With a bigger than typical family, I like convenience foods. They are a super simple way to provide a meal or snack to my kids when we are running a little too fast in our lives, or if I'm sick and can't keep up as well. Unfortunately, our budget doesn't allow for the purchase of these foods too often, and neither does our dietary limitations (I have a dairy allergy, Missa is red dye allergic, Liddy has Celiac, and Kimmy is soy sensitive and Celiac). So I have the joy of doing a LOT of cooking from scratch to make good meals that the whole family can eat.
As you can imagine, with so many limits I decided to cook to the children's allergies for the main meals, then if the meal has dairy in it I'll make a dairy free alternative for me. With having a soy sensitive child (she was soy allergic, now she's just intolerant but we are still avoiding it 100% whenever possible in hopes that she may outgrow the allergy since it is getting less severe) it makes things a lot more interesting to work around the Celiac, but it is totally possible to do so.
In case you aren't familiar with Celiac, it is a disorder that can be pretty nasty. What it boils down to is that Liddy and Kimmy can't have any wheat, rye, or barley products at all, or any other products that have gluten in them. Oats are still iffy, as technically they do have small amounts of gluten, but they don't seem to have any effect on the girls so we do oatmeal and granola once in a while. When a Celiac eats something with gluten, the gluten damages the villi in the intestinal tract. Those little villi do not repair themselves very easily, and are how your body absorbs nutrients from the food you eat. Too much damage can be deadly if left unchecked for too long. The only way to repair the villi is a STRICT diet that is completely void of all possible allergens to give the intestine a chance to heal over the course of several months (I told you they don't heal easily!). I do a lot of label reading at the store, which means that I RARELY shop with all the children along unless I am after a couple very specific things. Did you know that Twizzlers even have wheat in them? We don't buy them often because the obvious red dye in them, but when we learned of the Celiac we had to completely quit buying them because the company uses wheat to bind the stuff together to make the Twizzlers.
Obviously, cooking is interesting in my home at times, and I do get tired of it sometimes. I use rice flour to make my pizza crusts, which eliminates gluten (my recipe is yeast free, which my Celiac girls seem to react to as well) and by using 100% rice flour I can ensure that there is little to no soy present. I need to get a grain mill so that I can grind my own rice flour, as it is fairly expensive. We use the pizza crust dough to make homemade hot pockets regularly. On busy days I can just grab some sandwich (or pizza!) pockets from the freezer and toss in the microwave to warm up while the kids put shoes on, then they have a tidy sandwich that they can eat in the van. It costs around $10 for a box of 12 hot pockets, or I can spend about $6 for the ingredients to make 12 homemade ones and toss them in the freezer after baking (that cost includes fresh cut meat and cheese from the deli and parchment paper for my baking sheet since we can't use cooking sprays). Do you see the savings?
Yogurt is another one we have to be careful of. Most brands at the store have artificial dyes and/or soy in them so I generally avoid them. I was reading labels for a long time until a friend posted on her blog about making yogurt in her crock pot. I tried it once and was hooked, and have been doing it since. I don't regularly make it though, so we don't always have some left over yogurt on hand to activate the new batch. But with the small amount needed to do it, I don't read labels for the starter cup of yogurt. I just buy Oikos greek yogurt, it is the only single serving cup I've found that comes in plain with no sugars or anything. It is SUPER simple to make yogurt, as long as I keep an eye on the times the crock pot does 99% of it and it turns out perfectly.
Bread is another thing here. Out of the 7 in my home, 5 of us can have regular wheat bread no issues. So, I buy a couple loaves of bread each week for sandwiches and toast, and the 2 that can't have bread will use either a corn tortilla to do a wrap or they will do roll ups. To make a roll up, you take your lunch meat and some cheese and then roll a strip of the cheese up in the meat.
We also happen to LOVE pasta. Now, I used to make 100% of our pasta fresh but since the Celiac diagnoses I've struggled with finding a recipe that won't fall apart when I run it through my roller. So we buy rice pasta at the store. It is really expensive, so when I do that I make just enough of it for the Celiac girls and the rest of us have homemade regular pasta.
Juicing also helps. We really enjoy fresh fruit juices, so I try to get out the juicer regularly and juice fruits and veggies that are in season. I always sneak a little carrot into our juices, and sometimes celery or something else. It is especially easy to sneak in the stronger flavored veggies when I do fruit juices that are stronger flavored, like with berries. The remaining pulp either gets composted or, depending on what fruits it is, goes into a cake.
Then there are those awesome Souffer's lasagnas and such. Those are my weakness, as I love being able to just pop it in the oven and forget about it until the oven beeps. These are meals that my kids can make even, and I've often had one of the oldest kids put one in the oven when I'm fighting a migraine or in the midst of pregnancy sickness. Lunchables and TV dinners also fall under this category, along with frozen pizzas. So I just automatically double all lasagnas I make, or make an extra pizza to stuff in the freezer, or something like that. When I go shopping, I'll take some time that day to chop up part of the fruits and veggies so that I have ready-made snacks that just require me to make the veggie or fruit dip (a really good fruit dip is a block of soft cream cheese, whip it in your mixer to fluffy, then add 1/2 cup of brown sugar and some vanilla to taste and whip the snot out of it until its really light and fluffy, goes great with ALL fruits and takes under 10 minutes to make). For homemade tv dinners, my mother taught me this one. Get some sectioned plates with lids, you can get them almost anywhere now (they even have Gladware ones!) and dish up leftovers after supper into proper portions in the plates and snap the lid on and pop in the freezer. Poof, tv dinner made with no effort!
Ialso make my own seasonings whenever possible. I make my own taco seasoning, which works well to double as chili seasoning. Gravy I almost always make from scratch using corn starch. Ketchup and mustard, well those I always buy. One of the only things that I'm a real brand snob on is Miracle Whip; I will NEVER use any other brand and yes I really can tell the difference. I'm nice and don't say anything when not eating my own cooking if they use a generic or real mayonnaise but trust me I'm cringing inside.
If you like Rice-A-Roni (which I totally do!) you can make your own real easily. Take your rice and then break up a little spaghetti into small pieces and saute' until the pasta is browned (I use olive oil instead of butter), and then cook it in the broth of your choice. I keep chicken bouillon on hand at all times for this, beef too.
Fried rice is easy to make homemade too, but it isn't really a soy-free food since you need SOY SAUCE for it. There are millions of great recipes online for it that you can use so I won't share how I do it here. But it makes a great use for leftover rice, veggies, and meat with minimal effort made. I have one skillet that is just for making fried rice so that I can avoid cross contamination for Kimmy and her soy issues as much as possible (it is also the only pan that I never put in the dishwasher, yes I wash my pots and pans in the kitchen slave, life is too short for me to hand wash dishes).
I used to spend a LOT of money on the convenience foods at Whole Foods that would fit our dietary needs until our 5th child was coming. That was when I decided it was time to clean up my act and just make it all myself. There is a little more effort to assemble 2 or 3 lasagnas at once to freeze some for future use, or time to make 3 or 4 dozen homemade hot pockets when I make them fresh for lunch one day, but it really is worth the money saved for my family. If I get a grain mill to grind my own rice flour, then we'll go 100% gluten-free across the board and I'll work harder at finding recipes that will actually work for pasta and some other things we've skipped. It will definitely save us more money considering the outrageous price of rice flour compared to plain rice.
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