Fish, beef, lamb, chicken, pork - is there anything we've left out?

Looking at this week's menu plan, purely by accident, I think we've about covered all the main meat groups one way and another!

Last week's meal plan went out of the window at regular intervals and we managed to have, instead, a takeaway curry, pie & chips and chicken & chips (with a kebab for hubby).  I'm not really sure how that happened, but it can't be allowed to continue!  For one thing, we wouldn't be able to afford it!

The first recipe to be jettisoned was the Couscous stuffed peppers, which I just lost all enthusiasm for.  Anyway, my prize voucher from The Heart of India was burning a hole in my psyche and I just SO wanted to use it - so we did.  I had a gorgeously tender and non-fatty Lamb Biryani which comes with a lovely vegetable curry.  Hubby had a Chicken Pathia and son & heir had a Chicken Korma.  We all shared a Sag Bhajee and a Keema Naan and it was absolutely glorious.  I'm not sure when we'll be able to have another, but I can't wait!  With the prize voucher for £25 to use, it only cost us around £4 which was brilliant.

The next recipe that got the heave-ho was the Sherried Chicken Casserole.  This was part of a swap with the Smoky Pork & Bean Wraps because we were trying to fit the best meal to match up with an extra guest as son & heir had invited a friend for a sleepover.  I was intending on giving him the chicken dish and so swapped the two dishes around - only for us to forget to buy the Smoked Paprika when we'd gone to the shop specifically for it!  We got rather distracted by other things and the old grey cells aren't what they used to be, you know.  By the time we realised the lack of paprika, it was too late to do anything about anything, so we had a quick trip to the chippie instead.  What a shower!

The poor old Five Spice Beef noodles was the next one to go, as son & heir decided to stay at a friend's house for tea that night and it was just easier to go out and get something, rather than cook.  Hubby is always in the market for a kebab, so I got some chicken & chips.

So - you can see - all this has got to stop or we'll be completely spherical and skint!

This week's meals - which we WILL stick to (there, I've said it so it's got to happen now) are : 

 Tues : Fish pasta

Weds : Minced Beef Curry, vegetable curry and rice

Thurs : Sandwiches

Fri : Moussaka with tomato salad

Sat : Sherried chicken with broccoli & crusty bread

Sun : Beef Olives, roast potatoes & parsnips, Yorkshire puddings, carrots & savoy cabbage

Mon : Barbecue Sausage & Red Pepper with mashed potatoes, peas & sweetcorn.

  

A number of those meals require explanation, so I'll do my best.

Yesterday's Fish Pasta was something of a disaster for poor hubby.  Before I go any further, I will say that I liked the dish.  However, I was in the minority.

It all stems back to when I had a yearning to use papardelle pasta with the Pork Ragu that I make.  Don't ask me why papardelle - I just had a fancy for it.  Somehow (and I'm not too sure how), this got translated into hubby volunteering to make a fish pasta dish with the papardelle (which we'd sourced in Sainsbury's and bought by then).  He had planned to make a dish using a lesser-known type of fish (and we sourced and visited a Fishmonger, but they were closed, unfortunately - which was the start of the dish going wrong) in a Buerre Noisette sauce with lemon, capers and dill.  Sounded flipping lovely, to me.  With no fishmonger available, we were stuck with whatever Asda could supply - which wasn't much.  Hubby had got sidetracked a little by smoked fish - smoked trout in particular.  However, he couldn't get acceptable trout (never mind smoked) and opted for smoked salmon pieces.  Can you see how the expectation for the dish is being scuppered at every turn?  Well, unfortunately, we were too caught up in trying to make it happen to notice.

As he was cooking the meal, he began to lose faith in his vision of the Beurre Noisette and how it would marry up with the smoked salmon - and I think he has a point.  I suspect we should have swapped out to something totally different at the point that the fishmonger was shut - but then hindsight is a wonderful thing.  What he landed up with was nothing like his original vision, which was such a shame - but something of a learning experience, I think!

Keema Mutter - a lot to live up to!

So, tonight's curry will be something of a return to more pedestrian dishes - but hopefully, dishes that will soothe the savage breast and comfort the thwarted creativity with delicious and exotic curry spices.  I'm basing the Minced Beef Curry on the Keema Mutter (which is lamb) recipe and hopefully it will be just as nice.  I absolutely love a vegetable curry and it will be nice to have one as a side dish, along with the plain rice.  It also gives the sugar snap peas something to do, now they're not being used for the noodle dish!

