Menu 13/1/10

This weeks menu is feta & thyme roast chicken, chicken & apricot pizza (using leftover roast chicken), curried sausages, macaroni cheese, beef nachos and home made fish and chips. Total grocery cost $166 including $30 of nappies (ouch!)

 

Courgette and Feta Fritters with Sweet Chilli and Lime Salsa

Another quick and easy throw together that tasted great. Basically a pikelet mix with grated courgette and feta added in. Make sure you put the grated courgette in a tea towel and wring it out before adding. You'll be amazed at how much liquid comes out. The salsa was just diced tomato, avocado and spring onion combined with fresh lime juice and sweet chilli sauce – yum!

Tuna Stir-fry, Sausage & Salami Pasta and Stonefruit & Meringue Tarts

Noteworthy meals from the last couple of weeks (see previous post) have been tuna stir-fry which the kids loved (much to my surprise). Very loosely based on this tuna and pineapple BBC - Food - Recipes: Stir-fried tuna with pineapple recipe from Ready Steady Cook I used tinned tuna, omitted the fresh herbs and ginger (through necessity) and added noodles and carrots. Will definitely make this quick and easy recipe again.
Also a winner with the kids is sausage and salami pasta. All we do is cook the pasta, grill the sausages, fry a small amount of salami and combine with some pesto and parmesan. One block of parmesan has given us 5 pastas and 1 packet of pesto 4 meals so it's been quite affordable. We bought a whole salami which we'll use for 6 meals so it works out really cost effective and makes a delicious meal. We serve it with salad on the side.
I also attempted nectarine tarts with poached meringue topping. Having seen this being cooked once on Ready Steady Cook, I decided to give it a go. Perhaps I should have checked the recipe BBC - Food - Recipes: Peach meringue tart is the closest I could find. Anyway I don't know how they do it in 10 minutes as it took me close to an hour, but the results were delicious! I used puff pastry (note to self – for future reference, cook it on a high heat!), poached nectarines in water, cinnamon, brown sugar and red wine condiment, added them to the pastry and baked them while I poached the meringue. Then I placed the meringue on top and returned to the oven to brown. Hopefully I will find some shortcuts next time as this was too scrummy not to cook again!

Weekly menus

We have been managing our food budget and eating quite well lately so I thought I would share my meal plan. This week was tuna stir-fry, burritos, chicken chasseur, courgette & feta fritters and sausage & salami pasta. We were also supposed to have bbq'd prawns but I haven't made it to Toops yet. Total cost of groceries was $146 including nappies for 2 kids. Last week we had roast chicken, chicken & apricot pizza, corn & vege fritters, pasta again and a party tea. Grocery cost was $136 including nappies. Look out for more weekly menus in the future.

Christmas Baking

Well firstly please forgive my lack of blogging lately. The combination of new house, new baby and school holidays has kept me busy!

However we have had some successes over the Christmas period. Brooke and I made our very first pavlova following the good old Edmonds recipe. It turned out absolutely perfectly and 6 of us ate the whole thing in one go! We also had our first attempt at making shortbread which also turned out beautifully. Thanks to Debbie for her great recipe and also her helpful tip – if you want it less floury increase the cornflour and decrease the flour.

Sadly that was about it for holiday baking – hopefully we do better in 2010!