Yes. it is Wednesday today, not Monday, but remember that I promote flexibility! Unfortunately I'm getting far more acquainted with my office than I'd like and the whole working for a living thing is getting in the way of blogging at times.
So what are we eating this week?
On Monday, we had spaghetti and meatballs. This is really a cheat's meal and I love it. My local butcher (or his mother) makes lovely italian style herbed meatballs and sells a whole tray fresh for about $3.50.
It's a matter of browning some onion and garlic, sealing the tiny meatballs and then simmering them in a rich tomatoey sauce (try crushed tomatoes plus passata or bottled pasta sauce, with a generous amount of salt and pepper, plus oregano, thyme, parsley or whatever herbs you have lying around) until you can stand it no more, and serving over al dente spaghetti.
On Tuesday we went out for dinner. It is wonderful to take the opportunity to relax over someone else's cooking and talk about the few things we each do at work that isn't classified. Luckily we always have plenty of other things to talk about - a conversation about what was done in 10 hours of work is over within about 30 seconds.
I have the day off on Wednesday so I get to visit the friendly butcher, baker and candlestick maker. Well not really. I don't know a candlestick maker. I am toddling off to the fishmonger to get some freshly cooked crab - to make Angelhair pasta with crab and lemon. This recipe was on last week's menu but was rudely rescheduled due to that silly work thing I do from time to time.
Check back later on for the recipe and run down on this one.
We'll be graced with the presence of my sister and her boyfriend on Thursday night and I'll be making the risotto with tomato, prosciutto and basil that I planned to cook for them last week. My clever last-minute-cooking sister is going to bring something lovely for dessert.
On Friday we'll throw together some homemade pizzas - I'm thinking rocket (aragula), smoked salmon, red (spanish) onion, fetta, capers. We cook the bases brushed with olive oil and spices and then add the other ingredients cold, once the base is cooked.
On Saturday we'll be having some lamb cutlets in a spicy crumb, served with steamed greens, saffron basmati rice, eggplant kasundi and natural yoghurt.
As usual we'll be doing the family thing on Sunday.
Photo: Knife and Fork by nickwheeleroz
So how's your week shaping up? Leave a comment and let me know and then pop over to Chive Talkin' and I'm an Organizing Junkie to see what other people are eating this week.
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Vietnamese Prawn Salad
I made it for dinner last night, with a few changes to reduce the calorie content.
Firstly, I used snow peas instead of snake beans, because the snow peas looked great at the local greengrocer whereas the beans looked a bit tired.
To cut down the fat I didn't fry the prawns - I bought extra-large boiled prawns to go with the cold salad. I just peeled and de-veined them (leaving the tails on). I used more prawns than the recipe specified - prawns are low-cal and low-fat and 4 per person just didn't seem enough.
Coles now stocks palm sugar in my local supermarket (in the asian foods aisle, right on the top shelf) but you can use brown sugar instead.
If you like the look of this, you can click through to get the recipe for Vietnamese Prawn Salad.
Leftovers magic:
While I was fiddling about with the vermicelli and prawns I also peeled some prawns completely and wrapped them into some rice paper rolls with finely sliced cucumber, cooked and rinced vermicelli, coriander, vietnamese mint and thai basil. They were delicious eaten immediately, dipped into hoisin sauce.
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photo credit: Photoportunity
Each week I like to add some new dishes to the menu.
We do have our favourites that pop up on the meal plan on a regular basis (particularly mid-week) but I enjoy discovering new favourites too.
Here are some great recipes from the blogosphere and beyond that I'll be trying in the next week.
photo credit: Darwin Bell
Emma Knowles' Vietnamese Prawn Salad (Gourmet Traveller): This recipe looks light, fresh and well balanced. As a bonus, you'll find a short, simple ingredients list and minimal preperation and cooking time.
We'll be eating this one outside. Asian food and wine pairing can be tricky, however I think a young grassy sauvignon blanc or perhaps a riesling could work. I expect though that we'll be cracking open a few bottles of Hoegaarden (or Hoegaarden Grand Cru if we're feeling indulgent) instead.
Tips: I've previously successfully substituted brown sugar for palm sugar and if you have good pans I'm sure you can get away with less oil.
Heather Carlucci-Rodriguez's Chana Punjabi (as shared by The Wednesday Chef): Warm, luxurious and enticing, without offending the budget. Store cupboard basics and a few fresh bits and pieces easily picked up on your way home never looked so good!
