Meal planning is so much easier in the Autumn!

Cranborne Chase, Dorset

Or is it just me that thinks this?

There seems to be a much greater selection of dishes that are available to make, as not everything has to have a salad with it, or be a salad.  It's lovely to consider using the slow cooker, or to break out the soup pan again.

Of course, the downside of all this is that - being Dorset - the rain has started up again.  ~rolls eyes~  Nobody told us before we moved, about the link between the lush greenness of this area and what seems to be above average rainfall.  I suppose we could have put two and two together ourselves, but we didn't.  Now, whenever I say "I wonder what the weather will be like tomorrow", hubby will say "It's Dorset - it'll rain" - and be absolutely right.

Ah well, better that than living in a desert.  I certainly couldn't handle somewhere like Arizona!

We almost adhered to last week's meal plan.  The only thing that fell by the wayside was the Bacon & Onion Pie - and then only because I lost confidence in how well it would be received by my potato-hating hubby.  Yes, it was his choice of meal so I should have felt more confident in it, but it just seemed to be way too much potato - which is never a good thing.

The Sausage & Bacon Pilaff was a bit of a weird one.  I won't be blogging it, basically because it made me feel quite disgustingly bilious.  Now I do accept that it might just have been the black pudding that did it - as I seem to have developed a distinctly unpleasant reaction to the stuff, even though I really like the flavour.  However, even after I'd pulled out all the black pudding and stalwartly continued munching, I did not have a happy belly by the end of it - so we'll skip lightly over that one!

So what's on the menu for this week, then?  Well, it goes like this :

Tues : Shop bought cheese & bacon lattice topped pie with vegetables & cheese sauce

Weds : Curried Butternut Squash soup with flatbreads

Thurs : BBQ Pork Wraps with sour cream & salsa, plus curly fries

Fri : Pasta Sardinia

Sat : Cajun smoked sausage ricey thing (good name, eh?)

Sun : Shepherd's Pie and vegetables

Mon : Fish crumble with fine green beans, carrots & new potatoes.

Now that's a bit better balanced than last week's bacon-fest!

We had the lattice topped pie for dinner last night, which was okay - nothing to write home about, but okay.  However, what completely made last night's dinner for me, was that hubby (well done, that man!) found a Romanescu Cauliflower in the supermarket when we were shopping.  Now I had never tasted Romanescu and it was on my Bucket List of "things I need to sample".  I was so excited, you would have thought he was serving up lobster with white truffles.

Last year, we had attempted to grow some Romanescu - tried and failed, as it turned out.  The plants did have some teensy tiny florets that might have been something vaguely akin to a Romanescu Cauliflower, or they might have just had a fractal trip, man.  Either way, none of them produced anything edible - and I was so disappointed.

So to find one in the supermarket-that-never-tries-new-things was little short of astounding.

Also, is there any better way of eating vegetables (especially cauliflower-type vegetables) than dousing them in cheese sauce?  No?  I didn't think so.  Parents all over the globe take note - your children WILL eat vegetables, if you cover them in cheese sauce.  Son and heir was getting almost possessive over the remaining cheese sauce and was even - *gasp* - heard to ask whether any vegetables were left over!  Kudos, hubby, for your cheese sauce making abilities.

Romanescu is now my new favourite vegetable.  Prepare to find it featuring in main courses from now until it is out of season again!

Getting back to the purpose of this post, tonight's meal is to be a hearty curried butternut squash soup, with added vegetables in the shape of carrots, peas, chick peas - oh, and (you guessed it) Romanescu cauliflower.  What?  I told you I liked it!  The curry base will be made with coconut milk thickened by the use of red lentils and I'm liking the sound of the whole thing already.

We'll be eating it (or should it be "drinking it?") with some of Asda's Coronation Flatbreads alongside.  Yum!

Thursday is an extraordinarily easy meal, involving frying off some pork mince and onion and adding Mic's Chilli El Loco BBQ sauce.  Bung it in a wrap, add sour cream & salsa and Bob's your uncle.

Oh, incidentally, the threatened germs of last week seem to be staying away - but I thought I'd add a really easy dish in the middle of the week, just in case!

