4 Ways Your Child Can Eat Healthy After Flying The Nest
When your child gets older and begins to live independently, there are many lessons to consider passing down. After all, we all tend to learn the easy way or the hard way, but learning life skills to that keep us going won’t be optional. Nowhere is the most prevalent than in life management. As we began to spread our wings, we all met people who hadn’t been taught the basics of home cooking or cleaning, or how to pay bills on time. This can be tough to see, but it’s ultimately down to what standards our parents or guardians invested in us growing up. If your child leaves to live alone or with friends, or if they’re heading to college, how they eat (and what they eat) is essential to think about. After all, delivery apps and takeout food are both more prevalent than ever, and it’s very easy to waste a monthly budget on convenience if you don’t plan ahead, or worse, find it difficult to cook. In this post, we’ll discuss four tips to help you teach your child to cook nutritious meals that will sustain them, but without wasting their money.
- Teach Meals That Can Be Cooked In Batches
Cooking can be extremely cheap if you buy in bulk and cook in batches, and if you store or freeze the final product, or at least refrigerate it to serve through the week, you can enjoy delicious meals for a while. For example, an easy chicken pot pie can be stored for days and only requires cheap ingredients, yet it tastes delicious. It can also easily be segmented into serving sizes, so if your loved one is hosting a small dinner party or eating with a friend, having a recipe or five like these on hand can be a fantastic boon.
- Show Them How To Preserve & Rotate Inventory
Of course, there’s no benefit to becoming skilled at recipes and buying cheap ingredients if they go off in the cupboard. As such, teaching your child to store goods, to rotate old inventory to the front, and to check for rot or mold can be important. For example, if one bread slice in the pack has mold, it’s important to tell them to throw out the entire thing. Moreover, if meat is at its last date before expiry, cooking a full batch might be reliable. This way, they can look out for deals in the supermarket. If they notice two kilograms worth of turkey mince is reduced in price because it goes off today, they could cook a large batch of healthy ragu or chili and freeze it for use over the next weeks. This kind of deal-finding and preserving of ingredients can ensure they always have something nice to eat.
- Demonstrate Smart Grocery Shopping & Storage Techniques
You can share all of the little techniques you like to use to save money. Maybe you have a preference for the supermarket loyalty card you use, because after a year of shopping, it allows you to buy your Christmas meal for free, thanks to the built-up points. Perhaps teaching them how to speak to a butcher or weigh veg at a local grocer can also help them learn how to buy outside of the shopping markets too. If you teach them some more advanced skills, like how to fillet a fish, they can buy healthier food from the market instead of frozen alternatives. They may or may not use such skills in a given week, but it’s nice to provide them with that final capability before they move forward.
- Help Them Understand Meal Planning & Scheduling
When you eat is just as important as how you eat for most people. Three square meals a day is appropriate for most people, but you can show how planning out their frozen meals depending on their schedule can help save time, too. This is great for students who may not have the time to cook a brand new meal everyday when exams are coming up, or when they’re trying to socialize. You can teach them about portions, weighing out ingredients to make a certain number of servings, and how best to reheat foods to ensure they’re safe. You can also teach them how to grocery shop for select days – for example if they come home to see you at the weekends, they likely won’t need to shop until Monday. It’s a nice way to get them into the groove of healthy eating and money management without necessarily letting them fall into bad habits. With this advice, we hope you can more easily teach your child to cook nutritious and budget meals, but also the administration that goes along with that.
This is a contributed post, please see our privacy policy for more information.