No you won't be eating this in 15 minutes, but pour yourself and your partner a glass or two of wine while you stir and allow yourself to slow down and relax. There's no complicated prep or advanced cookery magic here. All you need is a bit of time and basic ingredients.
Note: Cilantro is also known as coriander.
photo credit: sea turtle
crispy chewy chocolate chip cookies by Smitten Kitchen: Speaks for itself really, doesn't it? A classic recipe that I'm sure will please everyone.
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]]>Well you aren't so awesome when it's 9:00pm on a Tuesday night, you're starving and you end up in a drive-thru deciding whether chicken nuggets or a fillet-o-fish will go better with a half-empty bottle of sauvignon blanc.
Being crazy perfectionist when planning your meals defeats the entire purpose. Sure you could plan a week of amazing tantalizing gourmet treats from scratch but unless cooking the evening meal is your only job and you have no other responsibilities whatsoever and you are a superhero or energiser bunny you are just flat out lying to yourself.
The reality is there WILL be days when everything goes wrong, you come home late, a friend calls you in tears because the moron you never liked is treating her like crap again, the power goes off or you just plain can't be bothered. If you don't have days like that then we are probably living in different universes. You need to build stuffups into your planning.
A well stocked pantry (and spaces on your meal plan) can help out in times of crisis or laziness. I'm a big fan of carbs in a crisis but go with what works for you.
Some of my pantry basics:
Rice/Pasta/grains:
- basmati rice (to serve with curries etc - and its low GI - bonus!)
- jasmine rice (short grain)
- carnaroli or arborio rice (for risotto - I prefer carnaroli but arborio can be easier to get)
- spaghetti (I like the Barilla Spaghetti Rigate - the ridges hold the sauce better)
- macaroni or short pasta
- thai style flat rice noodles
- polenta
- couscous
Tinned stuff/Sauces
- Tomato pasta sauce or passata
- Tinned crushed tomatoes
- Tinned diced tomatoes
- Tomato paste
- Tinned red salmon
- Tinned mixed beans
- Tobasco
- Woucestershire sauce
- mustards (wholegrain, Dijon, English etc)
- coconut milk
- coconut cream
- curry pastes (madras, vindaloo, thai red curry etc)
- soy sauce
- fish sauce
Oils/vinegars:
- Extra virgin olive oil
- Grapeseed oil (great for frying)
- Nut oil (unless you're allergic like I am)
- White wine vinegar
- Rice wine vinegar
- Balsamic vinegar
- Red wine vinegar
Vegetables:
- Potatoes
- Onions (keep potatoes and onions well separate)
- Sweet potato
- Carrots
- Garlic
- Fresh herbs (in the garden or a window box)
Basics:
- Plain flour
- Self raising flour
- Caster sugar
- Icing sugar
- Quality salt flakes
- Whole peppercorns
- Bicarb soda
- baking powder
- cocoa
- stock (chicken, vegetable)
- breadcrumbs
Alcohol:
- beer
- brandy/cognac
- plenty of wine
The most important thing in my pantry: a folder filled with menus from fabulous local takeaway restaurants. Why grab a whopper when you can get a pad thai instead?
Some quick and easy ideas:
Yes it would be great to only eat fabulous slow-cooked tomato pasta sauces made from your own organically grown heirloom tomatoes with fresh picked basil and garlic but it isn't possible on a daily basis for many of us. (Grendel, you can stop gloating now.)
A jar of Barilla pasta sauce for $2.50 can be bulked up in a few minutes with a tin of 79c tomatoes, some fried onion and garlic and a liberal amount of quality salt and freshly ground pepper. Add fresh herbs if you've got them. A tiny splash of balsamic vinegar or red wine will give the sauce depth with minimal effort.
You can even buy garlic in a jar now if you don't have access to garlic straight out of the ground or you don't add it to everything like I do. Serve over decent quality (egg) pasta with a liberal amount of grated parmesan/reggiano and a generous glass of wine and you'll be a quasi-Italian Mama in minutes.
A couple of potatoes (I like ruby lou or royal blue but whatever you have is fine) brushed, not washed or peeled and some onion chucked into a food processor with a grating attachment can become potato rosti in a flash.
My grandmother likes to fry the onion first but I often forget.Mix the potato and onion with egg and a bit of flour. Season well and form into flat cakes with your hands. Pop them in the fridge for a few minutes if you remember, then into a small amount of oil over medium heat and flip when the bottom goes crispy and golden.
