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!

.

Menu Planning - determined to recapture my cooking muse!

If you see a short, stout, elderly cooking muse trotting past your house, would you catch her and send her back to me?  I'd be most appreciative.

This week, I am determined to recapture some of my old confidence.  So I've taken a bit of a step back and have booked in meals for this week that (I hope) will help bolster my wilting lettuce of an ego.

I'm not expecting to be immediately successful - but some small steps towards success would be nice.  (Are you listening, cooking muse?  Yes?  Good).

So let's have a look at what I've chosen for this week :

Tues : Cheese stuffed meat loaf with salad and crusty rolls

Wed : Cheese, leek & potato pie, with bacon & peas

Thurs : Salmon & Asparagus Quiche with tomato salad

Fri : Pork Schnitzel with potato wedges and salad

Sat : Wine & Garlic Pork Chops with jacket potatoes & green veg.

Sun : Roast Chicken, roast potatoes & parsnips, carrots & swede, peas & Yorkshire puddings

Mon : Coconut chilli chicken with rice.

What do you reckon?  Do-able?  Well, dear hubby has volunteered to cook the Pork Schnitzel and the Roast Chicken, which leaves the remainder for me to trash, sorry, cook.

We had the meat loaf last night.  Considering we always have an issue with meat loaves, in that they seem to resemble meat porridge held together with a crusty edge, some might see it as a bit of a risky move.  However, I'd got confidence in it.  I'd been talking (via the comments box - nothing so exciting as a phone conversation!) on her blog with Gail Kruger Snyder who runs Good Deal Meals, which is where I'd found the recipe, about various methods of cooking meat loaf.  We'd come up with a plan - and that plan worked, although I suspect I could have taken the meat loaf out of the oven a good ten minutes before I did, just to save the slightly overcooked edge.  However, it was a successful recipe and I'll be blogging it in due course.


Tonight's Cheese Leek & Potato Pie is all Suzi on Facebook's fault.  She posted up a photograph of her version of the pie (using onion, in that instance) and it immediately made my mouth water in a way which said "make that - and make that soon".  In fact, the original recipe comes from The Happy Housewife blog and it doesn't look any the less inviting there.  It's an easy mix of mashed potato, leeks and cheese that you serve with grilled bacon rashers and peas.  Surely I can't get this one wrong?

Tomorrow's dinner will be a little bit more ambitious, but I'm hoping that as I really enjoy making tarts and quiches, that might help a bit.  I found the recipe on the BBC's food section of their website and it's a Simon Rimmer recipe (which ordinarily makes it a bit dubious - sorry Simon - but I'm hopeful).  I love the combination of salmon and asparagus, so keep your fingers crossed for me.

Friday is hubby's pork schnitzel, which should cater to both our yearnings to panné something.  Isn't it funny, how you get a fancy for doing a certain technique, or making a certain type of food?  We've, both of us, had a real yen to do "something in breadcrumbs" for some time and hubby decided to take the bull by the horns and start off with something relatively easy, like the pork schnitzel.  Of course, after making his Beef Olives at the weekend, we now have a meat mallet and maybe he just wants to spend time bashing something.  Well, better some pork fillet than my head, eh?

Couldn't you just? I know I would!

Saturday's Wine & Garlic Pork Chops enticed me purely because of its pictures (and the fact that it's a pork chop recipe - I'm a total sucker for a pork chop!).  I found it on the Tasty Kitchen website, but as it turns out, it is a recipe by The Pioneer Woman - who is about as famous as any food blogger gets, these days.  For all that I'm sensitive to garlic, I shall have to be brave with regard to the amount of garlic involved here.  I'm not too sensitive if the garlic is thoroughly cooked out - so I have warned myself and will only have myself to blame if I'm itching like a hedgehog with fleas, later on that night.

Sunday's roast chicken is going to be delicious, if hubby's description is anything to go by.  I won't spoil the gorgeous Sunday lunch surprise here - you'll just have to wait for the blog post!

Monday's dinner is a return to our well loved spicy chicken dishes.  It's not a curry, but it has lots of curry influences.  I particularly liked the spice combinations and the intent within the recipe of not winding up with hubby's hated "pond water" for a sauce.  The recipe uses a combination of coconut milk with a little flour added as a final note to thicken the sauce.  Now that's a method that's new to me and I'm keen to see how it works, as it could be used in other dishes where the sauce is coming up too thin.  A learning experience, that's what it is!

Well, there we are.  I have every intention of making another Strawberry & Rhubarb Pie, now that Ruby Rhubarb is bursting out of her planter again.  I'll probably pair that with the Roast Chicken, as pork and strawberries have been proven to be an unwise pairing for me, in the past!  As hubby is cooking the dinner, I can make the pie in the morning without getting in anyone's way and without wearing myself out, having to make dinner as well.

I can well remember, in my incarnation as a horseriding instructor, telling pupils that the best thing to do when you've come off your horse, is to get right back on again and carry on.  So, that's what I'm doing.  C'mon neddy - we're off!

.