Frugal educational trips: food and other costs

This is the last part of this series on Frugal Educational Trips.

Questions to ask before a visit

Saving on Entrance Fees

Saving on travel costs.

Today's post is about saving on food, drink and other costs.

I guess that saving on food seems fairly obvious; just take a packed lunch. I often find this difficult in the rush to get everyone ready and out of the house, along with leaving food for those who aren't coming on the trip. Yes, we usually do take a packed lunch and I'm probably the queen of uninspired picnics. However, an alternative is to stop somewhere to buy a baguette, cheese, tomatoes and fruit. OK, not quite as cheap but not far off and very quick! 

Please do comment with suggestions for other quick, cheap, on the go lunches. Creating exciting picnics isn't my forte.

Children seem to become especially hungry on trips. I've learned to take more than I think that we will need. A packet of rice cakes, bag of fruit or packet of crisps and more can easily disappear on the way home from a day trip.

Occasionally, eating has to be a special part of the trip. Some time ago, we took fairly frequent foot passenger crossings to France for the day. Eating French food was part of the experience and we didn't take our own food. 

The end of a day out is tiring and it isn't always easy to find the energy to prepare a meal on return. The simplest way to manage this and avoid buying an expensive meal out, is to prepare in advance. A casserole in the slow cooker or another meal ready prepared at home saves time and money.

When a visit will involve being away for more than one meal, it is worth careful planning. Can a second meal be carried in a cool box or is there somewhere cheap and cheerful to buy a meal? This usually means either going to a supermarket or sometimes, fish and chips. Do remember that portions of fish and chips are often very generous and it probably isn't necessary to buy one portion per person, except for teenage boys!

Drinks are much less expensive if taken from home. OK, I can't say I've never enjoyed a National Trust coffee but generally, we take water bottles and coffee in a thermos. In the summer, one water bottle per person is often not sufficient and it is worth taking a few extra litres from home. The saving from taking drink can be several pounds per trip.

Other costs

Many venues will have a shop full of interesting and generally, highly priced items. It can be very tempting to buy the children a small bar of chocolate, only to discover that it is 7-8 times the price of a basics bar from the supermarket. I try to deter children from spending their pocket money on plastic trinkets although sometimes buying these and discovering their poor enduring value is part of the learning process.

We do buy postcards for journals and occasionally, guide books. 

Please do share your thoughts on saving on trips.

After Christmas soups

Winter days call for soup. The remains of the Christmas chicken or turkey makes excellent stock. Making stock in the slow cooker is surprisingly easy.

We ended up preparing more parsnips than we ate on Christmas Day. This recipe from Delia Smith is a tasty way of using up excess parsnip. The first time that I made this, I didn't think that I would enjoy the combination of parsnip and apple but was pleasantly surprised.

Years ago, I borrowed a library book about cooking for older people on their own. One of the recipes was for Stilton and Brussel sprout soup. This has become a favourite, for those of us know love sprouts, although with our own tweaks and in larger quantities. This is my recipe but do realise that I don't weigh ingredients for soups precisely! If you like sprouts then this is for you!

Ingredients:
1 tablespoon of sunflower oil
1 onion
1 clove of garlic
Brussel sprouts about 300g of peeled and halved sprouts, alternatively use frozen spouts
1 litre chicken or turkey stock
pinch of nutmeg
sage to taste
pepper
Stilton or other blue cheese about 100g

Method
Peel and chop the onion. Soften the onion in the sunflower oil until just browned.
Add the crushed clove of garlic and the sprouts. Cook for 1 minute.
Add the stock and seasoning. Bring to boiling point and then simmer until the sprouts are just soft.
Puree.
Add the crumbled Stilton and serve.

This serves 4.

Bank holiday harvest

We've been blackberrying. This year's harvest is rich-lovely, big, juicy blackberries.

My freezer now has several pots of blackberries. We use them on porridge and with apple. 

This year, we seem to have a reasonable apple harvest. Something for which we are thankful after last year's poor harvest but, perhaps, not quite as big as the bumper harvest of a few years ago.

In case, anyone else has a fair few apples, here are the links to my compendium of apple recipes:

Breakfasts, soups, main courses and vegetables

Desserts

Apple turnover

Blackberry jelly

While the earth remaineth  seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease. 

