Very quick chicken stew

Dinner tonight was very quick chicken stew from Olive magazine's December 2006 issue.  I don't buy Olive magazine but the GoodFood website has some recipes from the magazine on it.  I found this recipe when I was looking for a low GI chicken meal on the website.

The stew serves two.  As I wanted to have it for dinner on Tuesday night as well I doubled the ingredients.  While saving time on preparing dinner tomorrow night, it did take slightly longer than the 30 mins stated to make as there was a lot more in the pot.

I made a few alterations to the recipe.  I had chicken breasts in the freezer, so I used four of them instead of the chicken thighs listed in the recipe ingredients.  Also, I had now fresh tarragon in.  I do have dried tarragon in my cupboard, but rather than use it, I decided to use some parsley as I had bought some for the quinoa (bulghar wheat) tabbouleh and had some leftover.

As I want to have give some of the chicken stew to my baby for dinner tomorrow night, I left the chicken stock cube out of the recipe, just adding boiled water instead.  As the chicken and vegetables were going to be cooking in the water I figured that they would flavour it.  To be sure that the stew had plenty of flavour without the stock cube, I threw a couple of bay leaves into the pot and seasoned with pepper to add a bit more flavour to the stew.  You can buy low salt stock cubes suitable for giving to babies, but I do not have any of these in the house.  While the stew tasted ok - it was much better the second night, I think it would have tasted better if I had used chicken or vegetable stock in it.  Next time I make it I will use some chicken or vegetable stock that I make myself in advance.


TIP - Anytime I have a roast chicken for dinner, I always boil the bones after the stripping all the meat from it to make stock.  I throw in a carrot, celery and an onion (skin on) if I have them in the house.  I then pour the stock into some 'Pour and store' bags and put in the freezer for when I need it.  Unfortunately I didn't have any in the freezer for this recipe, otherwise I would have used some.

Cost - The chicken breasts were bought at the butchers when it was 12 chicken breasts for €10.  I used four chicken breasts in this recipe, so the cost was €3.33.  The potatoes were 99 cent, the shallots were 49 cent, the carrots were 50 cent and the peas were 50 cent (another estimate).  I have allowed 20 cent for the parsley, bay leaves and pepper.  The total cost is €6.01, making the cost per meal 0.005 cent over €3!  Not too bad.

Quinoa tabbouleh, minus the quinoa!

Just in case I am not keen on the bulghar wheat version I halved the ingredients and made enough to serve 2 people, so it will do me for lunch on Monday and Tuesday.  If I like it I will make more on Tuesday night for lunch on Wednesday and Thursday.  If I'm not keen on the Bulgar wheat I'll use cous cous instead when I make it on Tuesday night.

Qunioa tabbouleh, from GoodFood magazine

If you looked at my meal planner for the next week you may have noticed that one of the things I was planning to make for lunches was Quinoa tabbouleh.  Unfortunately I never checked to make sure I had quinoa in the house before going to do the grocery shop, so I bought all the ingredients and when I went to make it tonight for lunch at work over the next few days, I discovered that I have no quinoa in any of my cupboards.  Gutted!!  I assume I had some in as I usually do, so it just goes to show that you should always check your cupboards thoroughly before going to get the groceries.


As I had all the ingredients in I decided to check to see which ingredients I had that might make a suitable substitute.  I decided to use Bulgar wheat in place of the quinoa, so I guess you could say I actually made Bulgar wheat tabbouleh.  I'll find out tomorrow if it tastes as good as the quinoa tabbouleh!

Irish coddled pork with cider..again!

Back in January I made this Irish coddled pork with cider recipe from the GoodFood magazine and it went down a treat.  I decided to make it for dinner today when I saw that both cabbage and turnip were on offer in Dunnes yesterday for 29 cent each.  There we pork loins in our freezer and we got some bulmers when we were in Asda last week (note - we bought 'Magners' not the English Bulmers), so I didn't need to buy them which made this recipe a cheap enough option for me this week allowing me to stay well within my grocery budget.

The cabbage on offer in Dunnes was a quarter of a white cabbage for 29 cent, so I only used a quarter of cabbage this time round.  There was still more than enough to go around.

I wouldn't normally post about a recipe I've made previously, but I wanted to show how tailoring your menu to suit what the stores have on offer on any given week can reduce the overall cost of your menu for that week by comparing the how much it cost me to make the coddled pork this week to when I made it back in January.

Cost - As I said I had Pork Loins in the freezer.  They were recently on offer in our butchers at 5 pork loins for €5.  This recipe used 2 so this it cost €2.  The turnip was 15 cent, the cabbage was 29 cent, the carrots were 25 cent, the bacon was €1, potatoes were 60 cent (I used 4 instead of two) and the bulmers was 25 cent (the offer I bought them on was not as good as the one I got before Christmas making this ingredient slightly more expensive.  This makes the total cost of the meal €4.54. 

I saved 46 cent on this recipe this week when compared with how much it cost when I made it in January.  I used an extra potato but less cabbage.  Even if I had bought an extra quarter of white cabbage, I would still have saved money on the recipe as this would only have cost another 29 cent.

