How I Feed Three Hungry Boys for Under £70 a Week

My ten-year-old ate four Weetabix this morning and then asked what was for lunch. It was 7.40am. If you are also raising boys, you already know: they are not so much children as digestive systems with opinions. Noah is ten and eats like a docker. Charlie is seven and eats like Noah is going to steal his plate, which to be fair is a rational fear. Arthur is four and eats nothing all day and then requests a roast dinner at 6.55pm.

Feeding the three of them plus me and Dan used to cost us well north of £100 a week, and a good chunk of that was going in the bin or being rejected at the table. These days I keep it under £70 most weeks — sometimes £75 if there's a birthday party to cater or the big one has a football tournament, because a boy after ninety minutes of football is a locust. Here's the actual system, not the fantasy version.

Rule one: the plan is the law

I meal plan on Sunday night with a cup of tea and the ruthlessness of a wartime quartermaster. Seven dinners, written on the whiteboard on the fridge, and here's the trick that changed everything: the boys see the plan. When Charlie asks what's for tea, the answer is on the board. It's not me deciding to inflict fish pie on him personally; it's just what Tuesday says. You cannot negotiate with a whiteboard. It has genuinely halved the moaning.

The plan follows a loose weekly rhythm so I'm never starting from a blank page: pasta something on Monday, batch-cook night Tuesday, 'bits and picky tea' Wednesday when football training eats the evening, something with rice Thursday, homemade pizza Friday, whatever's-left Saturday, and a proper cooked dinner on Sunday. Same skeleton every week, different flesh on it.

Rule two: shop like you mean it

• Online order for the big shop — I stopped taking three boys into a supermarket in 2023 and my bill dropped about £15 a week overnight, which tells you everything about pester power
• Aldi or Lidl for the base shop, one top-up shop midweek maximum, and I walk to that one so I can only buy what I can carry
• Frozen veg is not a compromise, it's a strategy — peas, sweetcorn, green beans and spinach, all cheaper than fresh and no sad bag of slime in the salad drawer
• Supermarket own brand for almost everything; the one exception is baked beans, because I tried to economise there once and the boys staged an actual protest
• Wonky veg boxes and yellow stickers are a bonus, not a plan — nice when they happen, but the budget doesn't depend on luck

The other thing I did was work out our ten cheapest dinners that everyone actually eats — not tolerates, eats — and I make sure five of them are on the plan every single week. Novelty is for weekends. Weeknights are for bankers.

Rule three: cook once, eat twice (at least)

Tuesday is batch night. One big pot, doubled or tripled, and the extra goes in the freezer in labelled takeaway tubs. My rotation is bolognese (which becomes chilli with a tin of beans and a spoon of spices), a sausage and bean casserole that all three boys would defend with their lives, chicken curry made mild enough for Arthur with a pot of mango chutney on the side for the rest of us, and a vat of tomato pasta sauce with a frankly criminal amount of hidden grated vegetables in it.

I am not precious about the hidden veg thing. Some parents feel it's dishonest. Those parents have not watched a seven-year-old forensically dismantle a lasagne looking for evidence. Grate the carrot, blitz the sauce, say nothing.

The snack situation, or: defending the biscuit tin

Snacks were where my budget went to die. Three boys grazing freely will strip a cupboard like piranhas. The fix was the snack basket: one basket, filled on Monday, and when it's gone it's gone. Into it goes a box of own-brand cereal bars, bananas and apples, crackers, raisins for Arthur, and one packet of the good biscuits which by unspoken treaty are shared with scrupulous fairness.

Alongside the basket sits the always-allowed list: toast, fruit, and anything they make themselves. It is astonishing how often a boy who is 'literally starving' discovers, when offered toast, that he can in fact survive until dinner. Real hunger accepts toast. Boredom holds out for crisps.

Real hunger accepts toast. Boredom holds out for crisps. This one sentence has saved me hundreds of pounds.

A week that actually happened

1. Monday: pasta with the hidden-veg tomato sauce, garlic bread from the freezer, grated cheese blizzard
2. Tuesday: sausage and bean casserole with jacket potatoes (batch night — second casserole straight into the freezer)
3. Wednesday: picky tea before football training — omelettes, cherry tomatoes, cheese, crackers, apple slices, done in ten minutes
4. Thursday: mild chicken curry from the freezer stash, rice, naans torn up and fought over
5. Friday: homemade pizzas, one base each, toppings laid out like a buffet so everyone is the architect of their own dinner
6. Saturday: chilli (last week's bolognese, transformed) with rice and tortilla chips
7. Sunday: roast chicken, roast potatoes done in the air fryer, frozen veg — then the carcass into the pot for Monday's soup and the leftover meat into sandwiches

That week came to £64 including packed lunch stuff, breakfast cereal in bulk, milk (we get through nine pints, which I try not to think about) and the snack basket. No heroics, no lentil sermons, nobody cried at the table. Well — Arthur cried, but it was because his sausage was 'looking at him', and there is no meal plan on earth that legislates for that.

What I've stopped doing

I've stopped cooking separate meals. One dinner, served with at least one component I know each boy will eat, and if somebody chooses to eat nothing but the garlic bread, that's a choice they're allowed to make. He will not starve between six and breakfast, and the kitchen is not a restaurant. It took Charlie about nine days to accept this new world order and it has held ever since.

I've also stopped feeling guilty about fish finger sandwiches on the days when life wins. Feeding a family is a marathon, and some miles are just about getting to the next one. The same thinking, incidentally, is how we do birthday parties without going bankrupt — decide the number first, then make the fun fit the number, not the other way round.

Under £70 isn't magic. It's a whiteboard, a freezer, a snack basket with a door policy, and the cold-eyed acceptance that these boys will out-eat me for the rest of my natural life. I'd better keep batch cooking.