Menu for the Week - 23 to 29 March 2009

One of the reasons why I decided to start this blog was to keep track of the weekly dinner menus. It's been a bit of a ritual for the past few years - pretty much every Saturday morning, I lay out the latest editions of my food magazines and a selection of cookbooks, look at what's in season (or what I bought from the markets) and plan what we'll be cooking and eating over the next week. I then compile our shopping list - grocery separated from fruit and vegetables, with special sections for the butcher, bakery and deli when required.

I now have around 8 notebooks (handwritten) of weekly menus and most of our dinner/lunch party menus. People seem to find it strange that I do this, whereas I just cannot imagine NOT doing it. Imagine how long it would take to do the shopping! And I just couldn't bear the thought of visiting the shops *every* *day* to get what I need for that night's dinner. Ugh.

We aim to cook five to six times a week, with a day or two for either a take-away or eat out. Sure, there are weeks when I just can't be bothered and we end up taking away or eating out more times that we'd like, but most weeks I like to be good and use up what we've got in the fridge and pantry.

So I suppose one way to make sure I keep this blog regular is to put in our weekly menu. Yeah, some people might find this wanky or just plain weird, but what they hey - I'm really doing it for me, so there. :)

Here's what we're cooking this week:

• Pork cutlets (on bone) salt-rubbed with parsley, grape and chorizo salad with stir-fried snake beans and oyster sauce
• Fish fillets (lightly spiced) with almond basmati rice with cinnamon and green salad OR sauteed cavolo nero with pistachios
• Pecan crusted Scotch fillet steak with sauteeed nicola potatoes with garlic and mixed cherry tomato salad with purple basil mini cress
• Thai-style sweet pork with stir-fried sambal water spinach (kangkung) plus steamed long grain rice and extra Asian veggies
• Boiled lamb shanks with star anise broth with pearl barley or couscous salad
• Beetroot tagliatelle pasta with pork and fennel Italian style sausage, lemon and nutmeg with salatini salad and mixed cherry tomatoes

So 'til the next post, happy cooking and eating!

My Forays into Baking (or My Pecan Nut-Fest)

I'm really not that into baking. It's fiddly (all that measuring and weighing), it's messy (I can't believe I've used all those bowls and implements!) and I have had spectacular failures (the attempt and accompanying tantrum to make brazo de mercedes - a classic Filipino meringue and custard concoction - still gets talked about in my household).

However, for the past couple of weekends, I've been bitten by the baking bug and have produced three very different baked goods.

It started with the challenge to do an American-themed dessert for a get-together with friends last weekend. I normally cook the mains, but this time, someone (yes, I'm looking at you, Tim) decided it would be fun if we mixed it up a bit and everyone cooked what they normally didn't cook. So I got lumbered with dessert.

After a few weeks of agonising, looking through my back issues of Fine Cooking magazine and lots of Googling, I decided to go with pecan pie. It helped that one the recent episodes of SBS Food Safari had a video demonstration of a pecan pie recipe. What didn't help was the recipe text got the measurements of a couple of fundamental ingredients wrong - no way can y0u make a pastry with 10 grams of butter (it was 110 grams) and you'd end up seriously gluggy pie filling with one cup of corn flour (corn starch) which from the video looked like it was more like a tablespoon. Attempts of the Hubby to help by digging out Alton Brown's I'm Just Here for More Food:Food x Mixing + Heat = Baking book and looking through Stephanie's Cook's Companion were appreciated but made me somewhat confused when I made my first pastry dough and got all the measurements wrong. It was so disgusting I couldn't bear to take a photo of it. I decided to trust my instincts this time and made a second dough which came out perfectly. I had buggered up shortcrust pasrty before so was very apprehensive, but breathed a sigh of relief when none of the thick pecan pie filling oozed out from the pastry. Success!

I was so buoyed by confidence that I decided to make double-chocolate brownies with pecans (I mistakenly ordered two kilos of the buggers so need to use up as much as I can!). I have made brownies before so was reasonably confident it would turn out o.k., and they did.

What wasn't o.k. was I left out the box of Dutch cocoa powder which still had around a tablespoon of powder left in it out of the kitchen bench, and we left the doggies the run of the house while we were out to dinner. Bloody Labradors! We got home to a demolished box and smears of cocoa all over the beige carpet (disturbingly looking like poo...) The Hubby was extremely upset with me, not because of the carpet but because of the possibly lethal ingestions of cocoa that the dogs may have had which of course leads to theobromine poisoning. Needless to say, the dogs are all right, although Georgie was mighty thirsty in the morning and was apparently a bit hyper in the park.

The baking bug bit again this weekend and I made a cranberry, zucchini and pecan bread to have for Sunday lunch. The photo in the March edition of delicious. magazine was so yummy looking that I had to make it. It took a lot longer to bake than the recipe said though (that darned skewer just didn't want to come out clean) - more like 1 hour 45 minutes than just an hour or so, but good things are worth waiting for. It was seriously yummy, with smearings of King Island triple cream cheese, slices of salami and ham and the leftover roast lamb we had last night with a green salad for lunch.

To bake or not to bake...I still have 1.5 kilos of pecan nuts to go so the baking forays may not be completely over yet!