Sandwiches, granola & yogurt, toast, egg salad (keep a stash of hard-boiled eggs on-hand), and cheese toast (maybe–use the toaster setting of a toaster oven, rather than broil) all come to mind. Once the stove becomes a viable option, there’s many types of eggs, french toast and grilled cheese.

I highly recommend the Williams-Sonoma “The Kids Cookbook”, as it gives step-by-step instructions (with pictures!) for how to do each type of instruction in a recipe, and all of the foods start from scratch. It might even help out the parent in question, who appears to be cooking-averse…

I once read a nifty food article about France, where people fully expect to spend ONE THIRD of their income on food. They buy fresh, local, real foods, and value quality.

Over the past 12 months, our family’s average monthly food bill was $1,419.19. (Me and hubby, 4 big kids, and a nursling who eventually went onto solids.) I must admit that my “food bill” budget line-item includes other grocery store items, such as shampoo and laundry detergent, but that stuff loosely averages to $200 per month. So I’m spending $200 per person (not counting the baby–he used more laundry detergent than food last year!) in actual food money each month, which comes to under $7 per day. If you count him as a full person, then the amount drops to $5.71 per person, per day.

Food IS political, and I have been deeply aware of this for quite some time. That’s why our food budget contains no HFCS, no processed foods, and certainly no fast food, but does contain lots of payments made directly to local farmers, many of them organic. (We don’t eat out much, either.)

And hey, if you need something to make canning those tomatoes (and apples!) easier, just give me a holler, as I have some pretty nifty equipment to help me store my own.