This easy pasta sauce is just that – ridiculously easy! I’m rubbish at cooking, I truly am, but if I can make this, anyone can. Not only is it easy, it’s really healthy and it’s dead cheap! A jar of pasta sauce costs about £2. It has god knows what in (some of the big brands have six tablespoons of sugar in!) and does just one meal. With this, you know exactly what is in it, and it cost much less than £2 for a huge amount – the recipe below will do around 6 generous toddler size portions.

Ingredients

4 Tomatoes

2 Small Cartons of Passata

2 tablespoons Dried Mixed Herbs

2 Carrots

1 Medium Onion

Handful of Mushrooms

Method

Gently fry the onions for a few minutes on a low heat in olive oil.

Add chopped up tomatoes, mushrooms and carrots, and then pour the passata over.

Add the dried herbs.

Stir well and leave to simmer for 15-20 minutes.

Allow to cool slightly, and then whack through the blender. We kept ours quite thick but blended it enough so the veg was hidden.

Serve over pasta.

We added some tinned sweetcorn afterwards, because the boys love the stuff – I’m never going to miss the chance to get some more veg into them! The random pea you can see came from my egg fried rice that Alex had helped himself to, but peas would work well in this. You could also try peppers, leeks, courgette – whatever is lurking in the fridge.

The kids really enjoyed this, and I’m glad it made a huge batch . I’ve popped the rest of it into old takeaway containers and stuck it in the freezer to pull out when I can’t be bothered to cook. It would also make a good base for bolognaise or lasagne.