One thing I have learnt since starting my studies & living abroad is how to cook with the least washing & cleaning up and with cheapest ingredients possible but still healthy(ish...). I try to reduce my processed food - the 'bad' ones, at least - intake and one way that helps with that is by cooking my meals from scratch.
I learnt how to pick ingredients and dishes that can be mixed and match with other ingredient/dishes - roast chicken that can be eaten with rice and turned into a sandwich, stews & curries that you can have with rice, noodles, bread, roti canai, frozen peas that can be added to instant noodles, fried rice or made into soup etc..
Yesterday I found a recipe from the internet that was quite easy and relatively cheap, too. I have diced lamb neck in the freezer; halal lamb is cheaper and easier to find here as compared to beef. I have a can of plum tomatoes (also cheap here - 38p!) and most of the other ingredients are the usual cupboard stock. I guess the recipe is a Northern Indian one - it is called Adhraki Gosht. A friend's aunt taught me to cook a similar dish using chicken and it tasted nice, so I thought this should not be bad, either.
I didn't follow the recipe strictly; to be honest at first I thought of making Lamb Kurma. I have been eating quite a lot so I thought I could do without the extra calories from the coconut milk in the kurma. I had about 300-400g of diced lamb neck (with bone). So I chopped 2 small onions and 2 cloves of garlic and about an inch of ginger and fry them in a bit of oil. I added a cardamom, a bit of cloves and a small cinnamon stick (still thinking of making kurma at this point). And then I changed my mind and decided to try the adhraki gosht recipe instead. I did it differently; I added the garam masala and let the fried things go brown and fragrant before adding the lamb. The lamb was browned for a bit before I added a can of plum tomatoes (I guess u can use canned chopped tomatoes or even fresh tomatoes) and a bit of tomato puree. I didn't have any proper chilli powder so I substituted that with pimiento powder left by a Spanish former flatmate. Added a chopped carrot (because it has started to go bad in the fridge), about a cup of water, let the pan go to boil, lowered the heat, and left it for the lamb to become tender.
I like the tomato sauce as it doesn't make the lamb taste too oily. Had it for the first time with roti canai. There's enough leftovers to last me two meals :).
