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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]]>I've previously mentioned how I use technology to plan my meals and write my shopping list. Of course, not everything is digital - I still have handwritten, scribbled notes and many favourite, sauce splattered and annotated cookbooks.
Try something new
I like to try at least one new recipe a week, and this may come from a cookbook, an idea posted on another blog, or something I invented in my sleep (this happens fairly often). This meal is usually scheduled for a weekend or a day I'm not in the office. I like to make things as easy for myself as possible.
Keep it fresh
My planning also takes into account my access to fresh produce. I prefer not to freeze steak or seafood for example, so I will always plan those meals around when I can buy fresh.
Save time with bulk cooking
I also like to ensure that at least one meal a week is something that can be doubled or tripled. I prefer not to have the same meal twice in a week but instead will use the extra from the first meal to make something a bit different. Alternatively I will prepare something and freeze it so we won't starve if I'm sick or I get home late.
This week I spread out some cookbooks and clicked through some favourite foodie websites. My husband chose Jill Dupleix's Angelhair with crab and lemon as the new recipe on this week's meal plan. He gets extra bonus points for choosing something quick, easy and light. He usually doesn't!
Photo credit: Betty Crocker by 427
Keep records
My planning system also includes recording each day's meals on our synchronised google calendars. It avoids the mid-day phone call, "what are we having for dinner tonight?" And here it is for you.
Monday:
Garlic and chilli king prawns stir-fried with onion and still crispy red capsicum, green beans and broccoli, lightened with oodles of fresh parsley, served on steamed Basmati (I use Basmati a lot as it is lower GI than other types) rice. I'd prefer brown rice but I haven't won that battle in my household yet.
Tuesday:
Home-made chilli and herb crumbed chicken schnitzels (oven baked), with macaroni cheese, roast grape tomatoes, baked herb field mushrooms, steamed greens. For some reason unknown to me, my macaroni cheese provokes bizarre reactions of rapture amongst my friends and family. My husband regularly begs me to make this, and due to the fact it is so insanely easy, I do indulge him. My version isn't too heavy either - the sauce is a roux enriched with mustard, cheese and herbs and lightened with low-fat milk.
This meal will give me leftovers - extra cooked chicken schnitzels to go into the freezer (I can then pull them out later, defrost in the fridge overnight, then top with a tomatoey sauce and cheese, then chuck under the grill) plus leftover macaroni cheese to have with a salad for lunch on Wednesday.
Wednesday:
Angelhair pasta with crab and lemon plus a simple garden salad. With any luck I'll be able to buy some fresh pasta from the Italian place down the road, but if not I have some decent quality dried pasta in the pantry. I don't mind making my own pasta but I'm better at ravioli or lasagne sheets that don't need as much precision!
I'm not in the office on Wednesday so I can skip over to the fishmonger and then the butcher for tomorrow's dinner.
Thursday:
Seared beef and rice noodle salad. I can make this one in my sleep and it is lovely and fresh and flavourful.
Friday:
My grandmother, my sister and her boyfriend are coming over for dinner to have my famous risotto. This one will have prosciutto, tomato, basil and baby spinach. We'll go heavy on the carbs with some home-made bread and a few simple salads. Dessert is likely to be sorbet and fruit or perhaps some cupcakes if I get time.
Saturday:
Duck salad with rocket and baby spinach, just warm slow-roasted tomatoes, red onion, capsicum and snow peas, drizzled with chilli jam.
Sunday:
On Sunday nights we usually have dinner with my parents or in-laws. Otherwise it'll be a quiet night at home with takeaway Thai or a wood-fired pizza with a few glasses of wine.
If you'd like to see what other people are cooking this week, you'll find more meal plans at I'm an Organizing Junkie and Chive Talkin.
Check back later in the week for recipe reviews and results!
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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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]]>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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]]>I have no idea how this happens when I dutifully write a meal plan and shopping list every week, but I digress. So we had risotto cakes all wrapped up in prosciutto and served with sweet balsamicky tomatoes and rocket.
This recipe is an easy one, and very quick if you happen to have some left-over plainish risotto in the fridge. I never seem to, we're both far too fat and far too fond of risotto.
photo credit: Metano
At any rate this makes a nice dinner party entree with a little "here's some I prepared earlier" magic. On a weeknight it is far more important to make sure your husband knows exactly how long you've been standing in front of the stove.
You'll need a couple of cups of cooked risotto to serve 4 as an entree or 2 as a main. If you're starting from scratch now, you want a basic risotto base. Anything too complicated will get lost when you turn the risotto into cakes and fry them.
Basic risotto
photo credit: Glorious risotto
My basic risotto starts with a cup of arborio rice (carnaroli is better, but I always only seem to have arborio in the pantry), a small brown onion, a couple of cloves of garlic, butter and olive oil, white wine and chicken or vegetarian stock. Homemade stock has a far superior flavour but if you've got some tetra packs of stock in the pantry then use them, I do.
Simmer the stock (about 5 cups should do it) and keep warm on the stove over a low heat.
Heat the butter and olive oil in a large pan with the chopped garlic and then add the onion, finely chopped, to soften. Don't brown it.
Add the rice at lowish heat and toast it, stirring, until covered in the oil and butter and you can hear the rice start to crack.
Add about 1/4 cup of white wine now, stirring until mostly absorbed. Add another 1/4 cup of wine for the pot and a glass for you.
Now gradually add the stock to the rice, about 1/2 cup at a time, stirring as you go.
Add more stock as it gets absorbed and continue until the rice gets fat and swollen and lovely. You want the risotto to be al dente and creamy.
Add a few good handfuls of freshly grated parmesan (the powder in the green tin is not parmesan, it is dirty sock scrapings) and season well.
Stir through some fresh breadcrumbs and put the risotto in the fridge to cool while you prepare the other bits and pieces to go with it. (If you use dried breadcrumbs the roof probably won't cave in and I won't tell on you.)
Photo credit: Homegrown roma tomatoes
Sweet Balsamic Tomatoes
I'm pretty sure the tomatoes are originally from a Delicious magazine recipe.
You'll need a couple of roma tomatoes, quartered.
Seal them on each cut side in a frypan over high heat, then add 1 TB of brown sugar, 2 TB balsamic vinegar, a tsp of Worcestershire sauce and a TB of water.
Drop the heat to low, pop the lid on and cook for a few minutes.
Make the Risotto Cakes
While that's happening, mix an egg into the risotto mixture and divide into 4 or 6 cakes, depending on how much risotto you have.
You don't want arancini size for this, but you don't want them to be so big and cumbersome that they will fall apart when you put them into the pan.
Wrap each cake in a few pieces of proscuitto. A few sage leaves can work nicely with this too.
Shallow fry the cakes in a bit of oil for a few minutes either side in a frypan over medium heat, until the cakes are golden and the proscuitto is crisping.
Serve the cakes over some nice peppery rocket and top with the tomatoes and some shaved parmesan and pretend that it was hard work.
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