Army Rations

I am a massive fan of one pot dinners.  Having teenage boys means needing to provide hearty and when I say hearty I mean hearty meals, they eat like it is going out of fashion!  And teenage boy cannot live on cereal alone, although they would certainly like to try... and do seem to be trying to prove that they can.

One of my favourite one pot meals is what we call Army Rations,  it's not particularly glamorous to look at but it's very tasty and filling and you can make lots of it for quite a low price tag.... got to be a good thing in this economy.

You will need:

500g Minced Beef
1 Large Onion or 2 small ones

1 Beef Oxo Cube

1/2 pint of Beef gravy

1/2 bag of 1kg Mixed Frozen Veg

Seasoning

Use a deep frying pan or a large pot for this, it starts off looking small but volume will increase hugely so you need the extra cooking space. 

Chop your onion and fry it to soften it in a touch of olive or vegetable oil and once the onion is soft and golden add the minced beef to brown it.   Add your oxo cube and stir.  

Once the beef is browned, add your seasoning,  a little salt, lots of ground pepper and I like to chuck in a couple of slugs of Worcestershire Sauce. You could also pop in some ground chilli if you like a bit of heat in your food.   Now put in half a bag of mixed frozen veg,  brand is unimportant, pick what you personally like, my personal favourite is the farmhouse style with broccoli and cauliflower in it. 

Stir the veg in and add your 1/2 pint of gravy, turn the heat down low pop a lid on and let it simmer away for 20 minutes. if you find you want more gravy you can always add more just before serving.

 

You can have this on its own or with lots of crusty bread or you can serve it with rice and my boys particular favourite with pasta.

Herby Roasted Sweet Potatoes

I am really really into sweet potatoes... I never really had them before I had to think about the sugars in my diet. Apparently having PCOS (Polycystic Ovary Syndrome) often means that sufferers have insulin resistance which means weight gain is very likely.  The only way I have found to control weight as a PCOS sufferer is to try and keep sugar (carbohydrates) to a minimum which isn't easy as one of the problems of having PCOS is an extreme sweet tooth... how unfair is that then???

So avoiding foods like pasta, rice, bread and potatoes is really important as they are quite high on the glycaemic index (lots of sugar)  who knew?  Not like they taste terribly sweet, ok well bread can if you smother it in jam...mmmm jam... no stop don't get me started.

Anyway a good alternative to potatoes and rice is sweet potatoes, the name is a bit misleading, even though they do have a slight sweetness to them, they actually contain a lot less sugar than potatoes and are much lower on the glycaemic index.  Nature is well weird.

One way of cooking sweet potatoes is to roast them, you can actually cook them almost anyway that you can cook a potato, roast, mashed, chipped or boiled (although boiling isn't as nice) and you can't really do them like a baked potato, well you could but the skin is quite tough. You can even make really healthy sweet potato crisps and they are just yummy. I may do a recipe for that....can you bear the suspense?

Anyway enough of this onwards to the recipe.

Ingredients (serves 4 people)

2-3 Large Sweet Potatoes

2 Tablespoons Olive Oil

Pepper

Salt

Mixed Herbs

1 Teaspoon Medium Curry Powder or Tikka Spice (optional)

Peel and chop your sweet potatoes, give them a rinse under the tap and then pop the on some kitchen roll to let them drain for a few mins whlst you make the coating.

In a bowl mix, the 2 tablespoons of olive oil, grind some pepper, salt and a couple of pinches of mixed herbs as well as a teaspoon of Medium curry powder or tikka spice.  Stir it together well.

You can just miss out the curry powder, it gives a nice spice but if you're having something like roast chicken with the sweet potatoes you might not want spicy.

Toss the sweet potatoes in the coating, making sure all the potatoes get a thorough coating.

Lay your sweet potatoes onto a tin foil lined baking tray.

Cook your sweet potatoes in a pre-heated oven at 200 degrees for 20 mins, it's a good idea to turn them over 10 mins into cooking to make sure both sides get a chance to crisp up.

You can serve these with any meat you like really but works especially well with roasted chicken.

I served mine with oven cooked pork loin chops and mixed veg and lots of gravy... YUM!!!!