£10 course gets mums and dads cooking from scratch
Luckily, one children's charity in Canterbury, Kent, is more than happy to provide the answer. It offers families the chance to learn some tasty new recipes that the whole crew will love – and that won't break the bank.
'We asked parents, like Ellie, what they would like to see us do,' says Ann Lamkin, the family support practitioner who runs the course with colleague Jo Horley at Canterbury and District Early Years Project.
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'And one of them said: 'Oh, we just need some basic meals, some basic cookery. We're fed up with doing the same old, same old food.'
'So we put together a six-week course where we not only cook, we look at things like the importance of sitting around the table and eating together, or how to save time and money, like with batch cooking.
'Now they've got one extra or maybe five extra new things to add to their repertoire.'
The course, helped off the ground with a £1,000 Tesco Stronger Starts grant, takes place three times a year.
It's been a roaring success, with proud parents posting their dishes to the Facebook page.
One person asked how to make pastry, which they then turned into cheese straws. 'These skills get lost over time,' says Ann.
'There is nothing wrong with convenience foods, but we want to show that actually cooking from scratch can be cheaper.
'You probably end up with three times as much. And parents tend to find that it's not actually as hard as they think it is.'
Around 12 families attend each session. While parents cook, their children play in the free crèche.
Costs are kept to a minimum, at just £10 for the whole course – ingredients included – and there's a free food bank.
Healthy chicken nuggets rolled in cornflakes go down well, as does a moreish macaroni cheese using a homemade white sauce that can be the base of other dishes.
'We made a delicious bean and vegetable hotpot, which the children love,' says Ann.
'We asked our parents to guess the cost. It was just £2.30 for a family of four.'
Ann's top tips? Have a ready-made pantry at home with basics like rice, pasta, mixed herbs, chilli and tinned tomatoes, shop with a weekly meal plan – and don't hit the aisles when you're hungry.
'We reckon over the three courses it's between 53 and 60 children benefiting from having a meal that's cooked by their parents.'
Tesco Stronger Starts has awarded over £13million to almost 12,000 community projects, with grant recipients chosen by more than 330 million customer votes using blue tokens in stores across the UK. Applications for Cooking for All grants close on May 30.
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