Meals for under 3 quid! (A 15 quid meal that lasted for six meals)

Recently I am struggling to find cheap meals that are easy to make for myself. This is the story of one particularly tasty pasta bake that was used, abused and transformed over a series of days to make an extensive amount of dishes.
There will be no photos of my own food, but I will but the occasional cat photo in to keep you entertained through my writing. I have found in life, that if food is good, you shouldn't take photos of it. You should eat it. Don't eat this though:

Recipe 1. (2 meals) Saturday night, I was entertaining a friend, and as my coeliac housemate wasn't home I decided to make a gluten packed, dairy filled extravaganza of a pasta bake.
This wasn't any old pasta bake though.  It contained the following:

Ingredients
(Change these for anything you have in your fridge. Really.)
1 courgette
1 pepper
1 carrot
3 onions
2 cloves garlic
150g chorizo
4 pork sausages (Chopped up and seasoned with cumin seeds)
1 butternut squash
200g penne pasta
1 pack mozzarella (Torn up)
100g cheddar (grated)
400g chopped tomatoes
Oil
Sage
Mixed herbs

As we all know pasta bakes are dead easy to make, but this one was quite long in the preparation, but totally worth it.

Method
1. Chop your butternut squash in half and rub in oil, sage, salt and pepper.  Whack it in the oven at 180 degrees C for 20 minutes.

2. Whilst your butternut squash is in the oven, chop up your other veg and the chorizo into roughly 2cm cubes, and when that first 20 minutes is up season them in the same way as the butternut squash, and put them in the oven all together for a further 20 minutes.  The butternut squash should stay in the oven for this time, just to clarify.

3. When there's 10 minutes left, you need to do two things, this is when you need to keep your eyes open 'cause there'll be loads on the go at once.  You need to put your pasta on, in boiling water (only cook it till it's half cooked), as well as heating a frying pan for the sausages and garlic.  Start cooking these whenever, you can probably get away with doing them one at a time, as it doesn't really matter if everything's hot at the same time in a pasta bake.

4. Once everything's ready, take it all off the heat, drain your pasta, and take your veg out of the oven.  You'll need to give the veg a couple of minutes to cool down, then skin and cube your butternut squash.  I did mine in quite nice big chunks as it's my favourite part!

5. Throw it all together in a nice big perspex dish.  Mix all the elements together thoroughly, then stir in the chopped tomatoes and the torn up chunks of mozzarella.  This gives nice stretchy nuggets of cheese throughout your bake, it's very exciting.

6. Put the grated cheddar on top and put it in the oven at 180 for half an hour. If you only half cooked the pasta then all the liquid should get soaked up nicely and it'll be great, unfortunately I overcooked mine a little and it came out slightly watery, but still tasted good.

Done! So that's 2 meals (me and a friend), but you still have 2/3 of the dish left... refrigerate!!

This is not what it looked like:

Day 2: 1 meal
Refry it.  It's that simple.  Make sure it goes into a hot pan, preferably with chilli oil for a little extra kick, and wait til it's crispy and hot all the way through.  Delicious.

Day 3: Meal 1: Unfortunately, just took it to work and microwaved it, but we all know food tastes better a day or two later...

Day 3: Meal 2: Spanish omelette time! Or frittata to those educated folks out there.  It went a little like this:

Ingredients
Leftover pasta bake
4 eggs
20g Parmesan
Dash of milk
Salt&pepper
Mixed herbs

Method
1. Mix together the eggs, herbs, salt and pepper, parmesan and milk in a bowl with a fork, whisk them up good and proper.  Have your grill ready on a medium heat too.

2. Fry up your leftover pasta bake on a medium heat, in a smallish frying pan, make sure it's not too hot or you'll burn your omelette, but not too cold that it won't cook through.

3. Throw your eggs in on top of the pasta, giving it a very quick stir. Let it all cook for a while (4-6 minutes) but keep an eye on it, it's so easy to burn (speaking from experience).  At this point it's quite nice to grate some cheddar on top... just a suggestion.

4. Once you can move the pan and there's limited movement in the egg that's on top of the pan, as in it's clearly solid under that top layer of egg, put it under the grill for 3/4 minutes - again, keep an eye, you might have a better grill than mine and it could be done a lot faster.

Easy!  Once that's done, loosen the edges and flip it out on to a plate. In this situation it can be easier to just put a plate over the top of the pan and turn it upside down, like you would a sandcastle.

Here's another picture of not my food:

This should be enough to make you a decent size frittata - as long as you have self control, you can have half for dinner tonight, and the other half for lunch tomorrow. Which brings me on to day 4...

Day 4: 6th meal - Have the  other half of your frittata for lunch! Easy.

So there we go. What originally started as a surprisingly expensive meal to entertain a friend has turned into days of dinners and lunches.  Although you might find it dull to repeat a meal, this one was actually really tasty and easily changeable, and I highly recommend giving it a bash.

What's the longest you've ever made a meal last for?  If you have one that's changeable enough I'd really like to hear about it.  Another of my favourite things to do is to turn a curry into a pasta sauce... but that's a story for another day.