Beef Casserole
We cooked this as a wintery comfort-food dish and it worked out well. We cooked it in advance and ate it this evening after getting home from a rainy shopping, tube and bus experience. It was just the ticket.
While cooking it I thought that there was too much tomato in it, it has gone a little too sweet, but the flavours combined better afterwards.
Cod and Tomato Sauce on Pasta
This wasn’t particularly successful. On its own, the tomato sauce was good. On its own, the fish was good. But put together, the tomato sauce overpowered the fish and the fish diluted the tomato sauce so nobody won. The pasta was good, but hard to pick up. Not sure what this sort of pasta is called because we threw away the packet – it’s like thin tagliatelle.
If there was a next time, we would use a fish with a stronger flavour and maybe add olives or capers to the sauce too.
Art Deco Lamb Cutlets
It wasn’t quite my intention to create a strange-looking design on the plate, but after a gruelling trip to IKEA (my first in fact), it somehow seemed like the right thing to do. Trimmed lamb cutlets with some steamed new potatoes and green beans. I added loads of butter to the potatoes and beans after the picture was taken. Mmmmmmm.
Pocky!
Last night we went to dinner in Chinatown and dined on various Shanghai specialties at eCapital. No alcohol-affected trip to Chinatown is complete without a post-dinner pocky trip. We visited two super-happy-fun pocky stockists and chose a selection of their finest offerings. From left to right in the picture: Men’s pocky, almond crush pocky and black sesame pocky.
Garlic Bread and Almost-Pizza
After our successful pizza last weekend, we decided to attempt another one. We had since invested (!) in a pizza stone and were keen to see how pizzas baked on it compared to those on the metal tray.
I followed the recipe exactly. Same recipe as last time. To the last detail. But somehow the dough turned out to be superglue rather than dough and stuck to everything. We managed to make a small garlic bread out of it, but failed to make it into a pizza. So we had nice pizza-like garlic bread with mozzarella, rock salt and rosemary and then put all the pizza toppings onto some olive bread which turned out rather well, all things considered.
Steak and Roasted Vegetables
After a week of healthy eating, I felt like a treat but not something so bad it would undo all my hard work. While eating the stuffed aubergine yesterday, we commented that it would go well with steak….we must have still had steak on our minds today because when we realised we didn’t have anything for dinner we both immediately thought of steak.
So, steak it was. 21 day aged sirloin steak, cooked rare with salt and pepper, and garlic.
We had mushrooms to use up and intended to fry them off with some red onion, somehow it ended up becoming roasted vegetables with three kinds of pepper and mandolined carrots. The carrots were good, we haven’t done them this way before but will be doing them again, with parsnips and beetroot to make root vegetable crisps.
Stuffed Aubergine
We followed a recipe for stuffed aubergine (we got one in our vegetable box) which was stuffed with red pepper, courgettes and mozzarella. Somehow, after about six weeks of courgettes, we didn’t get any this week so we used mushrooms instead. It wasn’t a great success. The insides of the aubergines were coated with red pesto and I didn’t put enough on. Also, it was generally under seasoned. We’ll know for next time – more seasoning and probably more cheese too. Mmmm cheeeeeeese.
Mushrooms on Toast and Salmon and Couscous
For an evening of healthy eating, we decided on baked salmon fillets, a small serving of couscous and green salad. The mushrooms were looking a little past their best, so instead of having them in the salad, Kerri decided we should cook them and have them on toast as a starter. It was an excellent idea:
This was then followed by the salmon (topped with a little red pesto) and couscous. We also had some hastily-roasted green pepper slices because we were being very conscientious in terms of using up all the vegetables in the fridge before the arrival of this week’s vegetable box tomorrow:
Chocolate Week 2006
http://www.chocolate-week.co.uk/
How come I didn’t know about this? Obviously, I now have to go and eat lots of chocolate so that I can write about it. Oh, life is hard.
Partridge and Chicken. Separately.
For the first time in months, we ate different dinners. Kerri had chicken breast and salad because she was being healthy. I had partridge and gem squash because I was being greedy. Mmmm… partridge and bacon… mmmmmm…. gem squash and butter…. a good opportuniy to use up some vegetable box ingredients.
