Ditch the ready meal! Chicken and Bacon Pasta Bake\Mac and Cheese - more post furlough/student food

 So what do you do when you leave home for the first time and discover that you all those Food Tech lessons you did at school proved that you can design cool packaging but don't know how to make the contents.  For many the fear of cocking up and ruining food (which we now know for the first time is EXPENSIVE) means that they bolt for the ready meal aisle.  All the supermarket have them and they lure us in with Instagram quality pictures and the promise that it will be a delicious meal ready in minutes.  What is not to love?  Well the cost for one and the fat/salt/preservatives for another and did I mention the plastic pollution...

For an example I chose Chicken and Bacon Pasta Bake which is common to ASDA, Tesco and Morrisons and varies in price from £2.65 to £2 a time.  Now no-one wants to eat the same thing day in and out but if you rely on ready meals only for your evening meal that sets you back £380-£500 a year just for term time just for that one meal a day.  So 1) how much can you save on this one meal and 2) how easy is it to make?  The answer is that with a bit of organisation you can easily half the cost and it is easy to make, honest!

Chicken and Bacon Pasta for 1

You need two pans - one for pasta, one for the sauce

In the pasta pan add water from the kettle and a pinch of salt (the salt raises the boiling point of the water slightly so the pasta cooks a bit faster - clever huh!).  Add 75g of pasta (about a double handful if you do not have scales). Stir and leave to simmer for about 10-15 minutes whilst you make the sauce (water should be bubbling gently).

For the sauce take a couple of teaspoons of butter/margarine and melt it in the pan.  Do this gently, you do not want it to go brown as it will be bitter.  Add a dessertspoon of flour and stir to make a thick paste.  Keep it over the heat and keep stirring for about a minute to help cook the flour (this will improve the taste later).  Take about half a standard mug of milk and add to the pan a dribble at a time, stir in between to get rid of any lumps (if you do add too much by mistake then you can use a whisk to rescue it).  Stir gently and continue to heat the sauce until it starts to bubble.  Add grated cheese (about enough to cover you palm, somewhere around 25-50 g) and allow to melt then taste to see if it is "cheesy" enough, if not add a little more.  Stir in cooked shredded chicken (as much as you can spare a whole breast is too much) and chopped bacon (1-2 rashers).  Taste again - it may not need extra salt as both the cheese and the bacon will have salt in them.

By now the pasta should be cooked, taste a piece and if it is soft then it is cooked.  Drain the pasta and put back into the pan.  Pour the sauce on top and stir to coat the pasta.  Serve.

The hardest part of the whole of the cooking is that you cannot walk away and need to keep stirring the sauce to keep it from catching on the bottom of the pan- but it only takes the time it takes the pasta to cook.

Cost : Depends on where you get your chicken from.  If you buy cooked chicken in small packets like these 

then you are going to struggle (packet above is £2.50 for 180g and would make about 3 servings).  By the time you add bacon (£1.95 for 10 rashers) this would make the cost over £1 just for the meat alone and the entire cost approximately (20p for milk+8p for pasta+12p for cheese+5p for butter+3p for flour) £1.51 (assuming that you can use a grater to grate your own cheese, you're not going to fall for that one are you!).  Better than £2-£2.65 (if you did a similar thing every night for a week this would be a saving of £3.43-£7.98)  (Over a 38 week year this is £130.34-£303.24 or for us in the real world with a 52 week year £178.36-£414.96) but you can shave the savings down to be better - how? cook your own chicken breasts.

In advance buy something like these chicken breasts

At £3.30 for about 450g , much cheaper per gram.  So how do you cook it? Using foil make them into an enclosed parcel and cook in the oven for about 25 minutes, leave to cool then shred - the resultant meat can be used for recipes like this or sandwiches, wraps, added to mayo for baked potatoes, the list goes on and better still if you divide it into smaller portions (I would divide this into about 9 portions of approx. 50 g each), it will freeze for about 6 months, just pop in the fridge the morning of the day you want to use it.  This brings the cost of the bake down to £1.05 per portion.  About half the cost of even the cheapest option ( £7.35 per week rather than £14-£18.55).  If you use "cooking bacon" - this is packs of mis-shapes from when the bacon is sliced- then the cost dips below the £1 per portion mark.

Of course if you really want to drive the cost down ditch the meat and the recipe above becomes mac and cheese (also sold as a ready meal for  £2-£2.65 but costing you a massive 48p on average).

Potentially hundreds of pounds of savings over the course of a year - isn't that worth a little effort?