As the school summer holidays draw to an end, harassed parents can find themselves running out of ways to satisfy their children's endless demands for snacks and entertainment. And with the cost of living soaring, most don't have an endless budget to help them.
Fortunately, Lynn Beattie, who writes the finance blog Mrs Mummypenny has some tips to share to lighten the load. One of her best ideas is to make the creation of the snacks fun so you satisfy the tummies and the need for fun at the same time.
Lynn told the Daily Mirror how you don't have to spend a lot of cash, with one of her biggest hits a tasty crumble that gets the kids out and about foraging for berries. After that, all you need is £1 worth of ingredients from Aldi to prepare the dish.
She also has great ideas to help your kids get their five-a-day in a fun way. And to create luxury-looking ice creams at budget prices.
Here are Lynn's top ideas for the holiday snack attacks:
Blackberry crumble
Lynn writes: "This is my big hitter and my favourite of all the food treat activities in this list. The brilliant thing about blackberries (apart from the fact they are early and abundant this year) is that they are everywhere.
"It’s lovely to get out into the countryside to pick them if that’s easily accessible to you. Once home all you need to do is rinse the blackberries, pop them in a bowl with a couple of tablespoons of sugar and then get the kids involved in making the crumble topping.
"There are heaps of different ways you can make crumble topping but essentially it’s butter and sugar and flour. A crumble topping with these proportions using Aldi flour, butter and sugar - 120g flour, 60g caster sugar, 60g unsalted butter - costs about £1.
Ice lollies
Lynn explains: "The big investment with homemade ice lollies is of course the ice lolly mould. The good news is that lots of summer range stuff is on sale at the moment so you can pick these up for less than £2 from places like Wilko and Hobbycraft.
"You’ve got loads of options of what you can put in the ice lolly moulds – you can use fruit juices like apple juice or orange juice which is a bit more expensive but a good way to get some fruity vitamins into the kids. We tend to buy the long life fruit juices in our house so one litre of apple juice is around 80p and you get loads of lollies out of a litre.
"The other obvious one is that you can use squash. I tend to find you need more squash in an ice lolly than you’d use in a drink for a full flavoured one, but half squash, half water makes a nice lolly. Again it’s a good way to keep the kids cool and hydrated in the heat.
Fruit kebabs
"Junk food rather than fruit is usually what my kids are after when they are clamouring for treats. However, I’ve found I can not only amuse them for at least 15 minutes in the creation of their very own fruit kebabs, they are usually well up for eating the fruit once they have made them.
"I use apples, bananas, pieces of orange usually and then make it that bit more exotic by adding in some strawberries or melon. You can also used tinned fruit like peaches too.
"It’s worth noting that with the earlier heatwave there’s been a real glut of berries so lots of the supermarkets are selling 800g of strawberries and other berries for what you’d normally expect to pay for 400g at the moment."
Popcorn
"We have a bit of a termtime ritual in our house which is that Friday night is movie night. We started this in the winter when we used to drag the kids' duvets downstairs too and make the sitting room dark like a cinema – and of course we’d make a huge bowl of popcorn to share.
"Whilst none of us would even think about duvets at this time of year, the kids love movie night so much that it’s still something they want to do on Fridays in the summer. We’ve tended to use packaged microwave popcorn (which still only works out at roughly 70p a bag) but recently we’ve been experimenting with buying bags of corn kernels and making it ourselves in the microwave.
"There are heaps of recipes online and the beauty of this is that you can make whatever additional toppings you like, keeping it as healthy (or not) as suits. A 500g bag of popcorn kernels costs around £2 and you use less than 50g per session, so that’s popcorn costing you about 20p a time before you add any toppings, which is a pretty big saving. My kids love putting the popcorn in the microwave and listening to the sounds."
Ice cream cones
"This is probably the most expensive of all the foodie treats here, but it’s a real winner with the kids. You need to buy a pack of cones, some tubs of flavoured ice cream (we tend to have strawberry, chocolate and vanilla in), some strawberry or chocolate sauce and some sprinkles.
If you were buying all of those things all at once you’re looking at spending around £8 - though I’d say you probably get ten to 12 cones out of each tub and definitely more if you do two or three flavours per cone. I tend to do smaller scoops if the kids want a mix of flavours.
"On average I’d say each ice cream comes in at about 50p to 60p for something that looks and feels incredibly decadent and impressive. I tend to break up buying the ingredients by getting say one tub of ice cream per shop and of course the cones come in a pack of 21 usually, so they are brilliant value for money (approximately 3.5p per cone).
"I also use different things for sprinkles, like sometimes I add a couple of smarties or jelly sweets or chop up some flumps or use mini marshmallows."
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