Getting back in harness : Menu Plan w/b 6 Sept 11

I think that title - "Getting back in harness" - is entirely appropriate, as that's exactly what it feels like.  Having been away from interesting and new recipes for a couple of weeks, it feels good to get back to some new ideas.

Here's what's on the menu for this week :

Tues : Son - Pizza. Parents - Borscht & crusty bread.

Wed : Cornish pasties & baked beans.

Thurs : Macaroni cheese.

Fri : Lemon & yoghurt baked chicken with savoury rice.

Sat : Slow-cooker Beef Stew & cobbles, with tenderstem broccoli.

Sun : Roast bacon, roast butternut squash & beetroot with celery gratin.

Mon : Tuna pasta bake.

How does that lot look, then?

Tuesday's pizza day was in full effect yesterday, which enabled us to have Borscht for the first time.  I'd never made it before, much less tasted it before, so it was all a bit of a voyage of discovery.  However, it was a completely delicious discovery, which hubby declared was his "best soup evar!".

Anyway, I've done a blog post in which I talk all about it and give the recipe, so I won't witter on here about it.  Watch the blog, as it's the next one to be published!

Tonight is another go at making the Cornish Pasties that got bounced in favour of an indian takeaway, last week.  I'm in a much better place to be making them today, so I think everything worked out just fine in that regard.  I was going to be serving salad with them, but it's been so cold and miserable outside just lately, we decided to opt for good old Baked Beans instead.

Now, Thursday is an Important Day.  Hubby is cooking a Macaroni cheese, which is something he's never attempted before.  He's following a recipe, rather than just winging it, so we've no reason to believe that it'll go anything other than perfectly.  We've got some lovely streaky bacon and have invested in a small pack of Gruyere cheese (incidentally, have you SEEN the price of that stuff? Are the cows made of gold, or what?) so we're all set for a goodie!

I thought that, on Friday, it would be nice to have a fairly easy dinner.  So I'm making the Lemon & yoghurt baked chicken as described on "Everyday Mom's Meals" blog.  All I've got to do here, is remember to defrost the chicken on Thursday, so that it can marinade overnight!  I'm serving it with savoury rice, which I have to admit, I've bought a couple of packets of the stuff.  So shoot me!

When I lived on my own - when I had the horses - savoury rice was one of my staple meals.  I could mix it up, then pop it in the microwave and take the dogs for a walk while it cooked.  With a couple of sausages that had been baking in the oven, it made a superbly quick and remarkably satisfying meal which was very well received at 9pm after two visits to the horses and a day at work!  So this is a bit of a trip down memory lane for me.

I'm really looking forward to Saturday's beef stew.  I've been yearning for a lovely thick warming stew made with Shin of beef, for ages.  To help hubby out, who has had E-NUFF potatoes for a while, I'll be baking some cobbles (scone-like objects) to go with the stew and I'll add some tenderstem broccoli on the side.  Should be gorgeous!

Sunday's dinner formed in my brain a bit back-to-front.  It all began with my wanting a celery gratin (celery hearts in cheese sauce with breadcrumbs on, baked in the oven).  So then I had to think of a roast meat that would go well with it - hence the bacon turned up. 

Being a Sunday dinner, it required a bit more than just the bacon and celery, so I finally decided upon a butternut squash, roasted in the oven, along with the leftover beetroot that didn't get used in the Borscht and some potatoes to make Son & heir happy.  A bit of an odd way of assembling a meal, but I think it works!  Well, I suppose we'll find out, eh?

Monday, as ever, is a storecupboard dinner day.  There was a time that I hated Tuna Pasta Bake and would have been very happy not to have ever seen one again.  Then (and I am a tad embarrassed to admit this), came Homepride's Tuna Pasta Bake sauce in a jar.  I seriously suspect they've put something terribly addictive in this sauce, as I absolutely love it and would be very happy to carry on eating the bake until either the cows came home or until time immemorial.  Considering how negative I am towards sauces such as this, it really is remarkable just how much I love the stuff.

All of which makes a potentially fairly tedious day's meals a much happier prospect.

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Successes and failures - a typical cooking week or so!

What BBC Good Food thought it should look like.

Now, where was I when it all went pear-shaped?

Aaah yes, it was Friday of the week before last (how DOES the time slip past so quickly?) and we were due to have the Sticky Chinese Chicken and Thai Carrot Salad.  Hmmmn, well, that all went very much to worms, I'm afraid.

The chicken went well enough - although it was far from "sticky", but very nicely flavoured all the same.  The Thai Carrot Salad was just such a disaster!  The dressing seemed to be weighted very heavily in the Fish Sauce direction and, having spent over a week trying to purchase rice vermicelli noodles, found that they didn't react in the way that the instructions on the packet intimated that they would.  The carrot mixture, on it's own, was barely edible - but having introduced the noodles to the equation, it became totally inedible.  So that wasn't a successful attempt - which was very disappointing, after the spectacular success of the New Potato, Bacon & Goat's Cheese salad.

The Pork with Lemongrass & Cinnamon didn't happen, which was a shame, but I just didn't feel up to making it.

However, the Pot Roast Chicken just had to be made as the dinner for the following day was relying upon it - not to mention Sunday's dinner!

I really love cooking pot-roast chicken.  There’s something so homely and comforting about having a chicken chuckling in a stock pot on your cooker.  I think it’s also the smell of the herbs and vegetables that go to make up the stock ingredients, combined with the knowledge that the chicken will emerge from its bath both subtly flavoured and succulent. 

