by Mouse

Created on: October 22, 2010   Last Updated: October 25, 2010

One of my student buddies approached me this week to teach him how to make something nourishing, but simple enough for him to cook, having never done much cooking before.

So for all you students new to cooking, here's the recipe and instructions for a basic casserole, together with another four variations you can make very easily.

All of these meals will freeze. My best tip is to freeze it in portions to be re-heated in the microwave or the cooker later on - there's nothing better if you get in hungry, from a late session (be that study or drinking) and have a hot meal within a couple of minutes!

These are great if you have company too. Just add some bread, or some jacket potatoes (wash the potatoes and stab them onto a skewer or fork and put into the oven on 200C for 1hour) to make it stretch further if you need to. If you're going to serve this to a group of veggies, switch out the meat for Quorn, or Tofu and add some lentils when you add the veggies. Change the gravy to veggie friendly and there you have it, a veggie casserole.

Casserole looks and smells amazing and looks like you have to be an amazing cook to make it, but it's dead easy, I promise! The only thing I will say though, is you might wanna get confident doing it with beef, lamb or pork before you try chicken as chicken can be difficult.

Okay, don't panic on me, it's lots of steps on paper, but once you're doing it and you get into it it's so easy!

Stick your oven on to 180C to pre-heat.

Cut your meat into chunks and roll in some flour, salt, pepper and any herbs you like. Put it in the fridge out of the way.

Cut up whatever veggies you want into chunks and put on one side.

Grab an onion and chop it up small. Stick it in a pan with some oil and fry until they go soft and brown. You need to stir it a tiny bit, every once in a while so it doesn't stick, but not too much.

If you like mushrooms, or if you want to make the stroganoff variation, add in sliced up mushrooms at this point. Treat them the same as the onions. Keep them going until you see them go kind of wet from the liquid they're releasing. then stick everything from this pan into your casserole dish (any oven dish with a lid will do).

Put a little more oil in the pan if you need to. fry the coated meat, a few bits at a time until it turns brown. Put it in the casserole dish when it's done and repeat until you've done all the meat.

Add the cut up veggies to the dish and top it up with gravy (1 stock cube in a pint-glass of boiling water

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