Yes, we’ve had something of a change in routine regarding the planning and purchasing of our shopping. All of which has been driven by the supermarket’s “three items for £10” on selected items of meat & fish deal that they’re doing at the moment.

So, instead of pre-planning the menu for the week and then buying for it, I’ve had to have a bit of a re-think.

Initially, we bought ahead of requirement i.e. when shopping on a Tuesday we bought three extra meat items that meant I could then plan for Tues/Weds/Thurs’s dinners, then buy again on the Friday.

It has all worked really quite well, as we’ve had an interesting few dinners this week.

Firstly, we made the most of the fresh chicken breasts and had pesto-stuffed chicken with baked cherry tomatoes, gnocchi in cheese sauce and carrots.

I had a few rashers of streaky bacon in the freezer, so they came out to be wrapped around the chicken before it was oven-baked. I didn’t put any pesto in my son’s portion, which turned out to be a good move as everyone cleaned their plate.

Next on the list was the restrospectively dubbed “Posh Porks” (did you see what we did there? *chuckle*), the recipe for which you can find on my blog here . However, to save you looking, it basically involved the curiously entitled “pork sizzle steaks” ~shrug~ which were braised in stock with celery, chestnut mushrooms and our own home-grown lemon thyme (amongst other things). Cream was added at the last minute and it was served with plain white rice and the ubiquitous carrots and peas. Once again, there were clean plates all round.

I find myself mentally punching the air when this happens. After all, I spend quite a lot of time thinking, planning and cooking the meals, it is so nice to have one that is a success! It’s not often that a meal totally bombs, but it does happen occasionally and I am always so disappointed when it does. Incidentally, the lamb’s liver was one of those meals. I loved it, but son picked dubiously at his “beef” (I didn’t like to correct him) and to give him his due, he ate around a third of it before declaring it inedible. Hubby valiantly plowed his way through as much as he could stand of it, for which credit is due as he really doesn’t like it at all, but was just “taking one for the team” in the hope of getting our son to eat it.

I guess we’ll leave it for another year before trying again.

Following an evening when we indulged in the loveliness that is sausage, mash & baked beans (doesn’t everyone have this from time to time?), came the week’s challenge, which was to make the “beef sizzle steaks” edible.

We’d used the same cut of beef last week in a stir-fry, without much success. Even just flash-frying the beef rendered it akin to shoe leather, so it was something of a challenge.

I reckoned that, because it was so thinly sliced, if I used it in a casserole/stew type of dish, it wouldn’t take much cooking to become fairly tender.

Ever on the search for some kind of carbohydrate that doesn’t involve potatoes (as hubby’s opinion of the humble spud doesn’t bear repetition), I had settled on some kind of dumpling. Inspiration struck when I remembered Jamie Oliver’s herby dumplings and so I used our home-grown Oregano and Parsley. The dumplings turned out to be everything that a dumpling should be and quite overshadowed the beef, which after an hour and a half’s cooking on the hob in my big old stew pot, was lovely and tender, if a bit lacking in beefy flavour.

As I dished up, onto my gorgeous blue & white china bowls, I reflected on the fact that even if the dish turned out to be a bit below par, not everyone gets to eat from Royal Worcester. *chuckle*

I had had a bit of a quandary over the chicken. As part of the “3 for £10” deal, the chickens were just too good to miss. However, I didn’t really fancy (for once) having the standard roast on Sunday.

Not because I’m tired of it, but because if I have a chicken, I really want to use every little bit of it. Which includes making stock with the carcase, which I do by leaving it to chuckle overnight in the slow cooker along with celery, carrots, parsley, onion, garlic and anything else that looks likely – and this chicken was way too good to miss.

Now I work on a Monday, so all the fiddling about finishing off the stock has been something of a pain in the butt. All this is why we wound up having our roast dinner on Saturday evening, which worked a treat for making stock overnight. Sunday left me with bags of time in which to wait for the stock to cool, strain it through firstly the colander then secondly the sieve and decant it into containers ready to be put in the freezer.

I wound up with six containers of gorgeous chicken stock, plus half a chicken ready to be included in a chicken biryani later on that night.

I suspect the Sunday roast may very well have become the Saturday roast, in future!