Genesis 8 v22

Healthy living on a budget

As a family, we have recently been working on eating a more healthy diet. This has many benefits but we have found that it can lead to higher food bills: 50% higher in the first month. OK, we also went away that month but some of this was buying more vegetables, chicken breasts and fish.

I was brought up on the maxim that feeding dessert saves money and this is true. It is cheap to make an apple crumble from apples from our tree and that means that the main course is less expensive. Of course, often dessert was fruit but changing to having dessert as mainly uncooked fruit costs more. Yes, we can plant more fruit bushes and plan to do this but they won't produce instantly.

It also seems that the cheaper main courses are stuffed full of saturated fat: quiche, home made pizza, lentil bake and homity pie. They all contain either pastry, cheese or both! 

So what have we done?

• Planted more. Younger daughter wanted to help with the Family Diet so she has planted salad.
  
  There is more growing in the kitchen. We've also planted spinach and Christmas potatoes, in bags,
  
  so that there will be new potatoes as an alternative to roast. Plans are afoot to plant more currant bushes.
• Frozen vegetables are often much cheaper than fresh. We are keeping more bags of frozen veg in the freezer.
• Tried to sort out some new meals. I've not found any suitable veggie recipes that will be generally acceptable. Please let me know if you have any frugal veggie meals that are not high in fat. 
• Added pulses to meat. We did this anyway but it means that it is necessary to use far less meat.
• Using fruit from the garden. Our blueberries only gave us a few berries as they are young plants but enough to enliven porridge and blackcurrants which were more plentiful have been used in the same way.
• Wild blackberries are now taking the place of the, almost ended, blueberries and blackberries.

Has anyone else done this sort of dietary transformation? Do you have any recipes that you recommend?

Feeding fussy children

I suspect that every family has one or more children that is more picky about food. We certainly do.This is my personal perspective on how we have managed. I'm not a dietitian and this certainly isn't about food allergies just about managing children who won't eat a broad spectrum of foods. 

Our goals are twofold. First to have a child who eats a sufficient range of food that they won't get nutritional deficiencies and second to have a child who can cope in society, that is, they can eat with friends and other families without causing a scene or difficulty.

What hasn't worked:

 This may be controversial but treating this as a discipline issue hasn't worked. Bringing out the food again or not allowing dessert has been counter-productive. Trying this tactic on fussy eaters leads to nothing being eaten.

Producing stressful situations-when we've made a big thing of likes/dislikes nothing gets eaten.

So what has worked?

Time-most children eat a wider range with age. For us this has meant that a very narrow range has broadened, not to everything, but to a much easier and more acceptable range.

Trying different foods-not all will be liked but there will be surprise likes. 

Soup-we use soup as a means of increasing vegetable intake and also trying different vegetables. The soup is pureed so issues of new textures are removed leaving the new taste. If the soup is eaten, it is worth trying the actual vegetable.  Many vegetables seem to be eaten as soup which might otherwise be avoided.

Practicing for social situations. Negotiating meals with friends and family is difficult for children with food issues. We practice using an unlikely example. "What will you do if Mrs X offers you shark's eye soup or ham sandwiches?" 

The appropriate answer 

"I would prefer a ham sandwich."

What to do if there is no alternative

"Please may I have a very small portion."

How to be polite when you hate shark's eye soup

"Thank you for making the soup."

This doesn't get over the problem of what to do if shark's eye soup makes them gag but does put them in a more confident position to manage. We have seen covert swapping of bowls with other  family members in this type of situation.

Low stress around different/possibly disliked foods. We have found that saying "I won't give you any x because you  don't like it" sometimes leads to a child asking for a portion. 

Providing food that will be eaten-OK not really an answer but it is better to provide the one or two vegetables that are eaten each day than for the child not to have any.

Do you have a fussy eater? How do you manage?

Potatoes

This year, I accidentally ordered double the number of potatoes we intended to grow. Not a disaster but it meant that we ended up growing potatoes in potato bags, compost bags, old dustbins and even the ground! 

Most of the bags used compost made in our compost bins from kitchen scraps, grass clippings and weeds. Due to my over-order, we did have to buy some extra compost. It will be interesting to see how the yields compare. 

