Cheats Roast

My family love nothing more than a good roast dinner. Sadly it's not one of my favourite meals, possibly one of my least favourite and because of this, and the mountain of dirty pots and pans that remain afterwards, I don't often cook a full roast dinner.


When I received an email last week with a recipe included for a 'Cheats Roast' I chose not to hit delete straight away and read through the email and recipe. The recipe was devised by Junior's Pantry founder Kate Finch whose family, like mine, would eat a roast every day of the week. This is a quick, easy and economical way of giving them 'almost' a roast dinner without the mountain of pots and pans afterwards.


I changed the ingredients very slightly and this is my version of Cheats Roast :


1kg of Pork Loin Steaks
800g New Potatoes
600g Parsnips
300g Butternut squash
3 eating apples
2 large lemons
Handful of woody herbs, I used Rosemary & Thyme
4 tbsp Olive oil

• Cut the chops/steaks lengthways
• Chop the veggies into large chunks & core & quarter the apples
• Squeeze the juice from the lemons & mix with the herbs and olive oil & season with black pepper
• Toss everything together in a large roasting pan, throw in the lemon halves too (remove before eating!)
• Roast in a 200 degree (C) oven for approx 1 hour (mixing a couple of times during the cooking), until all the meat & vegetables are brown

I made a gravy with the juices from the pan.


Total cost for this was under £10 and it served 3 large portions today with enough left over that I should be able to stretch between 2 or 3 tomorrow, along with a few extra veggies.

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Chocolate Cake In a Mug

I've seen this recipe done before but never got around to making one. Last week the lovely Susan posted a recipe on her blog which prompted me to give it a go, actually I just let 9 year old H make it herself.


This is so easy and I can't believe we've never tried it before. You can find the recipe over on Susan's blog, which we followed exactly apart from the vanilla as we used vanilla caster sugar.

It was baked in our 700w microwave for 3 minutes and was perfect. Whilst it was cooking it rose up an inch or more over the top of the mug but unfortunately I never got a photo and by the time I took it out it has deflated - the reason why I have never attempted a souffle.

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