Salad? Don't be silly!

*phew* No lack of salad here!

As I sit here and look at the menu plan for this week, I'm seriously hoping that the weather forecasters are right and the hot hot sunshine is going to take a bit of a back seat for a few days - because we're all out of salad, here!

Son & heir has been moaning about the amount of salad he's had to munch his way through just recently, poor dear.  Yes, I know - but he's practising to be an ungrateful teenager and is doing quite nicely at it, currently.  As a result, we've had to think of meals that don't insist on a side salad to go with them.  He probably hasn't twigged to this, but being without a side salad inevitably means that cooked vegetables will appear on his plate instead.  I won't let him get away with just pasta meals for ever, you know.

He's also - very kindly - distributed a cold germ about the place and hubby has succumbed and I'm just about to, if my throat is anything to go by.  So, personally, I'm very glad that we opted for an easy one to start the week!

Let's have a gander at what's on the menu list, then :

Tues : Pizza

Weds : Pork schnitzels, potato salad and corn on the cob

Thurs : Chicken Murry with mushroom rice

Fri : Beef in black bean stir fry

Sat : Baked trout with green couscous and parsnip crisps

Sun : Roast beef, roast potatoes & parsnips, carrots, broccoli, peas, Yorkshire puddings and creamed horseradish with gravy.

Mon : Beef & mushroom pie, new potatoes, peas and carrots.

Ssssh!  Don't shout too loud about those trout, or Asda will have sold out before we can buy two on Friday.

So, pizza tonight and we're both very happy with it.

That's not a Wienerschnitzel - that's a continent!

The Pork Schnitzels on Wednesday will be a creation from hubby's arsenal.  Having done the egg & breadcrumb thing with the fishcakes last week, he's as keen as mustard to try the same thing with an escalope.  It sounds like it's likely to be a bit of a blast from the past - and will take me back to meals in Germany when Bockwurst wasn't on the menu and I opted for Wienerschnitzel instead.

Oh and I have got to tell you about the Rose Veal thing - but that's for another blog post.  We rang our butcher to investigate getting some Rose Veal to make the schnitzels with, you see.

A Murry from the past ... ah, fond memories!

Thursday's Chicken Murry is a chicken curry - but not one made to anyone's recipe or with any particular style in mind.  It's a "Mummy Curry", i.e. one which I made up as I went along and is jolly blinking good.  I'll be giving the diced chicken from our local butcher a go with this one, crossing my fingers that it'll be a suitable substitute for the chicken breasts that we used to use when they were on special offer.  If it looks a bit ropey, then I'll have to buy a couple of legs and dice the meat up myself.

Hubby has found a use for the other half of the Silverside we bought for last week's curry, in the Beef in Black Bean stir fry.  It's going to be a noodle & broccoli stir fry, so hopefully son & heir won't do his normal downcast "oh!" when he hears it's a stir fry for tea.

Something that looks like this would be good!

Saturday's baked trout is going to be a new challenge for me. I've wanted to cook a whole fish in paper for almost as long as I can remember - and I figure that two whole trout will be enough for the three of us for a dinner.  I'll be putting it with some of Ottolenghi's Green Couscous and making up some parsnip chips - the thin ribbon kind, as opposed to the fries kind.  It seems easy enough to do, so I reckoned I'd give it a go.

Sunday's dinner is the roast beef that we moved on from last week owing to the weather.  It really was madness to think of having a roast beef dinner on such a hot day - which is this weekend's gain as we get to have it then instead.  My mouth is watering at the idea of roast beef, so I'm hoping the weather won't intervene and send it off to next week again!

We're reckoning (and hoping!) to have some leftover roast beef, which I'll incorporate into a pie with some whole shallots and mushrooms.  Served with some lovely Jersey Royals together with peas and carrots, it should be cracking!

Maybe something a bit like this?

Now, as for everything else, well I'll have to think of something to have as a dessert on Sunday, plus I can feel another cake sneaking up on me.  I'd like to make a sponge cake this time, I think.  Something lighter for the warmer weather - maybe with fresh fruit involved somewhere along the line.

I'm not sure whether hubby has any plans to make anything extra this week - so we'll just have to see what turns up!

.