Drain the rosti on paper towel while you wilt some baby spinach in the frypan (off the heat will usually work) and poach or fry an egg or two. Stack up the plate with the spinach, rosti and then top with the egg. No harm in adding some proscuitto if you have it. Serve with beer.
If you've got time to scoot past an open butcher or fishmonger (lucky you!) on the way home your stocked pantry will convert a piece of protein into a meal, stat.
Fridge and Freezer essentials to follow!
UPDATE: While I'm finishing up my fridge and freezer posts, you might want to head over to Summer Tomato. Darya has written a great post about stocking your pantry for healthy eating.
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]]>The important bit is consistency and not wasting too much time stuffing around setting up a system. You will need to sort out what works for you. However, this is what works for me.
Once a week I plan my meals. Ideally I would always sit down in the same place and calmly write it out every week but my life isn't like that. I have two computers at home that I use regularly - a desktop computer in the study and a laptop. I also use a computer in the office when I'm not working from home and occasionally I use my husband's cute little eee pc when I'm out and about.
It is important to me to be able to access my shopping list/meal plan/recipes from all of those places. All of those computers other than the one in the office run Ubuntu linux. The office computer runs Windows XP and I'm limited in what I can install on that one (read: have no ability to download and install anything at all).
I enter my meal plan onto a free google calendar a week or so in advance. My husband and I have separate profiles on each of our computers. All have access to the google calendars (his, mine and the meal plan) from Thunderbird/Lightning (hint: install the provider for google calendar extension to get this going in thunderbird) and our customised iGoogle pages. We both have read/write access on our own calendars plus the meal plan calendar, and read access to the other's calendar. When I am writing the meal plan I can see quickly when my husband is going to be late home from work or when he is going out for a long lunch and is less likely to want a heavy dinner. (Edit: we've switched to using solely Gmail for email now - it is quicker than loading up Thunderbird, particularly on the eee pc.)
As I write out the meal plan, I add the ingredients that I need to the nifty web-based task manager, Todoist. I have a section set up for groceries etc which is divided by shop. As I run out of things during the week I add those to the list as well. As todoist is a web based app it is available everywhere that I have internet access. It also has a portal for access from your mobile phone.
Due to the fact that I'm hopeless when it comes to mobiles (sms is beyond me) and I'm too cheap to pay for unnecessary data, I don't usually access my shopping list on the fly. Instead, once I've finalised the shopping list I open Todoist up in print view, save the list as an html file and send it via bluetooth to my mobile. You could also print the list if you prefer.
The final part of my system is recipe storage. My previous system involved handwritten notes on scraps of paper decorated with dollops of sauce and oil spatters. Now I use Google Docs to manage my recipes. Each recipe is in its own file inside Google Docs.
One of the great things about Google Docs is that you can add multiple tags to each file. So a recipe for fruit mince pies might be tagged with 'baking' 'sweet' 'Christmas' 'fruit' etc. I can set up any individual file to be shared or can allow access to my full recipe repository. Google Docs is of course easily searchable and free.
Some other apps/extensions which make my digital life easier/more fun:
Gnome-do: a quick launcher for linux which includes the ability to quickly add or search events on google calendars
Ubiquity: a fabulous extension for firefox which performs all kinds of wonderful magic
Goosync: a nifty service which allows my google calendars to sync with my mobile phone via the cleverness of SyncML
Soocial: another nifty SyncML service, this time for contacts
Dropbox: a fabulous way of sharing all kinds of data with the whole world, a select few or just for backup. My mum and I have this set up to share all our family photos which are now available in a local directory on each computer. Dropbox automagically updates the folders when one of us adds new pics.
Feel free to ask questions/hurl abuse/offer suggestions in the comments section below. All the best to you and yours for a fabulously happy healthy and relaxing Christmas and holiday season.
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]]>It might be time-consuming but I really believe that writing meal plans and shopping lists can help you to eat better more balanced meals and save money too. However, a lot of meal plans are set up so that while you eat nice, healthy, balanced meals and save some dosh, the meals are boring and repeated over and over ad infinitum. I don't like boring, so this is the way I do it.
To write an effective meal plan there are a number of things you will need to do first.
Inventory of your pantry, fridge and freezer
In my mind, this is one of the most important things you can do and so few people do it very often. You will need some spare time for this. I suggest breaking it down over a few days unless you have free time growing on trees (I don't). If you do this thoroughly you will save yourself a lot of time and money later.
Now if you have a perfectly organised and laid out pantry this will be easy. I'll assume you don't. If you do you can go and gloat for a while.
