Fishy Pies for the freezer and your tum-tum

Make a huge mahoosive pan of veggie mixture, you can use the cheapest bag of frozen veg, something like 60p, an onion, bit of garlic, chuck in a cheap tin of baked beans, a squirt of ketchup or barbecue sauce, anything goes, just so long as you end up with a big tasty pile of cheap veggie mixture, cook it up and leave it to cool. The next day would be best as it leaves it time to mingle too.

So get your self some foil dishes, the sort with lids, like you get from some take-aways , use the tin foil sort, not plastic as these will going in the oven from the freezer. 

Pop to the piscean produce purveyors and purchase a packet of pollock. This works out to about 43p per piece of fish.

Plop the sloppy jalopy & fish in the tin foil dish, make sure the fish is straight out of the freezer and you are putting it in cold veggie mixture as it will all be going back in the freezer any minute now. 

Instant mash, this stuff is 20p a bag, tastes great and is just like real spud if you treat it right. 

Just use half a bag to start with as it goes cool and difficult to work with quite quickly, half a bag will cover two fish pie dishes.

Add a pinch of dry mustard and a pinch of vegetta or salt if you prefer

After I mixed the mash, I put it back in the bag it came from, snipped off one corner with the scissors  and piped the potato on top of the pies. makes life so much easier. 

Pop the lids on and freeze immediately. When you want to eat one, cook it from frozen for about 40 minutes at gas 4 or 5 depending on your oven. Put some grated cheese on top for extra yummishness. I reckon one tray/dish will feed a hungry me on its own or two hungry me's with garlic bread or other accompaniment
Frozen veg 60p
Onion 10p
Beans 20p
Potato 20p 
Fish £1.75
Round it up to 3 quid for 4 big 2 portion dishes
37 and a half pence per meal. 
Shut up!

Vertical pork chop casserole

6 pork chops found marked down to £2.50 from a fiver. Skewer them through just under the fat and suspend them in a deep enough ovenproof casserole type dish. Season, oil etc and leave to marinade in the fridge while you prepare the veg.

Take the rack from the dish and place enough chunks of frozen spinach to cover the base of the dish.

Add some chopped red onion. and chopped leeks.

Dont over fill it, as you will have to put the chops back in.

Tuck the chops back in, I did this by removing half the veg mix, putting the chops in and tucking the rest of the veg around it and some of the thinner bits in between the chops.

As I haven't actually done this before, due to only having just thought of it, I decided to place the glass lid back on to keep moisture in and stop the tops from going brown too soon.

I'm cooking these quite low in the oven at about gas 4 for an hour to start with and see how it goes, while it is cooking I am uploading these pictures and writing this blog.
I will let you know later if it turned out well or not :-)
Fingers crossed.
Warning, do not, under any circumstances, actually cross your fingers while cooking, not only is this dangerous, by virtue of the fact that it will hinder your dexterity, but there is also no proven causal link between ritualistic culinary gesticulation and the eventual edibleness of the food being prepared.

The Finished pork product, While I was toasting the ciabatta to make garlicy I took the pork out of the dish and stirred a packet of noodles in the the spinach and leek malarkey and blimey Charlie it was tastier than a very tasty thing. Loads of bold flavours, making it quite a rich and filling dinner over all.
Garlic  spinach and leek being at the forefront and with carbs in the bread and noodles bringing up the rear, a surprisingly satisfying winter dish, on a scale of forty winks to food induced coma, this was in the region of after dinner snooze in front of the box., waking up in time for Downton and pudding.