Oct 1

4 Meal Ideas for Larger Families

Cooking for a large family when you have a few kids or grandparents living with you can add an extra bit of challenge when it comes time to cooking lunches or dinners. Choosing meals that are easy to cook in large quantities or recipes that easily scale up is key. Here are a few meal ideas if you’re responsible for cooking for a large family.

Cooking Together

Preparing meals and ensuring that your kids eat a healthy and balanced diet is your responsibility, but nothing is stopping you from sharing the workload with them. Inviting them to help you prepare dinner each evening or encouraging them to pack their lunch for school is a great way of not only getting them involved but also teaching them skills in the kitchen and a sense of responsibility. If you’re in the process of integrating your family unit as a result of a marriage to a partner with existing kids or a new foster child joining the family home from a foster agency like fcascotland.co.uk, then allowing kids to work together and with you to create meals is also a clever way of promoting teamwork and unity.

Pasta

Italian families are traditionally big and enjoy getting together to enjoy mealtimes, and Italian food is perfectly suited for it. All the many different forms of pasta are dishes that work well for large families, as they’re infinitely scalable, and all you need to increase the amount you make is a bigger pot or oven dish. It is also a cost-effective dish to make in larger quantities, particularly if you opt for a tomato-based bolognese sauce.

Chicken Fried Rice

Rice dishes are also perfectly suited to cooking in larger quantities, and rice is a very affordable food. Chicken fried rice is tasty and quick to prepare no matter how much of it you’re making. A wok is also a versatile pan, capable of holding enough for a big family. To speed up the cooking of chicken fried rice, you can also start with pre-cooked rice. Add a good quality soya sauce to bring the dish to life.

Swedish Meatballs

Swedish meatballs are delicious and are a breeze to make in larger quantities. It’s also the perfect meal for those days that you really don’t feel like cooking because they freeze well if you make a big batch all at once and plan ahead. The creamy Swedish-style meatball sauce does a good job at making the vegetables kids usually turn their nose up at more appealing too, so it’s all around a great dish.

A Slow Cooked Stew

Stew is another meal that doesn’t need much extra effort to cook in larger portions. Peeling and adding a few more potatoes or carrots only takes a few minutes and set it to cook slowly over the course of an afternoon will leave you with a delicious, tasty, and tender meal when it comes to dinner time.

If you’re in charge of planning and cooking meals for a big family, a great and easy guide is to think of meals that you make in the biggest pot you have. These are the ones that are easiest to scale up!