If your summer holidays are turning out to be anything like mine, one of the biggest challenges is finding new ways to meet the endless cries of "I’m hungry" from the kids.
And of course it’s not just that they are hungry. In this heat, "I’m hungry" can also really mean "I’m thirsty".
It’s the holidays, so it can also mean "I’m bored".
Also because it’s the holidays, they’re often looking for something more special than the usual after school type snacks I might have in the house.
With food bills rising (and rising…) this is a bit of a nightmare for most parents.
Here are five low-cost ways I’ve found to not only make some treat-style snacks, but also to keep them entertained by helping with preparing the food.
1. Blackberry crumble
This is my big hitter and my favourite of all the food treat activities in this list. First up, my kids love going out to find the blackberries.
That’s handy because I struggle to get the youngest interested in taking the dog out for a walk, or just generally dragging him away from watching endless Paw Patrol.
The other 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.
2. Homemade Ice lollies
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’s 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 actually a half squash, half water makes a nice lolly.
Again it’s a good way to keep the kids cool and hydrated in the heat.
3. 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.
4. Popcorn from corn kernels
We have a bit of a term time 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 historically to use ready 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 £2.00 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.
5. 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 £8.00 - 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.
Basically there’s loads of ways to "pimp your cone" and for older kids you can probably get them to build the cones themselves.
These are some of the sweet ways we’re getting through the big holidays, trying to balance making it special and fun for my children without being completely crippled financially.
Often I find it’s the oddest things they really like – a bowlful of ice cubes can keep them quite happy for a bit, and freezing a tube of yoghurt transforms a relatively "boring" pudding into something they’re pretty excited by.
If only they felt the same about frozen broccoli...
