to make a delicious, healthy, wholesome meal, but find one ingreident is missing and don’t have time to head to the shops to pick it up. This can often result in the whole meal being thrown out of the window and the parents opting for something delivered instead. Avoid this. Instead, you can often replace particularly ingredients with something else you may have in the cupboard, or modify the recipe to make do without. You can find plenty of replacements out there, from chia seed mixes replacing eggs to sweetener to replace sugar or these are the top brown rice flour substitutes.
Have Healthy Snacks on Hand
If you’ve been out or busy all day and collect your kids from school, chances are, dinner isn’t going to be on the table as soon as they walk through the door. They are also likely to be hungry. So, instead of handing snacks that may overly fill them (causing them to leave their healthy dinner), or junk food that isn’t going to be good for them, you should make sure that you have plenty of healthy snacks around. This will allow you to temporarily satiate their hunger while you get on with making their main meal.
As you can see, you don’t have to compromise when it comes to feeding your family well around your other commitments and responsibilities. Hopefully, the guide above should help you to find a good balance that meets everyone’s needs!