I always roast the chicken for a half hour at 200deg prior to dunking it into its bath of gorgeous stock ingredients.  I think it imparts some of the “roasted chicken” flavour without resulting in the sulphurous effect that can be brought about by just roasting alone.

For the stock, I used onions, garlic, celery, thyme, parsley, basil, black peppercorns and included a star anise for that lovely and very distinctive flavour it imparts.  The smell, as the chicken cooked, just improved as the 90 minutes (it was a big chicken!) went on.

I'll be blogging the whole process as my next blog post, hopefully!

The sausagemeat balls were a bit of a disaster, unfortunately, as we didn't manage to get sausages from our local butcher - and the Tesco versions we did get were pretty darned pallid.  I'll have another go when I can get the butcher's sausages I was after to begin with.

It was very worthwhile taking the trouble to cook that chicken, even though I was feeling so rough, as the Coronation Chicken wraps we had on the following day were spectacular.  I included some lovely avocado in the wraps for us grown-ups - Son & heir has yet to obtain a liking for avocado - and with the lovely fresh crunchy lettuce they were just the job.

Which brings us to the start of this week's fare.

Rather cunningly, we decided to deviate from my self-set rule of not cooking separate dinners for everyone, and bought Son & heir a frozen pizza to have while we had a rather delicious Porcini Mushroom risotto.  Made by hubby's own fair hand, it contained the lovely chestnut mushrooms as well as the usual shallots and other ingredients.  For me, I was challenged a little bit by the grittiness of the dried Porcini.  As hard as you try to avoid including any grit from them, it just isn't possible to filter it all out - even with leaving the last of the soaking juice behind in the bowl.   Some people are challenged by fat in their food, I'm challenged by grit.  If an omelette includes even the tiniest bit of eggshell, I'm afraid that's enough to stop me stone cold dead in my tracks - and probably bring what I have eaten, back.  It's really such a shame, as the risotto was just SO mushroomy and gorgeous.  I loved the flavours - but could have done with having a comedy set of teeth, i.e. removeable, in order to eat it.

The next meal on the list was a Chicken & Cauliflower Curry.  For some reason, I decided to go about this curry by blitzing the onion, garlic and chilli before frying them off.  I suspect it's too much food t.v. that planted this particular idea in my mind.  I really don't know why I did it, because in the past whenever hubby has made a curry this way, I haven't really liked it because it leaves the sauce quite textural and almost gritty (again).  In fact, part-way through the cooking of this curry (shortly after the addition of some yoghurt, which promptly split) I was seriously considering consigning it to the bin.  However, I persevered and once the cauliflower began to cook, the whole thing came together quite nicely.  It wasn't bad, but I have to admit that I much prefer the "slice onions, fry, add garlic & chilli, fry, add spices, fry" approach to making a curry!

All was safe and sound by the following day's meal.  I have cooked the Sausage & Mozzarella Pasta Bake dozens of times now.  However, this time was a little different in that hubby was cooking.  I had to write the recipe out, as our printer has given up the ghost, and he even managed to read my writing correctly.  He turned out a lovely rendition of the dish - and for once, not having cooked it, I suppose - I could understand why the whole family like it so much!

We're up to Friday now, and owing to certain things happening rather suddenly (which I won't go into here, as I'm sure you'd be bored by it all), the planned Stromboli (regrettably, I failed to keep a note of the website which fired up my interest in the dish, or you could have seen it) fell by the wayside when I ran out of time in which to prove the dough required.  Pizza managed to fall into the gap again.

Yesterday, Saturday, I had planned on making a Quiche Lorraine.  Following a bit of comparing and contrasting various Quiche Lorraine recipes - from those with an ingredients list a mile long, to those with four or five ingredients - I decided on a fairly plain recipe.  I knew that the ingredients I had - Burford Brown eggs, Butcher's Bacon and a lovely strong piece of mature cheddar, were probably enough.  I will admit to adding a pinch of nutmeg, but that just seemed to make sense at the time!

The end result was a quiche of quite glorious proportions and taste, too - which I'll be blogging second on the to-do-list.  With a fairly simple salad, it made for a lovely meal.

Tonight's dinner is going to be roast bacon - I bought a lovely little roasting joint from Spring Fields Butchers on Friday - together with a Pasta Ratatouille bake.  I was after something a bit nicer than your average fare, but that was easy to prepare.  Hopefully I hit that nail on the head - I'll let you know later!

So far, I've boiled the little chap in some apple juice and water - approx 50/50 dimensions - with some thyme, a cinnamon stick and some pepper.  It smelled lovely when I got it out of it's bath to go into the roasting pan.  I'm currently cooking it long and slow - it will probably have had about two and a half hours in the roasting tin, by the time dinner is ready.  Fingers crossed, it will be falling apart tender by then.

All of which just leaves Monday.  I'm taking the car back to the garage to have the work done for the MOT pass on Monday, so we needed something easy to make and flexible - just in case we got the "come and get the car" call right at an inopportune moment from the dinner's point of view.

There's really only two meals that fall easily into that category - either spaghetti bolognese or chilli con carne.  As we've had a number of pasta dishes just lately, we opted for the chilli.  Hubby will be cooking that one as he's the Chilli-meister, so I'll be able to sit back and lick the wounds that the MOT will have undoubtedly caused.  If I had the money, I'd buy a new car every year, just so that I didn't have to go through this MOT nightmare annually.  It'd be worth it, I'm sure!

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