Kids' dinners for about £1 a head

It's ten past five in week four of the holidays. Everyone is somehow both starving and unwilling to eat anything. The plan you had on Sunday has quietly dissolved, and the honest options are: something out of a packet, something delivered, or something you can make in the time it takes for the arguing to stop.

This is a list for the third option. Five dinners that children actually eat, that take one pan and not much attention, and that come in at roughly a pound a head.

About that pound

Let's be straight about the number, because a lot of "cheap dinner" writing isn't. A pound a head here is an approximation, not a costing. It assumes own-brand basics, a store cupboard that already contains oil and salt, and that you're feeding more than one person so the packet gets used up rather than half-wasted.

We're not going to list prices for you. Prices move, they differ by shop and by week, and a blog post full of them is wrong within a month and stays wrong forever — the internet has plenty of those already. What doesn't go out of date is the shape of the meal: which cheap thing is doing the work, and what you can add when you're feeling more generous.

1. The jacket potato, taken seriously

A baked potato is about as cheap as a hot dinner gets, and it has an image problem, mostly because of how often it's served as a sad beige lump. Fix the skin and you fix the meal: oil, plenty of salt, and long enough in the oven that the outside actually crackles. Microwave first if time is short, then ten minutes in a hot oven to finish.

Beans on top, cheese if there is cheese. Slightly nicer: a knob of butter stirred through the fluffy middle before the beans go on. It takes four seconds and changes the whole thing.

2. Eggy bread, for dinner, unapologetically

Bread that's gone a bit dry is the ideal candidate, which makes this a rescue dish as well as a cheap one. Egg, splash of milk, dunk, fry.

Children who have decided they don't like eggs will frequently eat this without noticing it is almost entirely eggs. Slightly nicer: savoury rather than sweet — black pepper in the egg, and a hard cheese grated over while it's still hot in the pan.

3. Pasta with a sauce made of whatever's going soft

Not a recipe; a formula. Anything in the vegetable drawer that's past its best but not past it — a tired tomato, half an onion, a pepper going wrinkly, the end of a courgette — softened in oil, then a tin of tomatoes, then blitzed smooth.

Smooth is the tactical part. Blended sauce gets past children who conduct a full inspection of anything with visible pieces in it. Slightly nicer: a spoonful of the starchy pasta water stirred in at the end, which makes a thin sauce cling properly instead of sitting in a puddle at the bottom of the bowl.

4. Soup, with bread that's worth eating

Soup is cheap by nature — the whole point of it is making a small amount of ingredients go a long way in hot water. Potato and whatever else you've got is the reliable base. Blend it; see above regarding visible pieces.

The bread is the bit people skimp on, and it's the bit that turns soup from a starter into dinner. Slightly nicer: toast the bread properly, rub it with a cut clove of garlic while it's hot, and let everyone dunk. Small children find dunking to be an activity, which buys you a genuinely peaceful ten minutes.

5. Egg fried rice with a fistful of frozen veg

Frozen peas and sweetcorn are one of the great cheap-cooking arguments — no waste, no chopping, no going off. Cold cooked rice (leftover, or a pouch on a bad day), hot pan, push it to one side, scramble an egg in the space, mix it all through.

Slightly nicer: a splash of soy at the end and, if there's a spring onion in the fridge going limp, the green bits sliced over the top. It goes from beige to looking like someone cooked on purpose.

The other kind of £1 night

Some nights you are not doing any of this, and that is entirely reasonable. Week four of the holidays is long, and the point of a list like this is that it's there when you want it, not that you owe anybody a home-cooked dinner every evening.

Worth knowing: on the right night, a restaurant will do the feeding-them-cheaply part for you instead — that's how chains fill their quiet evenings, and it's the entire premise of this site. Which chains, on which days, and until when changes constantly, which is exactly why none of it is written here. The chain-by-chain rundown is the place to look — it marks the ones that have finished as well as the ones still running — and what's on over the summer is the seasonal cut. If you've never picked apart the small print on one of these, what "kids eat free" actually means walks through the five conditions worth checking before you get everyone's shoes on.

Two more in the same spirit, for when the problem isn't quite this one: cooking from what's actually in the fridge is a set of formulas for the night the plan has already gone, and the movie night in is for when dinner and the evening's entertainment have become the same problem.

A pound a head at your own table, or someone else's table and someone else's washing up. Both count.