Probably due to the rain, we have had a battle with slugs and whilst this crop is organic, I'm about ready to throw in the trowel and buy slug pellets next year. This autumn, I need to research pellets that won't harm children, birds, hedgehogs and frogs-all of which appear in our garden. The slugs had a bit of a field day with our potato leaves even with regular removal of many, many slugs. Suggestions on the slug battle are gratefully received.

Today was the great day for emptying the first potato bags. I think that it is worth growing even a few potatoes so children can have the excitement of seeing them appear from the ground.

There were a fair few worms too!

The first bag was of white potatoes and a fairly poor harvest perhaps because this bag had the most slug attacked leaves. The second bag was of reds and had a much richer content. Both the bags contained home made compost.

Fresh potatoes taste so much better than shop brought. I'm hoping that we have a good yield from the other bags. The family seem to eat more though so they won't necessarily last long.

Next year, I need to have more ground properly prepared and to work on the slug problem. 

Pear and ginger crumble

This is a easy dessert which can be prepared ahead and also freezes well.

Ingredients
Pears
Ground ginger
Muscavado sugar
Plain flour
Butter/margarine
Oats

Method
Peel and slice pears.

Add ground ginger and brown sugar to taste-most pears are naturally fairly sweet.

If the pears are hard, cover and heat at 150C/350F until soft. This is not necessary for soft pears or if you like a little bite to them.

Make the topping. I'm really bad at measuring and make this entirely by eye, however,I usually use about 1 oz butter/margarine per person.

Mix the fat with oats and flour until it has the consistency of gooey breadcrumbs. I think the secret of success is to be generous with the oats and mean with the flour. Use approximately twice the weight of oats/flour to that of fat. My preference is that at least half of the dry mixture is oats.

Add sugar to taste.

Add topping to fruit and cook at 180C/400F for 20minutes.

Enjoy!

Pushing the boundary with veg-pak choi

I haven't pushed the boundary with fruit or veg for a while now but have a list of recipes to try this year.

Today is Chinese New Year and, not only that, but we are "rowing" Ping, by Marjorie Flack, which is set in China with the younger children. So today was the day to try stir fried pork and ginger. I had hoped to have a link as the recipe is in my BBC food recipe book but sadly, it doesn't seem to be on the BBC site.

Suffice to say, this is a simple recipe involving stir frying pork fillet, garlic, ginger with vegetables. The recipe suggested Savoy cabbage but I used pak choi and added in the sprouted mung beans that we grew.

Success, everyone enjoyed it-not easy when cooking for eight. Even my most fussy eater ate the pak choi-possibly not realising that a form of cabbage was involved.

I need to stir fry more often!

Apple recipe compendium part 2

I meant to put this up a while ago but after about three months of apple picking, processing and desperately pressing bags of apples on friends, I took a bit of a break from thinking about apples. Now it is apple time again.

This is the second part of my list of apple recipes. I decided to take out the cakes as my list wasn't particularly long and there are plenty to be found. A couple of friends have told me about the amazing Apple recipe round up at The Pink Whisk. Definitely worth a look-I'm looking forward to making apple lemon curd. This isn't a comprehensive list of the dessert recipes that we use-just a few favourites.

Desserts 
Apple pie with shortcrust pastry.
 Do remember to read How to make an apple pie and see the world with your children when you make this.

Apple pie with filo pastry
 I use ready made pastry. Put two pieces of filo pastry crosswise in bowl, drizzle over melted butter, add two more pieces of filo pastry and repeat butter, fill with peeled, chopped apple, add sugar and cinnamon to taste, cover with two more pieces of filo pastry. Take the pastry ends and roughly cover the apple. Drizzle with more melted butter. Cook at 200C/400F for 25 minutes.

Apple turnover
basically a parcel of puff pastry filled with peeled, chopped apple, sultanas, sugar and cinnamon. Glaze with milk or egg and cook at 200C/400F until the top is browned.

Apple cobbler

Christmas pudding

Baked apples
Ingredients
Apples-one per person
Dried fruit
Brown sugar
Mixed spice
Method
Core but do not peel apples.
Stuff the core space with dried fruit and a little sugar. Note that the dried fruit is sweet so only a small amount of sugar is needed.Sprinkle with mixed spice. Cook at 180C/350F for 25 minutes until the apple pulp is soft. Serve with custard.

