Sandwiches at work are fine. There’s nothing wrong with a good sandwich. But we fancied something better. It’s good to have a challenge, and trying to cook a single pot dish using a slow cooker has been a fun challenge. If we get things moving by 9am, you can have a great lunch by 1pm, for less than the cost of sandwiches. And much better tasting too.

We spotted these in the reduced section of Lidl. They’re a slow cooked beef rib, deboned and already sous-vide cooked. They really only need heating through. We got 2 boxes from the reduced section for £2 a box.

Wanting to thicken the sauce element up, and add lots of flavour, these four slices of black pudding interested us. They were 50p in the reduced section too. So we grabbed those.

A brilliant go-to seasoning that adds a dash of far-eastern flavour to anything is this shallot sauce. We got it from Wing Yip in Manchester. Other supermarkets are available, and if you live in that London you can probably get this in Kwik Save.

All that lot was thrown in the slow cooker on HIGH for about two hours. With a good spoonful of wholegrain mustard too.

It needed something else of course…

There’s not much wrong with a pack of noodles for 55p. So that’s what we ended up with. 

Noodles had boiling water poured over them, then left to soak for 5mins. Then tipped in with the beefy goodness for a few minutes to soak up the sauce.

Ed had three bowls and declared it lovely. £5 for a massive lunch for two? That’ll do for us.