Blanche sugar-snap peas in boiling water (or the microwave) and toss with a little bit of sesame oil. Add a few sliced mushrooms and toss to soak up any remaining sesame oil. Finger food for kids and I bet they'll like it (put out a towel to wipe sesame-oiled fingers, or make them use forks, whatever). Snap peas too expensive? Grow your own, blanche and freeze them in half-lb ziplock batches. Grow snow-peas too. I usually plant mine starting the last part of feb and more small batches on thru March.
grow your own
Oatmeal. Old fashioned or steel cut. Every day. Add a pinch of fresh-ground flax-seed (grind in an old whirlybird coffee grinder - the stuff goes rancid pretty quick after it's ground, so I just grind a little every few days). This will drop your cholesterol in about a month. Feed the kids oatmeal every day, get 'em off boxed cereal asap. Put a smiley face on their bowl w/raisins or honey. I don't care if cold cereal is 'easy' and 'cheap', it's not cheap if it batters their pancreas every day until it gives out. A huge percentage of this country is diabetic/pre-diabetic. I blame cold cereal and white bread.
Soak a bag of beans overnight and cook them or (unsoaked) split peas every week, flavor with a little bit of ham or bacon for the last half-hour, but add about 4 tablespoons of olive oil to the beanpot. When the beans are done I add an onion or two that I cooked in olive oil with curry powder, a few serrano chiles, ginger, mustard seeds and cumin seed, lots of garlic. IF this is too spicy for the kids, just spice up your share. The curry and spices will also help w/your cholesterol. And I love this stuff.
Eat sardines and kippered herring for lunch once or twice a week. Eat more salmon (canned salmon patties are cheap, note that canned salmon is on sale for lent right now. Stock up) Make beef and barley soup, find a recipe online that you like. Cook a lot of broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, turnips. The brassica family has a plethora of 'protective' ingredients, really ought to eat some of these every day. More sweet potatoes - don't need to fill them with marshmallows, just bake or roast them, cut open and serve hot sprinkled with cinnamon and a pat of butter. They're sweet enough as is for me, but if you need a little honey or real maple syrup...ok. Real sweeteners like honey and maple syrup cost more? Just up front. That forces you to use less. Trust me, cheap sweeteners are not so cheap in the long run. See diabetes info, above.
When in doubt, ask yourself 'would my great grandmother recognize this as food?' If it comes in a box with a pouch of flavoring crapola, no, she would not. If you pour it from a box and cover it with milk, no she would not. If she would have known how to peel it and cook it, you're probably safe to eat it. Since my kin lived on pork, beef, fish they caught, eggs, butter, garden produce, milk, beans, cabbage/kraut and oatmeal and usually lived to be in their 90's, this sorta goes against the 'don't eat any fat, don't eat any meat, live on 'healthy whole grains' mantra that a lot of folks repeat. Listening to those folks may well be the reason the whole damned country is fat and has heart disease.