Cobbler, Bobotie, Wraps, Curry, Stew & Pasties - meal planning!

Gosh, I must be getting better at this - it's only Wednesday and here's me telling you about this week's meal plans.

Last week finished up okay, with the Corned Beef Pie which I've yet to blog about.  I'm happy that I managed to recreate it as per my memories of the flavours involved - but for me, the real star of that show was the Red Cabbage and Cranberries.  I'll also blog about those, as the recipe could come in very handy for Christmas!

We've finally managed to settle upon what meat we're having as our Christmas dinner.  Thanks to Knorr, we've already done the Turkey - and as we're very unlikely to have cause to invest in such a glorious bird, thought we'd go sideways from the many fowls that are available at Christmas time.  Hence, this year we'll be having Roast Beef.  In fact we've just been and ordered our 1kg of Sirloin, which was the best compromise we could come up with where a piece of Beef was concerned.  You see, hubby would always have a piece of Silverside or Topside because of its lack of fat whereas I would always have a Rib roast because of its marbling of fat.  So, to compromise, we settled on Sirloin as it has a layer of fat which is restricted to one side of the meat.  So now I'll be happy because the fat is there to baste the meat and provide flavour, whereas hubby will be happy because it's easily removed.  Job done.

Now then!  What about this week, I hear you ask?  Here's what's on the menu :

Tue : Pizza

Wed : Sausage & Leek Cobbler with carrots & cabbage

Thur : Bobotie with carrot & parsnip mash and cabbage

Fri : Spicy Chicken Wraps with Salsa & Sour Cream

Sat : Chicken Dopiaza with white rice & puppodums

Sun : Carmargue Beef Daube with Parsnip apple mash & peas

Mon : Ham, cheese & celeriac pasties, baked beans & hash browns.

Well, owing to my having forgotten to do the banking required, we didn't go shopping on Tuesday as normal.  Hence, we all indulged in pizza on "pizza night".

Having corrected the bank account, we set off for the shops today and came back with two packs of Debbie & Andrew's "Perfect Pork" sausages that were at half price.  I think they'll be lovely in the Sausage & Leek Cobbler that's on the menu for this evening.

The Cobbler is another recipe that I made in the days before writing Rhubarb & Ginger, so we've had it before and liked it very much then.  Fingers crossed, we'll like it as much again!

My earlier batch of Bobotie

I'm looking forward to tomorrow's Bobotie.  I have made this before, using Rachel Allen's recipe, but this time I'm using a recipe from Kevin Dundon.  It doesn't differ by a lot, but seems a little easier to put together - particularly for a mid-week meal.  The combination of mildly curried lamb mince together with the eggy topping is really moreish.


Friday is son & heir's last day of term, so to celebrate we're having one of his favourite meals - Spicy chicken wraps.  This doesn't involve a whole heap of cooking - just some baking of some breadcrumbed shop-bought spicy chicken pieces which are then sliced and put in a wrap with salsa and soured cream.  I might be able to sneak a little lettuce in there, but only if he's not looking!


I'm going to have a go at creating a Chicken Dopiaza on Saturday.  I've been quizzing both Bipin at Bipin's Curry Pots and Dan from GreatCurryRecipes.net for ideas, so we'll see what I wind up with!


Sunday's Carmargue Beef Daube is a recipe from Trish Deseine that looks gorgeous.  We've been ready for a lovely beef casserole/stew for the last couple of weeks, so the slow cooker will be back in use, while we all gather around it and sniff the delicious aromas.

I'm serving it with a parsnip & apple mash which came from "Affairs of Living" - a wonderful blog site that deals with gluten free and allergen-friendly food.  As you know, I'm supposed to be steering clear of the carbohydrates as much as possible (and have lost 10lbs in weight, owing to this anti-inflammatory style of eating), which is why you won't be finding too many potato or pasta recipes here for a while!  This recipe is intriguing owing to the method, as you are required to roast the ingredients so as to reduce their water content prior to mashing.  Otherwise, as you can probably imagine, mashing parsnips and apples together could get extremely messy.  I am hoping the mash will go very well with the Daube of beef - again, fingers crossed!

Poor ugly celeriac!

So now we're back to Monday.  I found a little recipe (one of the little "afterthought" recipes) in the latest Good Food magazine for Ham & Cheese pasties.  The ingredients (apart from ham & cheese, of course) included potato.  Now, a little potato wouldn't have been an altogether bad thing - but coupled with the pastry, just made it a double felony.  What could I use instead?  Well, you can't make a pasty without pastry - so that had to stay and I needed to find an alternative to the potato.  What flavours go well with ham and cheese, that might also take the form of a carbohydrate replacement?  Why, celeriac of course!  Thinking back to my Cheesy Celeriac Slice, I don't see any reason why these pasties shouldn't wind up being totally delicious.