Start by taking the food out of the pantry, one shelf at a time. Once the shelf is empty, dust and then wipe it clean. (I use enjo cloths for this but you can use whatever you like, but please avoid strong chemicals in the kitchen. If you need a non-physical cleaner McClintock's make a nice vanilla fridge wipe that will do the job without spraying poison everywhere.) I also like to clean the pantry walls (mine is a walk-in) at the same time but I'm weird and you don't have to do that.
Take a very close look at all the food that you've pulled out of the pantry. The first thing I do is look for patterns and start to group things together. As you move each item, check the expiry date. When moving pasta, rice etc inspect well for weevils or any other nasties.
Everything in your pantry will be roughly divided into three groups - "I will eat it" "I would like to think that I will eat it because: it is horribly healthy/was on special/some other stupid reason, but I really won't" and "this food is now a science experiment". I hope you have a bin handy.
With the middle group, you can donate this to a charity group or nearest struggling student. In some cases some items may be in the middle group even though they could be in the "I will eat it group" just because you don't know how to prepare it/what to eat it with. If that's the case leave a comment here and I'm sure we can try and help.
You should now just be left with food in the "I will eat it group". Be honest with yourself and make sure that everything left does fit within this category. What is left will tell you something quite important about your eating habits - is everything tinned/packet convenience food or do you have a lot of bulk basics? Do you have 14 packets of rice noodles that were scattered around in different parts of the pantry? At this stage I often write rough notes on each type of food - ie: rice, pasta etc and note if I'm out of anything.
Before you go any further and get distracted you'll need to put everything back in the pantry. Before I do this I chart out my pantry onto paper and work out where I'm going to put everything but you can just roll your eyes at me and ignore that. Do make sure that you give some thought to where you put things though. Put like items with like and be conscious of what is at eye level and what isn't.
For example, in my pantry, my husband's cereal, muesli bars etc are all at his eye level. This avoids the male-pattern-blindness and staring blankly into the pantry every morning. On the other hand, I keep the couverture chocolate on the bottom shelf along with the baking powders, flour etc. I hope he isn't reading this.
Make sure that you can see everything in the pantry easily because you will need to be able to later!
Repeat this with your fridge and freezer. You'll need to work quickly here so just get the food out, clean the fridge (most cleaning products are not suitable for use in the fridge so be careful) and put the "I will eat" things back.
When you put everything back in the fridge make sure that raw meat is kept well separated from everything else. All raw meat in my fridge is kept on the bottom shelf. If you have traditional wire shelves this will stop any chance of raw meat dripping onto something else. I have glass shelves which makes my life easy, and I put meat on plates to further minimise any risk. Yes, I'm paranoid.
It is now probably a few days after you started and you hopefully now have a shiny clean pantry, fridge and freezer. Well done!
The next step is to work out your fridge/freezer/pantry basics that will form the foundation for your meal planning. Click to continue on to part 2 on how to plan your meals.
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]]>The book is a monument to truly awful eating.
This particular recipe was supplied by George Bush (snr).
Mexican Mound
Ingredients:
2 lbs ground hamburger meat
Lawry's taco seasonings mix
1 pkg Doritos
1 cup grated yellow cheese
1 or 2 small chopped onions
10 chopped black olives (ed: 11 is obviously way too many)
1 chopped tomato
1 cup sour cream
1 cup shredded lettuce
1 can frozen avocado dip (ed: this should be illegal)
Method:
Easy to make, loved by all who love Mexican food. Ingredients easy to keep in the house. Children or guests can all help with chopping or grating. It's fun!! Follow instructions on taco seasonings mix for browning meat. I serve this meal in my kitchen, a big pot of meat simmering on the stove. A wooden salad bowl of Doritos and 7 bowls of the remaining ingredients around the table. Start with a mound of Doritos, a spoon of piping hot meat, cheese etc. Makes 8 servings.
Mmm yummy, Bush brain food.
This one came from Mrs Alan Simpson.
Party Vegetable Casserole
Ingredients:
2 pkgs frozen peas
2 pkgs frozen lima beans
2 pkgs frozen Fresh green beans
1 cup whipping cream
1/2 cup mayonnaise
1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese (use Kraft in can) ed: or you could use some dried skin shavings instead
Method:
Parboil vegetables until tender. Layer in buttered casserole dish. Whip cream, add mayonnaise and parmesan cheese. Pour over vegetables. Bake uncovered for 30 minutes at 325F. Makes 12 servings. Can be prepared ahead and refrigerated.
Enjoy!
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