We're visiting my parents on Thursday and if we're out for either lunch or dinner (not sure which, at the moment), sandwiches will do for whichever meal we'll need to provide at home.

My Moussaka - along different lines, but still nice!

Hubby is back in the kitchen on Friday, making a Moussaka

Hooray!  The Sherried Chicken makes its come-back on Saturday.  I was quite determined not to lose this recipe altogether as I've been really looking forward to it and so back onto the menu list it went.  The crusty bread we bought for it last week is still good as we bought home-bake petit pain rolls that keep for ever.  I suspect that the broccoli will meet its Waterloo in the vegetable curry, so that's probably the only ingredient that will require buying again for the recipe, so it's all good (as they say).

Hubby is back in the kitchen again on Sunday, making a dish that he's been craving for - quite literally - years.  Way back in the seventies, Beef Olives were all the rage at dinner parties around the country.  It is one of those dishes that has taken a back seat along with the prawn cocktail and sole veronique, but hubby has every intention of it making a delicious reprise on our Sunday dinner table.  Fingers crossed that the butcher has the right kind of Braising Steak, or we might end up with sausages instead!  

Speaking of sausages, if we can find some that might meet my exacting sausage requirements (a sausage with flavour and some fat content - hubby tells me that Sainsbury's should be able to answer this brief), I'll be using up the remainder of the Levi Roots Reggae Reggae sauce on the sausages and red pepper (left over from the abortive stuffed pepper recipe).  I really like the idea of baking the sausages in the barbecue sauce, then pairing them up with mashed potato, peas and sweetcorn.  In fact, the mental picture is making my mouth water!  It will be a simple dish that's exactly right for a Monday evening.

So there you have it.

Now, as for extra cooking ventures, well my first go at Watercress Soup went down the drain regrettably.  I hate waste - but that really was horrid.  Something happened in the blitzing that caused the mascarpone to suddenly split and I wound up with great globs of cheesy fat with bits of smashed watercress sticking to them, floating on the surface of the soup.  Not nice at all.  Even with those bits sieved off, it was poor.  Very poor.  So that's that one tried and rejected.

The next one is an intriguing mix of crab and watercress in a warm soup, for which we will need to get ourselves back down to the Fishmunglers.  Fingers crossed, he'll be open this time!

Apart from that, I have an ever-growing desire to bake a cake of some sort.  Watch this space!

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Meal planning through Easter

Not quite an Easter bunny - but so cute!

Easter has been a bit of a non-event for us, so far, in the planning.  I suppose we don't really make a great deal of Easter now that son & heir is beyond believing in the Easter Bunny (more's the pity - I had great fun making paper bunny pawprints to put all around the house!).

In days gone by, the family would all assemble at someone's house (usually, when we were in the country, my Nanna & Gramps' house in Kingston) and there would be a re-creation of Christmas, except without the presents but with Easter eggs.  We'd have another Turkey - usually with a Roast Beef alongside - and so Easter would be marked.

These days, having been through a phase of attending either my parents' place or my Aunt & Uncle's place, Easter seems to have fallen off the map somewhat.  I can remember enjoying Easters in the past, so I feel a bit guilty that we're not making those family memories for son & heir - but circumstances change and the wider family just isn't there any more.

Also, I've contracted son & heir's sniffles - which have developed into a full blown (and "blown" is the right word) cold.  I am so fed up with not being able to breathe and with being either too hot or too cold.  As a consequence of all that, when I sat down on Sunday to work out the week's menu plan, it came as something of a surprise to discover there was an Easter Sunday in the middle of it all!

So, after all that whining and whingeing (apologies for that!), here's what we wound up with :

Tues : Asparagus tart & pasta salad

Wed : North Indian Chicken Curry with rice

Thurs : Bacon couscous stuffed red peppers with potato wedges

Fri : Sherried chicken casserole with broccoli and crusty bread

Sat : Smoky pork & black bean wraps with salsa and sour cream

Sun : King prawn & Peppadew risotto

Mon : Five spice beef & sugar snap peas with noodles.

Mmmmn, nom nom!  Sounds lovely, I think!

The Asparagus Tart is modelled on a tart recipe I saw in the latest BBC Good Food magazine.  I can't remember what they used for their tart, except for the asparagus laid from one side of the tart to the other, like a louvred window.  I liked that idea, so pondered on what could be used underneath the asparagus.  In the end, I opted for Philadelphia cheese (their sundried tomato & basil version) with some streaky bacon, tarragon and parsley.  It looks lovely in my imagination - we'll have to wait and see what the end result is!

