Melbourne

Man, you've got dinner sorted! This is student food from the vault. Known as 'savory mince', but there's no recipie - you just use what you have on hand as well as the mince.

Fry up a chopped onion (any size) in a couple of tablespoons of oil/fat over medium heat. Add the mince and stir it about with a wooden spoon until it changes colour. Add a cupful of passata and 1 cupful of chopped mixed veg (frozen). Add a generous gloop of hot sauce if you like spicy. Add a splosh of soy sauce. Stir. Let this simmer on low heat while you chop a largish potato into dice, rinse the potato dice under the cold tap and put it in a microwave safe container to blast it in the microwave for 3 mins til nearly done. Stir the potato and blast it for another 2 mins. The sauce is ready when you start to see a bit of oil float to the surface. Stir this back into the mixture before serving.

Put potato in serving bowl and add a generous quantity of the mince mixture on top. Eat with a spoon in front of the screen/text book/whatever.

Substitutions : Add 2 tsps of onion powder or garlic powder (or both) to the mince before frying if you don't happen to have an onion on hand. Add 1 tsp garam masala if you like spice but not heat instead of the hot sauce. Use any mixed diced veg you have in the freezer. Add a bag of spinach and stir it through the mince mixture if you feel you need greens. Or 1 chopped cos lettuce if you don't have spinach. If you aren't using soy sauce, you may like to add some salt.

The cooked mince mixture freezes well, so any leftovers can be stored in a container there and just heated up in the microwave the next time you cbf cooking.

This mince mixture is basic and very flexible - you can use it as pie filling, over pasta or just over hot toast if that's your fancy.

We love this for a lazy mince feed Asian beef