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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Shepherd's Pie - succour during a week's failures in the kitchen.

This photograph makes my mouth water in a most unseemly way!

I've told you all what a dire week of cooking results I had, last week, so I won't go on about it again.  However, if you can imagine how sad, demotivated, anxious and lacking in confidence having a whole week's-worth of failed recipes would make you - I was right there.

This Shepherd's Pie, originally, was intended to be a Moussaka which hubby had volunteered to cook.  However, as hubby had spent the day wearing himself out doing battle with our garden, the thought of having to tackle all the processes required for a Moussaka was more than he wanted to commit to - and I don't blame him!  So, as he's a dab hand at a Shepherd's Pie, I needed some serious cheering up and he had some great ideas on making this Shepherd's Pie a cut above the average, Shepherd's Pie is what we wound up with.  Oh, and what a Shepherd's Pie it was.

Now you mustn't forget that Shepherd's Pie is my idea of food heaven.  So if I wax lyrical about this one, don't be surprised.  However, to say that it came at a perfect moment and in perfect form, isn't putting it mildly.

Oh pie dish of much promise!

I'd spent the previous couple of days being almost constantly hungry.  Now I know that being hungry isn't going to kill me - in fact, it'll probably do me good.  However, it is miserable to be hungry all the time and I needed something to stop that niggly hungry feeling that just makes you consider all sorts of naughtiness when you should be being good.  This Shepherd's Pie did that in spades.  Honestly, if I could have carried on eating it, I would have.  In fact, I considered going back for some more later on that evening (but resisted).  Well, I resisted only as long as breakfast time the following day, when a plate of Shepherd's Pie, a fork and myself met over a warm computer keyboard for ten minutes of sheer indulgence.

By the way - my friend Marilyn and myself aren't the only ones who enjoy a plate of cold Shepherd's Pie, are we?  Poor hubby had to sit in a different room to me as I ate my breakfast.  Oh, but it was good.  Naughty, but oh so nice.

Now I know I've already posted about Shepherd's Pie, but haven't ever given a recipe.  This recipe is not only gorgeous, but infinitely reproducible - so here you are.  You don't HAVE to use the red wine, you can use a little stock instead, but it definitely adds a little je ne sais quoi to the recipe - and you don't want to miss out on that, now do you?

SHEPHERD'S PIE    (feeds 4)

Ingredients :

4-5 potatoes, peeled and quartered

a large knob of butter

500g minced Lamb
4 banana shallots very finely diced
1 clove garlic, minced
1 stick celery, very finely diced
1 carrot, very finely diced
1 tsp dried thyme
half a tsp dried basil
2 tbsp tomato puree
500ml of good lamb or vegetable stock
half a glass red wine
sea salt and freshly ground black pepper.

Method :

1.  Heat a large saucepan two-thirds full of salted water until it boils.  Once boiling, add the potatoes and cook until tender (when they fall from a knife inserted into the middle).

2.  Once tender, drain them well, add the knob of butter and some seasoning and mash until all the lumps are gone.  Set aside.

3.  In the meantime (while the potatoes cook), heat a deep frying pan without any oil and dry fry the minced lamb until nicely browned.  Remove the lamb mince using a slotted spoon and set aside to keep warm.

  

4.  Turn your oven on to pre-heat to 200degC/400degF/Gas6.

5.  Return the pan, complete with lamb fat, to a high heat adding a little olive oil if necessary and then fry the shallots, garlic, celery and carrot.  Once the shallots are softened and showing a little colour, add the red wine and cook on a high heat until the wine has reduced by half.

6.  Return the meat to the pan and add the herbs and the tomato puree.  Cook for a few minutes to mellow the tomato puree before adding the stock.

7.  Reduce the heat to a simmer and continue to cook until the mixture reaches your preferred consistency.  I like to reduce quite a long way so that the mixture can support the mashed potato.

