Bruce, the four 3" RES I have in our aquarium love TetraBetta food. It is 43% protein and has fish meal and shrimp meal as part of the ingredients. Realizing buying it in 1oz containers of feed at WalMart is not going to make your wife happy with the cost side of the ledger, I do not know if one of the commercial feed makers make something similar in suitable size bags at a reasonable price for your purposes.
They also take floating 32% generic catfish pellets crushed up with pliers but they sure do not like it as well as tiny Tetra pellets.
I trapped some FHM out of the pond and put in with the RES and they seem to keep the feed in the bottom of the tank that the RES missed cleaned up. It had become a problem before starting to feed the Tetra food. Your FHM's could serve a dual purpose if you could put a bunch of medium sized ones in. Clean up the missed feed to help with the water quality and become a snack to the RES as they got big enough to consume them. Just an idea from someone who has zero experience with what you are doing.
What my RES really love is when my wife and I put on the boots, wade a few inches out in the pond that we have the edge lined with 2-3" rocks, turn some rocks over and bring them some tasty snails (under fallen leaves is a good place to look too). They start out will the small ones and work their way up in size till they cant get them in their mouth or can't crush them and will spit them back out. The big snails lay eggs and then when the snail eggs start looking like they are growing and turning colors, they mysteriously disappear.
Let's see. For you to feed your amount of fish snails..........looks like you should set aside lots of time for feeding fish. :-)
