Cheesy pasta bake with bacon, broccoli and cauliflower – feeding a family for £2 per head

Can you feed your family for a day for £2 per head? It costs £2 to feed and educate a child in Zambia per day. Voucherbox are donating £50 to Zamcog to feed children in a school in Zambia, for every blog post published as part of their £2 challenge (before end of Feb 2017)

It got me thinking about how much we spend and how much some of our meals cost. Here’s a family favourite that comes in under budget…. cheesy pasta bake with bacon, broccoli and cauliflower!

As well as being cheap it’s so easy to make:

• Cut a pack of bacon into little squares/slices and fry
• Cook some pasta (we love penne!)
• Steam/boil some florets of broccoli and cauliflower
• While all that’s cooking, make the cheese sauce…. melt some butter, add some sieved flour and milk in with it and stir over heat til it thickens into a sauce (if too thick add more milk, if too runny add more flour) then add in grated cheese, keep stirring and adding in more cheese til it looks like you have enough to cover your pasta and veg. My secret ingredient in a cheese sauce is adding a teaspoonful of wholegrain mustard, I think it gives it a lovely twist!
• Everything should all finish cooking together (your bacon will probably be done first… don’t burn it!), chuck it all in an ovenproof dish and stick in the oven before you’re ready to eat it (170 fan oven, about 15-20 mins) with some grated cheese and covered in foil if you like!

Yummy… a favourite for mum, dad, toddler W and baby S! Although last time I made I puréed the veg as W is going through a fussy stage, so he didn’t even know it had veg in it!

Between us our budget for the day would be £6 (I’ll exclude S from this as he doesn’t eat much yet!) and you could definitely get all the ingredients for that in one of the budget supermarkets – I reckon you could get it all for £5 (bacon £1.50 cheddar cheese £1.50 pasta £1, cauliflower and broccoli £1).

This would make enough for our lunch and dinner. For a cheap breakfast we would have porridge – you can get a big bag of oats for about 50p.

To take part in the £2 challenge read more about it here and to read more about Zamcog’s work in Zambia, go here!

Small print: I wasn’t paid or incentivised to write this post, just doing it to support a charity – what an easy way to raise money!