8.  Pour the mix into a suitable dish and top with the buttery mashed potato.  Fluff the mash with a fork and then place into the oven for at least 30 minutes, until golden and toasty on top and with evidence of the gravy bubbling up around the sides.  Rotate the dish in the oven halfway through cooking if your oven cooks unevenly (like mine does).  If you like a thicker crust on your potato then feel free to leave in the oven for as long as required.

9.  Serve with a selection of vegetables or a good robust salad and have a nice comfy armchair handy for that after-dinner satisfied slouch.

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Some weeks, you just can't cook a thing ...

Last week's menu plan turned into the menu plan from hell.  No, really.

Hubby's fish pasta began the sorry tale, in that he found it inedible.  I quite liked it, but it wasn't the sort of thing I'd be wanting to appear regularly.  The smoked salmon went very nicely with the lemon, but the cream cheese sauce just wasn't quite right.

It looked nice, though!

Next was my Minced Beef Curry with a Vegetable Curry.  Well, it doesn't often happen, but the minced beef went into the bin.  It was utterly inedible.  I haven't a clue what went wrong - but it went wrong with a vengeance.  We had fish fingers instead.

Thursday evening was okay - but then how wrong can you get sandwiches?  We had a lovely chicken and ham salad at my parents' for lunch and so didn't need a big meal come the evening.

Friday was supposed to be hubby's take on a Moussaka.  However, he spent a rather long time wearing himself out in the garden (we're remodelling the lower half of the garden - making it into a miniature wild flower meadow) and the Moussaka was dropped in favour of a rather easier but no less gorgeous Shepherd's Pie (which I'll be blogging the recipe for very soon).  It was a Prince amongst Shepherds, that pie.

Saturday's Sherried Chicken didn't go well.  The smoked paprika I'd got - I hadn't realised - was a hot paprika.  The recipe for the Sherried Chicken demanded one tablespoonful of paprika.  Well, thank goodness, I didn't opt for that much but reduced it down to two teaspoonfuls - which were still too much.  I think there is something intrinsically wrong with the recipe, as the photograph that goes along with the recipe bears absolutely no resemblance to what appeared on our plates.

We did butt up against hubby's intense dislike for a broth-like sauce or gravy (or "pond water") as he calls it.  He absolutely hated the dish (even if the paprika had been balanced right, he wouldn't have liked it) and says he knows when a dish demands a) vegetables, b) a tin of tomatoes and b) stock - that it's going to be horrible.

I didn't object to it anything like as strongly as hubby did.  Yes, the paprika was wrong, but the remainder of the dish had some promise - providing you don't object to a thinner style of sauce.  It made great ammunition for soaking your crusty bread in - which I felt was the object of the exercise when they recommended crusty bread in the recipe!

I suspect that our polarised views very much came down to personal taste.  Hubby doesn't like that sort of dish - I do.  It's a simple as that.

Sunday's Beef Olives dinner went about as well as it was possible for a recipe to go.  I was glad, as hubby had been so worried about it.  He was cooking a dish that he remembered from his childhood - which is never an easy thing.  He had found a number of recipes for Beef Olives and had taken the best bits out of several recipes, along with using his own common sense.

I'll be blogging the Beef Olives for sure - as they really were super and hubby's recipe is well worth sharing.  We'll just have to wait for him to write it up, that's the only problem!

This evening's dinner of Barbecue Sausages & Peppers was another stellar success.  As a variation on Sausage & Mash, it makes a lovely change.  I had a feeling that the spicy barbecue sauce would go very nicely with mashed potato - and I was right.  This is another one that I'll be blogging - so watch this space!

On the whole, hubby had a good week in the kitchen.  Me, not so much.  *sigh*  Even my Baba Ghanoush didn't work so well.  It tastes great - but it has set and seems distressingly jelly-like.  I suspect I didn't put enough olive oil into it - but hey ho, at least it's not so bad for the waistline in the jellified version!

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