More inspiration

We've had a busy week as we near the end of the holidays. It was good to have some fresh air at the sea and meet up with friends. 

Again, we've been blessed with an abundance of apples.

This is from a previous year. We have even more this year but I've learnt only to pick the number that I can process in one go. 

While I was at the sea, I learnt more about bottling fruit-thank you to the kind person who was prepared to go through the bottling process while watching the children make sand structures. My first bottle was made up last night. Sadly, I think that I failed to remove a bubble so it will have to be eaten quickly.

The Bramley apple site is a useful source of recipes. The tomato and apple soup is one of the recipes we have enjoyed.
We are now having to think more creatively about the apples! Earlier this week was the turn of apple art. Today, we made apple juice.

We blended some quartered apples and then seived and finally strained through a muslin. The result tasted fine but was a brown colour due to oxidisation. We need to research making juice more and whether lemon juice would work sufficiently well as an anti-oxidant.

I've been reading the Prudent Homemaker which has made me more determined not to waste our fruit. This is the website of a family who survived 8 months of no income, and little income since then, by careful storing and growing food.

We are coming up to the start of term. Whilst some of the children have done some work each day over the holiday, things will go up a gear or three. National Poetry Day has some ideas for including poetry. We are planning to have a time for poetry each week. It is worth looking at the lesson plans under the education section as there are some interesting ideas. As I write the plans still related to the 2010 Day but are due to be updated soon. Unlike some lesson plans, they would be easy to use at home.

This link isn't particularly new but is a list of favourite picture books by children's authors. A fascinating list with some beloved books. Please note that I'm not recommending all of these books as there are several that I haven't read. Some ideas for when we are in the library.

Finally, and by no means least, I think for the first time, the Metropolitan Tabernacle School of Theology is available as free downloads. The sessions on assurance, by Dr Masters, are particularly worth hearing.


 

Spicy squash soup

We've been pushing the boundary with fruit and vegetables again. This time some kind friends gave us a squash.

Eldest daughter kindly made a soup.


Ingredients:
1 squash peeled and cubed
1 onion
clove of garlic
1 carrot
olive oil to brown vegetables
chicken stock
1 tablespoon red Thai curry paste


Method
Chop the vegetables
Brown the onion and garlic
Add the carrot and squash with the stock and curry paste
Simmer until the squash is soft.
Puree

Serve with homemade bread.


Yes, we have pushed the boundary. This was a success.
To improve, for another time, it would benefit from a colourful garnish.

This is linked to Raising homemakers

Pushing the boundary with fruit and veg-chicory

Our broad bean experiment was successful and after the soup, we ate them steamed with a main course.

So onwards. There was a request for chicory and a kind friend sent us this link.

We blanched the chicory.

Then wrapped the chicory in ham, cheese and topped with breadcrumbs.

Grilled-all very easy.

It looked good but sadly, even some of my veggie lovers thought the chicory was bitter. Not such a success. The whole family liked the topping so might try this with leek in the future.

Pushing the boundary with fruit and veg

Like many/most families, we have family members who are less keen on fruit and vegetables than others. Some of us always get our five portions a day and some rarely, if ever and that, I'm afraid is the truth.

Of course, we have tried "no dessert until the first course has gone" which leads to no food, cajoling and doubtless a few other tactics. Recently, we have provided at least a helping of the few accepted items so that at least scurvy is unlikely and generally, with a low key approach things have improved. This has been a bit slow so we have decided to go for a faster approach and a challenge.

We plan to try at least one new vegetable and one new fruit a month. Frequently, texture is an issue with new food so we may well rely reasonably heavily on pureed soups. Anyone who doesn't like the recipe is going to explain why! Seriously, I need to know if the issue is texture, smell or taste.

Today's recipe was broad bean soup from the Dairy Cookbook of British Food.
This is actually made with equal quantities of broad beans and peas. Broad beans aren't really completely new to us-we even grew a few last year-but aren't particularly familiar to the non-vegetable fans.

The soup was pureed and garnished with grilled bacon.

It was a success, apparently not up to lentil soup which is a real favourite, but good enough to eat and that is good enough for me!

This is linked to Raising Homemakers