Wednesday's meal will be one from the redoubtable Anjum Anand.  Her Classic North Indian Chicken Curry looks perfect for the job.  It's one of those very simple to produce types of curry - just assemble all the ingredients and slowly put them into the pan one by one, heating them in succession and in various ways, until an hour or so later you've got a curry.  Sounds right up my street!

Thursday's stuffed peppers is a bit of a departure from our normal type of meal.  For all that I've done a stuffed pepper dish previously, it's been hard to find a stuffing that satisfies hubby's flavour requirements - as in "it needs to have BIG flavours".   I've decided to use couscous on this occasion because I've been fairly successful in getting big flavours into it in the past, so fingers crossed.  I've also chosen the Pointed Sweet Red Peppers as opposed to the Capsicum type, as these don't seem to have such a tough skin.

I'll have to investigate the freezer as to whether we've beaten down the potato wedge mountain that occurred when we bought another bag by accident.  If we've cleared them out, then I'll be making some home-made wedges to go with the peppers.

Now Friday's Sherried Chicken Casserole is one of those recipes that I'm vaguely excited about making.  Again, it originated with the BBC Good Food Website as Chicken, red onion & mushroom stew with sherry & butterbeans, but there are a number of alterations I know I'll be making to the recipe, so it will be a "based upon" rather than a "followed to the letter" job.

In a bid to make the cooking this week an easy matter, it is another "sit by the cooker and add stuff to the pan in sequence" recipe.  The ingredients seem to have the promise of combining really well and I think by Friday - if this cold weather continues - we'll be very happy to have a casserole/stew type meal!

Black beans

Saturday's Smoky Pork & Black Bean wraps will actually be Smoky Pork & red kidney bean wraps, as it seems to be impossible to source black beans around here!  However, I'm reliably informed by my friend Melanie (who is an ex-pat, living in Canada), that red kidney beans are an acceptable alternative.

Hubby steps into the fray for Easter Sunday, and will be making a King Prawn & Peppadew Risotto - which sounds gorgeous and I can't wait to try it.  The prawns arrived with the shopping yesterday and I was seriously tempted to thaw one packet right there and then.  

Monday's five spice beef - interestingly - uses minced beef instead of some hugely expensive cut, which I thought was intriguing (and makes a change from using turkey mince!).  Again, it is a simple dish which relies on browning through to caramelisation of the beef, for much of its flavour.  Now I absolutely love caramelised minced beef and will admit to - in my younger and fitter days - eating just that with mashed potato and some veggies for dinner.   So long as you drain the mince of its fat very well, it will be no more fattening than any other meat that uses a tablespoonful of oil for the frying, so it could almost be classified as healthy.

 

Aha!  Speaking of draining minced beef of its fat - look what hubby made for the birdies after cooking the chilli.  He drained the beef fat off and kept it, then the following day melted it down and mixed it with wild bird seed which he then packed into the empty half coconut shell.  Following half a day in the fridge - bingo!  A yummy birdy feeder that the dogs have been hankering after, something wicked.  I guess they're thinking "hey! That fat was supposed to have been in our dinner!", which they'd be absolutely right about.  Well, there's no point in clogging up the sewers when you've three waggy-tailed dustbins around.

Come and get it, you birdies!

As for additional cooking plans, well, I've every intention of making a Pea, mint & chilli dip for the weekend.  So often, I sit there in the evenings as hubby tucks into his packet of Sensations crisps and son & heir wades his way through a bag of Doritos, feeling a bit left out but not wanting to add to the fat load that my poor old body has to contend with.  So, when I found the recipe in the current Good Food Magazine - which uses a fat free yoghurt and that's it (apart from the peas, mint, chilli & a little cumin), it seemed a terrific answer to my little problem.  I can make some carrot, celery and apple sticks to eat it with - and shouldn't feel left out at all!

I'm also very conscious of the Watercress Festival at the end of the month and have promised to enter a soup into the competition.  I've been pondering on the recipe(s) for the last month or so and have a few in mind, so I'll be starting to make them with a view to finding the best one, which I'll then submit to the Festival competition.  It's a bit different, this competition, in that you actually make your soup and parcel it up, it gets collected and taken to the competition, whereupon it is judged.  I can't help thinking that a cold soup might be the best option, as it rules out any mishaps with re-heating!

Who knows, if I feel better as the week progresses, I may even make a cake for Easter Sunday.

Plus, our rhubarb is growing like a proverbial weed and is just about ready for its first crop.  I've been saving rhubarb recipes, but simply have got to make a recipe including rhubarb with ginger - I can't believe I haven't done that yet!

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