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Cooking For a Large Family
Keep the Cupboards Full and the Plates Empty
By Amy Rawson
All This and I Get Change Back?
How do you afford the large quantity of food for a big family? With a little planning and a bit of organization, you can have meals and snacks available for everyone. First of all, you have to rethink portions. Many of us are accustomed to considering meat the main food and creating foods to go with it. Try smaller portions of meat and larger side dishes. When adding meat as an ingredient, it's even easier. Simply cutting the meat into smaller pieces spreads it throughout the dish more evenly and you add less overall.
Rethink snacks and desserts. When we hear either of these words, we think convenience foods and sweets. Convenience simply means easy to get. By making your own snack items available, you can get rid of the high-priced junk foods and cut out a lot of grocery cost. Buy a large bag of chips for instance (try the store brand) and break it into several small zip lock-style bags. For less than the cost of two small bags of snack-size chips, you have 10 or more homemade snack-size bags of chips. If you wash fruit before you put it away, it becomes an easy snack. I find that washed fruit in a bowl on the table disappears; yet the same fruit in the fridge tends to be forgotten.
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