How to Plan Healthy Meals for Your Large Family

Feeding a large household is quite a daunting task, but trying to make meals that are healthy when you have many family members takes it up one more notch. Healthy eating requires more time and preparation. What’s the best way to plan nutritious meals when you have a large family? 

Feeding our family keeps us very busy. We are a family of twelve with five boys and five girls ranging in age from 19 down to almost two. Since we believe that “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” we have aimed to eat clean as much as possible.

For us, this means eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner at home with meals made from scratch. We try to limit the white sugar and flour in our diet and focus on real foods. We want more proteins, vegetables, and fruits in our diet.

Below are the strategies we use to feed our family healthy meals three times a day!

#1 Make Time in Your Schedule

Like it or not, eating healthy meals requires more time. There’s a reason fast food isn’t good for you! Cutting veggies for a salad takes longer than opening a bag of chicken nuggets and popping them in the oven. 

If you want your big family to eat healthy, you need margin in your busy schedule. You may need to eliminate some items from your calendar. 

In our family, we seriously limit our commitments. With plenty of siblings, our kids don’t have as much need for many of the community activities that most parents feel obligated to join. When our family was smaller, we participated in groups like scouts, but as our family grew, this kind of involvement was too much. 

Too many events in a busy family usually mean the kids are overtired, the house is out of order, and mom and dad are frazzled. 

If you adjust your calendar so that you have more time to eat and prepare food at home, it will be easier for you to eat healthy meals. 

#2 Make a list of your favorite healthy meals.

Making healthy meals for your large family doesn’t necessarily mean you need to have a detailed meal plan. Even though I am a mom of 10, I don’t menu plan at all. Instead of writing out weekly plans for 3 meals a day, I keep a list of our favorite healthy breakfast, lunch, and dinner meals. 

This master list, along with our well-stocked kitchen (below), IS my meal plan!

Because I have a list of our go-to meals on-hand, we try to have ingredients for all the dishes on that list. This makes grocery shopping easier too. We don’t spend a lot of time writing a shopping list or looking for special ingredients for certain dishes. We get most of the same items each grocery trip to supply the dishes on our meal list. 

Our Master List of Meals

Although your meal ideas will probably look different from ours, these are very easy recipes that can be adapted to meet your family’s needs.

Breakfast

• Eggs and bacon
• Yogurt with granola
• Sourdough pancakes or French toast
• Baked Oatmeal
• Quiche
• Toast with cream cheese or peanut butter and honey-sweetened strawberry jam

Lunch

• Salad
• Skillet dish: ground sausage and rice with black beans and onions topped with shredded cheddar cheese
• Quesadillas (I usually add leftover chicken or taco meat from a previous dinner meal.)
• Protein smoothies and popcorn
• Tortilla Chips with Sausage Dip
• Sourdough pizza
• Soup
• Skillet dish: Holushki topped with parmesan cheese
• Hard-boiled eggs with raw veggies and dip
• Skillet dish: ground sausage, sweet potato, apples, and green beans

Snacks

• Fruit
• Popcorn
• Ants on a Log (celery, peanut butter, raisins)
• Trail mix
• Tortilla chips with guacamole or hummus

Soups

• Chicken Corn Soup
• Ham and Bean soup from leftover ham roast
• Sausage and Potato Soup
• Chili
• Butternut Squash Soup topped with mozzarella cheese

Dinner

Beef– Chili, Tacos, Meatloaf, Spaghetti (served with spaghetti squash or high protein noodles), Shepherd’s Pie, Cowboy Grub, Meatballs with a no sugar Ketchup sauce

Pork– Sausage links, corn, and beans dish, Sweet sausage and potato skillet dish with creamy sauce, Ham Roast with potato and vegetable sides

Chicken– whole chicken with baked cubed potatoes and a vegetable, fajitas with avocados tortilla chips rice and peppers, 2 chicken breast recipes, 2 legs and thighs recipes 

Large family meal plans are easier when you have a central list of easy meals that the whole family likes to eat. 

