Recipe - Cheeseburger Pasta Bake

I have cooked my little heart out this afternoon, despite feeling a little under the weather. I have chronic back pain and no pain relief has touched it, so I pushed on. If it hurts when you sit and hurts when you do something, you might as well do something, right?

This is tomorrow night's tea, prepared in advance and shoved into the fridge, because I am taking the husband out (and not with a gun!). I expect we'll get some lovely photographs, too, so look out for those tomorrow evening.

My latest obsession despite not liking pasta all that much, and despite never having had a cheeseburger in my life before. There are a million and one different ways to make this, and I've never followed a recipe to do so.
 

Cheeseburger Pasta Bake 

Ingredients:

Cooked pasta - probably about 200g dried weight
Box of Passata

300g 5% fat lean steak mince

Large onion, diced

Handful of cherry tomatoes, halved

1 tsp onion granules

Beef Stock Pot 

Three large gherkins, sliced into rounds

1 tbsp tomato puree

150g grated mozzarella 

Method:

Cook the pasta and stir the box of passata through it. 

Preheat oven to Gas Mark 4/180C. 

Fry off the mince and onion in a little spray oil until browned. Add the tomatoes and onion granules and cook for a few more minutes. Add the beef stockpot and stir in. 

Add the sliced gherkins and the tomato puree and stir. Stir the mince mixture into the pasta and spoon into a large ovenproof dish. 

Sprinkle the mozzarella over the pasta, place in the oven for around 15 - 20 minutes, until cheese is melted to your liking. 

I made another at the same time for the children to have for their tea tonight, only they had a salami one, with cheesy garlic bread. No cheesy garlic bread for us this week :-( 

This is syn free if following Slimming World, and as this will serve three, it uses one Healthy Extra A with the mozzarella.

I also made a huge pan of leftover vegetable soup - I had leeks, half a cabbage, some carrots, potatoes, sweet potatoes, peas, and I cooked all that up with some pearl barley. 

I made scotch eggs to take with us on our picnic tomorrow. And instead of traditional breadcrumbs, I finally got round to using this packet which I picked up in Aldi ages ago.

I think it's meant for chicken but I saw that someone had used it on Scotch Eggs and apparently it was delicious. They were right (we had to share one between us, just in case they were horrible...)

And tea tonight, Mr G fancied something meaty (don't we all, love!) and I suggested gammon, which we hadn't had for a while. So, we had smoked gammon, egg and pineapple, mushrooms, homemade SW chips (Aldi Maris Pipers are currently on fire) and baked beans. 

I had hoped to bake some oats today, but I didn't get round to it, so that's a job for tomorrow morning. The place we're going doesn't open until noon so that gives me plenty of time to get a fair few batches made up before we leave, especially if I get an early start in the morning ;-)