Monthly Archives: November 2013

Meal plan w/c 17 Nov

A wish expressed by P for more traditional fayre. Last week he cooked an amazing almost veggie pie (bacon doesn’t count, right?) including making the pastry and having the pastry go under the pie as well as over it, which I would never do! He also found a tasting menu deal at Browns for Friday night, but those were this week’s food highlights. A lot on at work for me and a hectic social life for him meant a three-day takeaway binge in the middle of the week. Miraculously, I haven’t got too much heavier.

So this week, back on the wagon.

Sunday – Shepherd’s pie

Can you get more traditional than this? No need for a recipe, really, is there? A half-kilo box of lamb mince will be bought, and half will be for this meal, and half frozen for Friday’s.

Monday – mustard chicken thighs

OK, day two, and ahem, the trad theme is gone already. Something a little like the link, but there’s lots of things in there I don’t like so a little variation. I will cook extra chicken so that the following day…

Tuesday – Nigel Slater’s leftover chinese chicken wrap

These have become a bit of a staple. Chinese 5 Spice is weirdly hard to find it. Sainsbury’s don’t seem to sell it.

Wednesday – leek and herb baked potatoes

A late night meeting in school means yoga night is displaced, so something oven-timery will have to be done. For a change it won’t be beans, but something a little like this from Good Food. Leeks are seasonal right now, eh? (no) (double check. Ooh, maybe they are!)

I might also add a jar of sliced olives to this.

Thursday – veggie burger wraps

There will be leftover lettuce from Tuesday, so on Thursday I will stuff it with veggie burger mix made from a festering out-of-date carton of chickpeas in the store cupboard. I don’t actually like pulses and don’t know why I bought the chick peas or butter beans but they have got to be et, so I will blend them with onions and half a jar of roasted red peppers, shallow fry them and serve them with lettuce, tinned bean sprouts and chilli sauce.

Friday – cheese stuffed meatballs

A new recipe from Recipe Rifle that just has to be tried. I mean even the name of it is saying “try me, try me!”

Meal plan w/c 3 Nov

A break from meal planning, or at least blogging about it, with half term and visiting family and giving up on cooking, and not eating properly.

Term resumes on Monday and so we must draw ourselves together and pretend we have some sort of order, discipline and professionalism, and resume planning what we eat rather than cobbling together leftovers and phoning for pizza.

Sunday – Thai pork patties

An old favourite I learned about from Recipe Rifle, which I started to read because she’s married to Giles Coren and carried on because the recipes are good. I bought the book
this recipe comes from, read it cover to cover, and didn’t find anything else in it that grabbed me. Maybe I should reread it and see what I missed.

I shall probably buy 500 grams of pork mince and use half of it and freeze the rest to be pineapple rice at some point in the future.

Monday – baked potatoes and sausages, rice pudding

We have a huge glut of milk at the moment, because I forgot to cancel the usual order while I was away. The rice pudding will use up some of it. The oven can cook three things at once and it will start on a timer while I am at work. When the potatoes are half done, I shall get home and add the sausages and rice pudding in.

Tuesday – baked eggs

As chicken owners we have occasional egg gluts and we really don’t eat as many eggs as we produce. Baked eggs makes a substantial meal out of them. Fry bacon, onion, and other veg until they are soft and put them in ramekins with tomato purée, slightly beat enough eggs (four for two people for us usually) to cover and pour over. Grate parmesan on top and bake in a normal oven until the egg is solid and the tops are golden.

Delicious, but such a pain to wash up afterwards.

Wednesday hummus and crudites

We ate this out of desperation the other week when we were under the cosh, and it turned out to be simple and delicious and healthy, so lets do it more often. Wednesday is beginner yoga night at The Yoga Place which entails changing into my PE kit before I leave school and then heading straight to the yoga place, then home, starving, v v late.

Thursday – leftover sausage pasta

Will cook extra on Monday and then use up the rest with pasta and tomatoes and wine.

Friday – Faggots.

A freezer special. Maybe this will be frozen baking fish instead.

Munzeeing

So, a lovely visit to my family on the south coast has given me a new a hobby. My little nephews are currently obsessed with, among many other things, spotting munzees stuck to street furniture.

It is, at last, a real world application for QR codes that people might actually do. In my brother’s coastal town, there are clearly a bunch of people into this hobby as every lamppost for miles had its own barcode for people to hunt down and scan with the Munzee smart phone app.

Back in Nottingham, there are fewer around. My local park has a bunch and there are loads in the city centre, but neither of my local shopping districts has one at all. Well, we can fix that, I’m sure. Some near by towns have absolutely loads – Long Eaton is well represented. And one crazy local person has deployed over 4,000 of the little barcodes all over South Notts. You can use the website map to find if there are any near you.

Dahn sarf, I was clicking away like a mad thing, and captured a fabled seafront golden munzee – but in doing so, depleted my phone battery and it didn’t register. There are motel munzees with special features – the first five people to scan it get “rooms” in it and so they get points every time it is scanned. There are mystery munzees which award a different number of points each time they scanned and special holiday ones – for halloween, there were bloodshot eyeball munzees.

There are also social munzees, which don’t get you any points and don’t have to be located in a permanent physical location, so here is mine, which you can scan by downloading the munzee app:

My social munzee