Buy Meat in Bulk 

Not all big families are able to raise meat on their own property, however, anyone can buy half a cow or pig. Buying meat in bulk and storing it in a deep freezer will make meal prep much easier. If you have meat, you have a meal!

Fresh fruits and vegetables

We like to have fresh fruit like apples, grapes, oranges, clementines, and bananas on hand. For vegetables, we buy lettuce, celery, cucumbers, carrots, broccoli, tomatoes, sweet potatoes, and onions. Aldi has great organic options for produce, so we either get our produce from there or the local farmer’s market when it’s in season.

(Helpful tip: Kids want to snack all day long.  If you leave out a bowl of vegetables or fruit on the table throughout the day, they will snack on this and acquire an appetite for fresh produce!)

Dairy

Although we would love to have a dairy cow, that is not an option for us. These are the dairy products that we use. Raw milk, mozzarella cheese, cheddar cheese, cream cheese, parmesan cheese, sour cream, half and half, whipping cream, and yogurt.

Oils & Fats

Butter, lard, olive oil, coconut oil.

Whole Grains and dry food

Coffee, tea, raisins, wheat berries (for grinding to use in making our sourdough bread), oats, rice, sugar, tortilla chips, popcorn, nuts, trail mix, bread (for when we run out of our homemade sourdough.)

Condiments and sweeteners

Honey, maple syrup, stevia, jam, peanut butter,ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise, honey-sweetened BBQ sauce, vinegar, Braggs Liquid Aminos (rather than soy sauce.) 

Preserved Food/Root vegetables

In our basement we store home canned goods like applesauce, diced tomatoes, chicken broth, peaches, pickles, beets, strawberry jam, and green beans. We freeze some of the vegetables from our garden, but we also stock up on frozen store-bought veggies. We buy some of our canned products like black beans and kidney beans from the store. 

Spices

Salt, pepper, garlic powder, onion salt (great on potatoes), parsley, oregano, and chili powder are staples for us.

#4 Develop your food preparedness skills.

One great way that large families can alleviate the grocery budget is by growing and preserving food at home. For most of us, that means learning new skills. 

I have found that the best way to develop skills in any area is to try one thing at a time. Repeat that skill or product over and over until you are very good at it. When it becomes easy, then you can add the next skill. 

My approach to food preservation is to pick one food the family loves and will eat regularly. We preserve enough of that food to last for an entire year. 

Our family learned how to can foods by starting with applesauce. My mother-in-law helped us can our applesauce in the first few years of our marriage. When we felt confident with that, we tried other foods: strawberry jam, then peaches, tomatoes, and more. 

The first several times you try something new, everything takes a lot of time because you have to think about each step of the process, but after repeated success, you can do the work with minimal effort because you know each step.

Food Preservation Skills To Learn

• Have a garden.  This takes a little work and extra time, but learning to grow food at home is the perfect way to teach kids where food comes from and to limit the number of items on your grocery list.  
• Preserve food. Over the years, we have learned different ways of preserving food: dehydrating, water bath canning, pressure canning, and freezing. Freezing is the easiest by far so I would start with that first.
• Raise livestock. Layer hens are the perfect way to start raising livestock. Many municipalities allow families to keep chickens. They require very little space and having fresh eggs is wonderful!
• Make fermented foods. Fermented foods like sourdough, kefir, kombucha, and sauerkraut are wonderful , gut-healthy probiotics.

Meal Prep Tips

• Get meat out to thaw at the beginning of the week. If you have meat, you have a meal that is easy to get on the dinner table. 
• Have broth on hand. Soups are an easy large family meal that will feed the entire family.
• Leave a bowl of raw vegetables out on the table throughout the day for kids to snack on.
• Learn to make a quick meal with what you have on hand. We often make “everything soup” or “everything stir fry.”.  I use whatever vegetables we have on hand, saute them in butter, add a little meat and broth or rice. (Cooking whole grain rice in the instant pot is a big time saver for me!) Sometimes these dinner time meals end up being our favorite dishes!
• Make double whenever you can so you can have leftovers for another meal.

Looking for more great resources for raising and managing a large family? You may enjoy reading these similar posts. 

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