Baked Oatmeal Casserole

Tonight I made Baked Oatmeal Casserole, recipe featured here: Baked Oatmeal Casserole 

The youth leader commented tonight, "You always bring healthy stuff and I'm continually surprised that it actually tastes good too!" It's always good to hear this kind of feedback :)

Items I purchased:

-Oats
-Walnuts
-Blueberries
-Strawberries
-Bananas
-Milk
-Chocolate chips

The rest of the ingredients I consider baking staples and had on hand. Total cost of bought ingredients for me was $12, but it would run a little bit more with the additional cost of butter, sugar, and other extraneous items (salt, baking powder, etc.)

The prep time for this recipe was my biggest "whoops" moment. It took me about forty-five minutes to prep this, but largely because I got confused about combining milk, egg, and melted butter and ended up starting over several times on this and in the end still wasn't sure I mixed those things properly (it created this buttery film on the top which did not look good and ended up being hard to distribute evenly on top of the oats).

I thought it tasted delicious but a few of the kids avoided this I think because it looks like a strange and is not something a lot of kids are used to. Although it was all gone at the end!

Jello

Tonight I made jello.

Items I purchased:
-Two 6 oz. packets raspberry jello
-One package frozen raspberries
-One 3 oz. package lime jello
-One 3 oz. package strawberry jello
-One package frozen strawberries

I had just a few scoopfuls of jello leftover. Kids seemed to really like this snack! The lime was very popular and was gone the quickest.
Total cost was $12, the prep time was about 15 minutes (I made this the night before). The biggest challenge with this recipe was finding enough space in the fridge to store all the jello pans for a day ahead of time!

Milk & Cereal

Tonight I went the simple route (no prep time!) and bought cereal!
This seemed to go over pretty well.
Items I purchased:
-2 gallons of milk
-2 boxes Cocoa Puffs cereal
-1 box Golden Grahams cereal
-1 box Honey Nut cheerios cereal

I had about 1 box of cereal leftover
Total cost was $14 (I received one gallon of milk free thanks to a sale).
Prep time = 0 min (literally showed up with milk and cereal)
Kids liked it - all of the the cocoa puffs were gone. They asked for Lucky Charms next time :)

Welcome!

Welcome to youthgroupsnacks.blogspot.com!
I am a youth leader for a church youth group that serves about 15-25 kids weekly. I am in charge of bringing the snacks each week. I looked around for a blog/site that detailed someone's progress with making snacks for a youth group but only found suggestions of snacks to bring.

The purpose of this site is to set up a slightly more in-depth look at suggestions of snacks that serve about 20 middle and high school aged kids.

Qualifications that I generally use while trying to come up with snack ideas are as follows (ranked by order of importance for me):

1. Serves approximately 20 kids
2. Fit within my budget of $10-$15
3. Fairly short prep time (0-15 minutes)
4. Tasty
5. Are relatively healthy and not super processed
6. Will not be extremely messy to serve or clean-up

I do not always end up with a snack that meets all of these guidelines, but they are things I keep in mind when looking for snack ideas.

Hope this blog might help you if you have also been put in charge of supplying the snacks for a group of teenagers!