Apart from all that lot, I'm still pondering on light fruity desserts made with apples, cranberries and plums.  I've got one such in mind that I'm hoping to experiment with tonight, if I get time.  The Cinnamon Plums with Cranberries was so gorgeous and easy to prepare, there has got to be all sorts of different variations on that theme!


I've also got a lot of caraway seeds left over after the Red Cabbage & Cranberries.  I love a good old-fashioned Seed Cake and have been pondering over the combination of an American style pound cake, made with the caraway seeds.  I can't see any reason why it won't work - all I need is the time to give it a go!


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What to do with the other half of a chicken? Chicken Wraps!

I've given up oven-roasting a chicken for Sunday's roast dinner, these days.  Instead, I pot-roast it.  This involves oven-roasting for a half hour, then poaching for an hour or so in water with celery, carrot, onion, garlic, parsley - and any other vegetables or spices you might fancy at the time.

I've found that, not only does this produce a lovely moist bird for the primary meal, but the secondary meal (i.e. the other half of the chicken) benefits too.  The leftover meat from a roast chicken has that undeniably "roasted" flavour which can turn a bit sulphurous depending on how you treat it.  However, the other half of a pot-roasted chicken doesn't carry that sulphurous flavour.  As such, it makes it easier to find something to do with it!

One of my son's favourite dishes is plain old chicken wraps.  Now this involves leftover chicken, iceberg lettuce, mayonnaise and tomato salsa, which is okay but a bit under-achieving, I think.

We gave him a try with Fajitas, but it was just too complicated for his taste buds.  He liked them well enough, but they weren't deemed as good as his favourite plain old wrap.

In an attempt to strike a compromise between Mum & Dad's desire for spicier flavours and son's preference for the plainer, I came up with the chicken wrap we sampled yesterday.

Each wrap consisted of some Re-fried Beans, Iceberg lettuce, the mix of chicken, onions & red pepper, sour cream, salsa - and wrap.  Now, we'd previously always had Re-fried Beans beside our wraps, which left me without a context to eat the beans as either I was using a knife and fork, or fingers - for ease, certainly not both.  So it occurred to me, why not put the beans inside the wrap as the base upon which everything else sticks to?

I have to admit that son decided he'd have preferred his wrap without the beans, which is fine because when I do them next time, I'll just leave the beans out of his version.  No problem with that.

What I found was that the spicy Re-fried beans just about had sufficient flavour in them to cater for the spice requirements of the adults.  The onion/red pepper/chicken melange was flavoursome and juicy - and two wraps was almost more than I could handle.  (Almost!).

Oh and yes, those are curly fries.  ~hangs head in shame~  Don't blame me.  Apparently boys have to have curly fries occasionally or all their hair falls out - that's what they tell me, anyway.  ~shrug~  What was I to do?




SPICY CHICKEN WRAPS (feeds 3, with 2 wraps each)

Ingredients :

six large wraps (look in the Bakery part of your supermarket, rather than the "Mexican" aisle, for the larger size wraps)
a tin of Re-fried Beans (or make your own)
4-5 leaves of Iceberg lettuce, shredded
a red pepper, sliced thinly
a large onion, sliced thinly
half a cooked chicken, shredded
olive oil
sour cream
tomato salsa (or make your own).

Method :

1.  Take a large frying pan and heat some olive oil.  Fry the onion slices gently until transparent but not coloured (around 5-10 minutes).

2.  Add the pepper slices and continue to fry for another 5-10 minutes.

3.  Add the shredded chicken, stir to combine, then place on a lid (or a baking sheet, if your frying pan doesn't have a lid) and heat through gently.

4.  Heat up the wraps by dry frying, or popping into the oven for 6-7 minutes, or in the microwave for 6-7 minutes on full.

5.  Heat up the Re-fried beans.

6.  To assemble the wraps, take the Re-fried beans and smear some down the centre (from 12-6 o'clock).  Adjust quantity according to how much the recipient likes them.

7.  Sprinkle some lettuce over, then add some of the chicken mixture.

8.  Blob on some sour cream and salsa.

9.  To fold, take the lower edge and bring it up to cover the first third of the filling.  Take the left hand edge and bring it across, then do the same with the right hand edge.  Leave the top edge free.

Serve with fries and napkins!

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