Cheap Bone Stew in a Pressure Cooker

This is a rather low effort, quick recipe and the ingredients are cheap. You can get the meaty flavour without buying actual meat. Hooray for resourcefulness and for a good effort-to-tastiness ratio!

Ingredients:
2 tbsp oil
1 tspn butter
1kg bones
1 onion
2 big stalks of celery
5 carrots, chopped
2 potatoes, chopped
5 turnips, peeled & chopped
1 big head of broccoli, chopped
1/2 cup brown lentils, cooked (without salt)
1 medium aubergine, chopped and lightly fried

Method:
Brown the bones with some oil and melted butter in a hot pot or pressure cooker. 
Take the browned bones out and then start to brown the onions. 
Add the chopped carrots and celery at this stage to make a mirepoix.
Once those look nicely fried, add the bones back in and then also the rest of the roots (potatoes and turnips). 
Add enough water to almost cover the vegetables. We used a pressure cooker, so these ingredients only took 20 minutes to get cooked. A stove might take one to two hours.
Once the pressure is released from the cooker, take out the bones and discard them.
Add the broccoli, cooked lentils and fried aubergines.
Put the pressure cooker on for one minute (it takes a few minutes to get up to pressure as well). Don't over do the broccoli or else it will turn into green mush.

Enjoy this hearty meal with a piece of buttered, crusty fresh bread or with grated Parmesan on top.

Gluten-Free Dairy-Free Aubergine Lasagne

This is probably one of my favourite Whole30 meals I've had so far. It doesn't take too long to make, so I'm probably going to make this again this week (double sized).

Ingredients:
500g beef mince (preferably not lean since there is no dairy fat being added)
2 handfuls of baby tomatoes and 1 tsp tomato paste (instead of making your own 'passata', you can use some from a can too)
1 onion, chopped finely
2 cloves of garlic, chopped
2- 3 aubergines, sliced length-ways and fried in olive oil
A handful of olives, roughly chopped
Some thyme and oreganum
Salt
Pepper

Method:
Fry the chopped onion in some oil on a medium-low heat until translucent.
Add the beef (if it's not yet defrosted you have to continuously keep scraping off the cooked bits to make sure it doesn't make one giant meatball) and fry it until browned. This might take some time and can be done on high heat. Add extra oil if it starts sticking to the pan.
Once the meat is browned, add the garlic and season with salt.
In a separate pan I sautéed the tomatoes until soft and then I used a blender to make a  sort of soup (or 'passata'). I added tomato paste to add extra flavour.
Then, add your tomato mixture to the beef and make sure that any extra liquid is reduced away. Now the beef is ready to be ladled into a casserole dish and topped with some chopped olives (for flavour). Start with about a third of the beef and use half the olives.
Next, layer the aubergine on top (about half of them / enough to fit your casserole dish dimensions). 
Repeat the beef layer, the olives and then the aubergines again. It might be a good idea to end with another layer of beef if possible because my aubergines dried out a bit.

Put your casserole dish in the oven at 180'C for 30 minutes and then it's ready!

Tip (from an olive-lover): The olives add a lot to the flavour so don't leave them out! If you're not an "olive-person", don't worry because you can't really taste them :P

Mediterranean Couscous Salad

Great for a hot summer's day.

Ingredients:

A punnet of baby tomatoes

A big aubergine / egg plant / brinjal sliced & chopped

A yellow pepper, sliced

Half a cup of dry couscous

3 leaves of sage

5 leaves of mint

3 leaves of rocket

Olive oil

Flax Seeds

Greek yoghurt

Salt

Pepper

Method:

Get out a nice big roasting pan and put all your veggies in there. Sprinkle over the herbs (chopped), a bit of salt and pepper. And coat with olive oil (stir it up).

Roast this on 180 degress Celcius for 45 minutes.

While that is roasting, just cover your couscous with water and let it soak it up. You can also lightly salt it.

Add flax seeds to your couscous.

Serve the hot veggies around the couscous and top with Greek yoghurt and garnish with a spring of mint.