Healthy and Filling Afterschool Snacks

If your children are anything like mine, they arrive home from school hungry for snack. In fact, as they get older, their afterschool snacks often becomes almost a fourth meal of the day!

While it’s easy to stock the house with chips, cookies and store-bought doughnuts, it is not the wisest choice for developing good eating habits. Kids these days have so many extra-curricular activities and so much more homework than our times that it becomes more and more important to feed them with afterschool snacks that provide energy and nutrients.

Less Preparation Time

Whether it is you who prepare the snacks or your children are grown up enough to make themselves a snack, afterschool snacks should be quick to prepare. When hunger strikes, it becomes impossible to wait patiently for a meal to cook. More often than not, kids (or you) will reach out to hand them something ready to eat, and unhealthy. Those empty calories will satiate their hunger for the time being, but provide them with no nutrition and encourage laziness and weight gain.

While there is an occasional ‘doughnuts’ or ‘chips’ evening, I try to minimize these instances. To make it easier, I have made a list of easy and quick-to-prepare afterschool meals. Mostly, I try to give them milk or buttermilk and fruit in some form. Here are some ideas for healthy and nutritious afterschool snacks that I feed my children:

Hot, Fresh Prepared Snacks

1. Dosa or Cheela (Keep batter ready in the fridge)
2. Cheese and Tomato sandwiches preferably brown or multigrain bread
3. Bread Pizza – Refrigerate homemade pizza sauce and make mini pizzas on bread
4. Instant Pasta – with fresh cut, or frozen vegetables
5. Instant Noodles – with fresh cut, or frozen vegetables
6. Soup with Croutons/Bread sticks
7. Fried Leftover Idli or Dhokla, Poha cutlets or other creative leftover recipes
8. Chapati Rolls (Stuff chapati with whatever’s on hand or use a spread – In dire situations, I use jam or nutella. Hardly healthy – but at least they eat roti instead of chips!)

No Cooking Involved Snacks

1. Milk + Cereal (A mixture of flavored cornflakes and muesli)
2. Milk + Banana Slices
3. Milk + Rusk/Toast
4. Bhel
5. Fruit Smoothies/Juice
6. Milk/Juice + Leftover Homemade Cakes/Muffins/Brownies

Ready to Eat Snacks

1. Cuppa Poha (Just add hot water to make poha instantly)
2. Cuppa Upma (Same as Poha)
3. Nutrition Bars