Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:Okay for Mother's Day, I asked to go to a really nice buffet place. I got a feel for exactly how much food my family would eat in a sitting. Well they ate for what seemed like an eternity. So, I see how much they can put away, I just need to figure out how much they really need to fuel themselves.
Okay, OP. Here's the problem. You started this thread 3 weeks ago and in 3 weeks, you still have only made small strides in adequately feed your family based on 19 pages of responses.
You need to stop trying to "figure out" what they need, and to start cooking *MUCH* more than your have been. Instead of incrementally increasing the amount by a couple of hundred calories a meal, cook a few meals like you are planning for dinner for 15, like you invited another family like yours for dinner, and look at the leftovers and then calculate backwards if you can cut back on the amount of food you prepare. If you don't have leftovers, you don't have enough food yet. Just remember that dinner leftovers can be breakfast or lunch the next day, so you aren't going to be wasting food. But stop starving your family. And stop treating them like middle-aged women on a diet. That's what you are doing. You are using your personal metric for what you consider a normal healthy amount of food instead of a metric more appropriate for a man, two teenage boys and two grade schoolers. All the while, they are eating all that you prepare without leftovers, which means that although they are eating, they are still not eating their fill. And are they still snacking after dinner before bedtime? You used to have the problem that they were eating a second dinner afterwards. Now, I suspect that they are eating a more filling meal, but still need a snack before bedtime.
You should plan to triple your weekly budget for the next 2-4 weeks. Figure out how to feed them by going overboard and then cutting back rather than trying to slowly increase what you make until you make just enough. That's why people are getting so flabbergasted with you, because you seem more intent on saving money than actually feeding your family.