Join the Children’s Food Trust Big Cookathon 2016

Learning to cook is an essential life skill and by eating better, children tend do better generally. If kids learn to cook early in life it also means they’ll be more able to fend for themselves when they grow up and leave home, and keep their food costs down by making meals from scratch.

The Children’s Food Trust Big Cookathon is trying to get the nation cooking, and it’s being held across four days from Friday 22nd to Monday 25th of April, 2016. This is the eighth year it’s been running, and last year they had 25,000 people all cooking on the same weekend.

The 2016 theme is ‘reclaiming family mealtimes’. This year’s official recipe is cottage pie and there are two versions on the Cookathon website, one beef, one vegetarian. Both are easy, healthy and have plenty of vegetables in them, and they’re simple enough for kids to cook alongside adults – ideal for young cooks. They’ve costed up the meat version of the recipe at about 90p per portion using supermarket groceries.

Join in and win

To make the Big Cookathon the biggest and best mass cooking event in the country all you need to do is cook together and eat together.

Families can win one of 30 £100 prizes if they take the pledge to cook, then upload a picture of themselves cooking and complete the entry form on the weekend of the event 22-25 April.

There are also 15 £200 prizes available for schools and large groups (community groups, Scouts, Guides etc).

Even if you aren’t able to join in this time, please help to spread the word – it’s really important to get kids learning how to cook, having fun in the kitchen, and able to create healthy, cost-effective meals.