Hubby has already declared Friday's "Pasta Sardinia" (my title) to be a tad frightening.  I'm not so scared about it, but I'm still in two minds as to whether to use fresh sardines or tinned.  We've bought some tinned sardines already, but I'll take a gander at the sardines on the fishmunglers slab on Friday morning and decide then I think.

Do you remember the t.v. programme when Giorgio Locatelli took some art historian around Sicily (apologies, art historian, I've forgotten your name) and cooked him a very interesting dish of sardines with sultanas and pasta?  Well, that's what we're going for here.  You probably understand hubby's qualms a bit better, now.

It's funny, because Saturday's dish of "Cajun smoked sausage ricey thing" (my title for an as yet unnamed dish created by hubby) strikes a note of trepidation into my heart.

I've always been a bit dubious about Cajun style dishes, mainly because I've never had one that really floated my boat.  They always seem to be a bit pale pink, whereas I'd been expecting something with big flavours.  Hubby's plan with this one involves a jar of German Bockwurst, but I have faith.  I know that hubby likes his flavours to be big and bouncy, so I'm trusting in that and going with the flow.  If he can cope with my sardines and sultanas, it'd be rude not to.

Aaaah, now, everything should calm down beautifully for Sunday.  After the singularly spectacular success of my Rich Beef Cottage Pie, I thought it only right to present its counterpart, the Deliciously Lamby Shepherd's Pie.  I'm quite excited, too, because it will be the first chance I've had to make use of Essential Cuisine's lamb stock powder.  Fingers crossed!

Hubby devised his plan for his Fish Crumble after I'd made the Fish Pie recently.   From what he says, it seems to involve a creamy mixture with fish much the same as the base of my fish pie, except with a crumble topping instead of the mashed potato.   Sounds like it could be really nice and if he can, I'd advise him to get son & heir to do the rubbing in of the butter to the flour for the crumble, as he does it really - no, really - well.

So there it is - our next week's menu plan.  As for any additional makes or bakes, I had no plans for anything but hubby has been out and harvested Ruby the Rhubarb this morning.  The high winds of the last few days had beaten her down and broken a lot of the stalks and it really needed doing before all that lovely rhubarb rotted on the plant and went to waste.  So, I can see some cooking with rhubarb in my immediate future!

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Back to menu planning as we kick the takeaway to the curb!

Do you know, I'm sure I heard a little pained whimper from hubby, as I wrote that title.

We have, over the last couple of weeks while we've been dashing hither and thither, had a shameful reliance upon the local takeaways in the area.  We've had some utterly fabulous Chow Mein from The Alma Fish Bar & Chinese Takeaway in Winton (more than once), we've had fish & chips from an assortment of places, plus Doner Kebab (for hubby) and BBQ ribs (for me and which were the best BBQ ribs I've ever had from a takeaway) from our local Californian Chicken place.

We've also had takeout supermarket pizza, plus takeout curries (which weren't bad at all) from Asda.

Now, all this fun has to stop.  This mad carousel ride of rejecting the perfectly nice, balanced meal that we'd scheduled for that night, in favour of some mad and potentially disgusting (but often extremely moreish) concoction that someone else has cooked.  Just bung it in the microwave before sitting down and vacuuming up in ten minutes of guilty pleasure.

So, now we're back on a more even keel, we've managed to devise a menu plan for the week and have every intention of sticking to it.  No, I didn't have my fingers crossed as I said that, because if I did, I wouldn't have been able to type!

What is it, then?  Well, I think it all sounds rather nice ...

Tues : Chicken & sweetcorn pie with new potatoes, broccoli & carrots

Weds : Lasagne & chips

Thurs : BBQ pork wraps with salsa & sour cream, plus cheese & chilli cornbread

Fri : Sausage meatball pasta

Sat : Turkey Mufaletta with Caesar wedge salad

Sun : Slow cooker braised veal, roast potatoes, carrots, green beans & peas

Mon : Veal & ham pie with mashed potato & vegetables.

I'm working my way through a selection of meat products I was given to try, plus there's a Blogger's challenge in there and an "end of the school year" celebration dinner, too.

A previous chicken pie incarnation that was pretty good, too!

Firstly, the Chicken & sweetcorn pie.  This is going to be a home-made pie, in which I'll be using the other half of a French chicken that was given to me to try as part of a Westin Gourmet Variety Selection Box.

