3 Meals for 2 people from 192g of chicken

I started with the intention of making two meals which were a chicken lasagna and cheesy chicken and brocolli cottage pie, but as always I try and stretch the ingredients to make an extra meal which in this case was some paprika pasties as I had a bit of pastry in the fridge I had taken out of the freezer. As usual these are only loose recipes as I don’t usually measure and you can make similar with what ever you have in eg. You could make your own tomato sauce or use a jar if you don’t have soup, or you can add different vegetables like frozen peas or sweetcorn to either dish.

I was using up things I already had like the soup and the brocolli from the community pantry, the pastry that had been frozen from Mother’s day, a pepper that was wrinkled and a carrot that had seen better days.

Recipe.

1. I started by peeling the potatoes and putting them on to boil. Once boiled I added some milk and seasoning and mashed them.
2. I made the cheese sauce by putting about 20 to 25g of butter in a pan. When it had melted I added a couple of heaped dessert spoons of flour and using a whisk combined it and cooked it off. I then slowly added milk whisking it all the time until it was the consistency I wanted and added about 20g of cheese.
3. I chopped the onion and sauted it. I then took half of it out of the pan. 4. I chopped the pepper and the carrot in small cubes and microwaved the carrot for about 3 minutes.
4. I added the pepper, the carrot and some mixed herbs to the onion in the pan, sauted them for a minute and then added the can of soup and stirred.
5. To stop the sauce being too sweet and to thicken it I added a squeeze of tomato puree, and then added about half of the cooked chicken.
6. I constructed a lasagna by putting pasta sheets in the bottom of the dish or tray, the tomato chicken sauce on top and then another pasta layer, more sauce and finished with a pasta layer ( you can do more layers if you want.). I saved about a cm of the sauce in the pan for the pasties.
7. I then used about a third of the cheesy white sauce over the top layer and added a small sprinkle of grated cheese.
8. This was put in the oven for about 25 mins.
9. I added the rest of the chicken, onion and the brocolli (that I had cooked for a few minutes in the microwave) to the cheese sauce. Sometimes I also add lazy garlic too and cook it for a minute.
10. I placed this mixture in a dish, topped with mash potato (saving some for the pasties) and put in the oven for about 20 mins. I did not want to cook them too long as the airfryer will brown them when I warm them up.
11. For the pasties fillling I added a tsp of paprika to the left over dribble of tomato and chicken sauce mixture. I then added the mash potato and the 19g of cheese that was left and stirred.
12. I rolled out the pastry, cut it in half, and placed the filling at each side and made them into pasties (see photo). I put two small slashes in the top of the pasties and washed with milk before placing in the oven until the pastry was cooked and brown.

By cooking in this way and using the same ingredients for multiple dishes I am able to keep our food costs down. All these dishes freeze as well and so can be part of your meal plan. If I was wanting to do this as a vegetarian I would have made a vegetable lasagne, made macaroni and veg cheese (swop potatoes for pasta), and then put some chilli in the left over tomato sauce and mixed it with a bit of the left over macaroni cheese and put that in the pasties. It is all about using your imagination with the ingredients you have.