Friday meals

This is the start of our 3 days of eating more food, and we put up our energy allowance to normal levels - that's roughly 2200 for me. As we generally go out and see friends later, I try to look ahead for something to eat when we come home.

Breakfast is once again full fat greek yoghurt (100g) with some pineapple today. Lunch will be one of our favourites - tuna/egg salad with new potatoes and butter. These 2 meal will take care of around just 500 calories. I'll have some bread at some point in the morning if I want some. Yesterday I had an ice lolly (random)!

Tonight I'm going to prepare a very simple potato dish. Lyonaisse potatoes done our way.

We take 3 very large potatoes and peel then slice these up quite thinly. Take 2 large onions and thinly slice these. Then simply layer the two ingredients into an oven proof dish, ending with potatoes on the top. Put salt and pepper on each layer. Then take about 100g chicken stock and mix with 50g milk, and pour over the whole thing. Dot the top with butter. This will form our BASIC MIX. It can be cooked in a medium hot oven (180) for an hour or so - until the top starts to go nice and crispy and brown.

You can play with the basic mix, and can add whatever you fancy - ham, cheese etc to the layers. We quite often add some cooked ham or leftover cooked sausage if we have some. You could add cream instead of milk if you want something heavier. The thing is, it's a great way to use leftovers, and potatoes without breaking the bank.

We will put the potato dish into a low oven while we are out at the pub, and turn it up for a blast when we get back. We have an oven that we can programme to turn on and off, so we set the timer to go off just in case we are a bit late back. If you don't have this facility, the dish can be cooked beforehand, and it reheats well in he microwave then crisped up under the grill - with a bit of cheese maybe?

If we haven't added any meat to the dish, we might eat it with a couple of good sausages, or even mushy peas. It's real food, cheap and very tasty, and better than a takeaway (in both calories and cost). I'll take a picture later.