We made use of the first half of the chicken in a Chicken & Fennel Ragu which we ate last night - and which was absolutely fabulous.  To say it was really, really chickeny might sound a bit odd - but then there are flavourless chickens and there are chickens that have great flavour.  I cooked the chicken in the slow cooker for some 5-6 hours, surrounded by a selection of flavour enhancers for the stock - and both chicken and stock are superb.

So I'm holding out some hope for the chicken pie tonight.  I've saved enough stock to make the gravy with and it's going to be a "pie dish pie" i.e. top and bottom shortcrust pastry, as opposed to just a puff pastry lid.  So a "real" pie, not a shorthand version of one!

Photo c/o Westin Gourmet

More Westin Gourmet produce appears on Wednesday, as we try some of their Steak Mince in a Lasagne which will be crafted lovingly by hubby.  You might have noticed the chips involved with this Lasagne.  We had a somewhat intense few minutes while I argued for salad and hubby argued both his and son & heir's case for chips, before I gave up in the knowledge that we'd got plenty of salad and vegetables to come later in the week.  Choose your arguments, that's my advice.

Thursday is the last day of school for this year before son & heir moves up into year 9 in September.  He's done brilliantly well this year, having scored mostly A's and B's in his end of year report, so we're having a little celebratory dinner of some of his favourite things - including wraps made with pork mince and Mic's Chilli El Loco BBQ sauce.  Some silver may cross his palm at the same time - he'll have to wait and see.  *wink*

Mmmn, Cumberland sausage, mash & onion gravy.

Friday sees another batch of Westin Gourmet produce - this time it's the turn of their Cumberland sausages.  I'll be posting a blog about these sausages very soon, as we had them last week as plain old sausage & mash and I have got to say that I really - no really - like them.  They're reminiscent of sausages of old - the sausages that my Mum used to dish up to us when we were kids.  Hubby is going to be converting them to sausage meatballs to go with some interesting Mafalda Corta pasta that we found in the local supermarket.

Now, the Turkey Mufaletta for Saturday is a bit of a work in progress.  "What's a Mufaletta?" I hear some of you cry.  Well, it's basically an entire loaf of bread that's been hollowed out and the inside crumb replaced with meats, cheeses, vegetables - you name it.  It it will go in a sandwich, it'll go in a Mufaletta.  Once filled, the top is replaced and then a heavy weight is placed on top for some 3-4 hours to compress it.

Ours is part of the the Lean on Turkey summer challenge, where we have been asked to think up an original recipe for summer food (not barbecue food) costing £10 or less.  It really didn't take us long to think of the Mufaletta - but boy, did it take some negotiating to decide what was going into it!  *chuckle*  I won't spoil the surprise by detailing it now - just suffice to say that it's going to involve turkey in one way or another - but not your common or garden sandwich turkey!

In line with our desire to keep the complication of cooking to a minimum (we might have got a tad carried away with some things just lately, so decided to rein back to food which doesn't need a day's worth of effort!) we've decided to follow on from the Braised Beef Silverside that I cooked in the slow cooker and go for the same approach with the socking great piece of Veal which the lovely people at Farmer's Choice sent us to try.

I've bought a bottle of Fuller's Organic Honeydew Ale to cook the veal in and I'm looking forward to it.  The gentler more subtle notes of the lighter ale, as opposed to a dark stout which you'd use for the stronger beef, should be interesting!

It's such a huge piece of veal that I am quite sure we'll have more than enough left over for a veal & ham pie the following day.  I suspect I'll approach it in the same way as the chicken pie I'm making, in that I'll hang onto some stock for the gravy.  Should be fab!

Now, as for other bakes and makes, well hubby has been plaintively bleating about wanting, nay needing, some chocolate & banana muffins.  I've had some bananas going suitably black on the window ledge and they're about ready now, so maybe tomorrow?

I've also been intending to make a rhubarb & ginger crumble for weeks, but keep being foiled by our random relationship with the local takeaways.  Maybe this weekend.  Cross your fingers for me, because Ruby (the rhubarb) is beginning to take over the garden.

So there you have it!  Feels good to have a menu plan again.  :)

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