A saving of 46 cent doesn't really seem like a lot in the grand scheme of things, but if I saved this much in every meal I made in the week I'd have an extra €3.22 at the end of the week.  Considering that I have some recipes on here that cost less than €3 to make, this extra money means that I could feed the family for an extra day on what I had saved.  Something to think about I guess.

Marinated lamb steaks with barley salad

So, tonight after the kids went to bed I made the marinated lamb steaks with barley salad from the June 2010 issue of the GoodFood magazine.  It was, quite frankly, delicious!  My taste buds are still in heaven!  This recipe is definitely going on the list of dinners that we will be having again (and again and again and again!!).

After trying it my husband confessed that he was a bit dubious about the barely salad but that it tasted much better than he expected.  As well as making a nice change from potatoes as a side, the barley salad is has a low GI, meaning that you'll feel fuller for longer.  According to the GoodFood magazine the salad gives 2 of your 5-a-day, making it a healthy choice for dinner.

I made a few alterations to the recipe as I was going along.  The first change was forced upon me when I went to by the meat.  My butcher didn't have any lamb steaks, but he did have some lovely looking boneless lamb chops which looked quite thick so I decided that they would do the trick.  The second change was when I was making the marinade - it called for a pinch of dried chilli and I added a bit more than a pinch as we like our food spicy. 

The biggest changes I made were to the barley salad.  When I did the grocery shopping earlier today there were no frozen broad beans in Dunnes, so I bought soya beans and used these instead.  Red onions were on my shopping list but I decided not to bother buying them as 1kg of onions was 29c in Dunnes and I didn't really fancy having a kg of red onions AND and kg of ordinary onions in the house.  Although the red onions were on offer in Lidl this weekend, I decided that it was a bit excessive to buy a kg of them just for one recipe.  I meant to buy a single red onion, but forgot and only realised when I started making the dinner.  So instead of red onion I used two scallions (spring onions).  The red onion wasn't to be cooked and I didn't think that a raw onion would taste nice in the salad, whereas I was confident that the scallions would be fine.

The recipe suggests marinating the lamb for up to two hours if you have the time.  My lamb was marinated for 40 minutes and tasted fine. 

TIP - If I was to decide to make this recipe mid-week I would probably buy the meat at the weekend, make up the marinade, rub into the meat and freeze.  Then I would lift it out the night before making the meal and leave it to defrost and marinate in the fridge.  Alternatively I would make up the marinade the night before or in the morning, but for me the first option would save the most time on meal preparation during the week.

Cost - This was a bit more expensive than some meals that I make.  The lamb chops that I bought were €5.  The soya beans were €1.50, the peas were 50 cent (estimate), the pearl barley was 75 cent, the mint was 50 cent, the lemon was 25 cent and I have allowed 40 cent for the scallions, dried chilli and olive oil.  This makes the total €8.90 which makes this my most expensive meal to date. 

I would not normally spend so much on one meal for two of us, but a lot of couples spend much more than this on a meal in the restaurant on a Saturday night, so as a one off I don't think it's that bad.  In fact, we'd spend more on a takeaway if we were to get one and probably not enjoy it half as much!

Grocery shopping - menu planner for 28/4/2012 to 4/5/2012

So, it's Friday night and it's time to sort out my meal plan for the next week and write my grocery shopping list ready for my trip to get the groceries tomorrow.  Is it sad that I actually enjoy doing this on a Friday night...possibly, but I'm not afraid to admit that I enjoy having a trawl of recipe books and magazines on a Friday night and putting together a meal plan for the week.

Anyway, I digress!  My menu plan for the 28th April to the 4th May is as follows:-

Saturday dinner - Marinated lamb steaks with barley salad
Sunday dinner - Irish Coddled pork with cider
Monday dinner - Very quick chicken stew (I am planning on making this with chicken breasts)
Tuesday dinner - Leftovers from Mondays dinner
Wednesday dinner - Sticky gammon steaks with steamed greens and rice
Thursday dinner - Black pudding and colcannon
Friday dinner - Sticky pan-roasted sausages with grapes and leftover colcannon

For lunches we will have ham sandwiches, quinoa tabbouleh and scrambled eggs.

Shopping list for the week:-

1. Chicken breasts (usually 10 for 10 at my local butchers)
2. Gammon steaks x 2
3. Lamb steaks x 2
4. Smoked bacon
5. Black pudding
6. Good quality pork sausages (my butcher does some thick sausages that will be suitable)
7. Potatoes
8. Pak Choi
9. Shallots
10. Scallions (spring onions)
11. Cucumber
12. Red chilli
13. Parsley
14. Carrots
15. Swede (29c in Dunnes according to their website)
16. Cabbage (29c in Dunnes according to their website)
17. Baby potatoes
18. Grapes
19. Oranges
20. Apples
21. Bananas
22. Pears (29c in Dunnes according to their website)
23. Mint
24. Red onion (39c for 1 kg in Lidl)
25. Frozen broad beans
26. Eggs
27. Ham
28. Full fat milk - 2 litre
29. Skimmed milk - 3 litres
30. Bread
31. Yoghurt's
32. Cheese
33. Rice Krispies (to make rice krispie buns with the remaining Easter eggs!)

Hmmm...starving now after putting that together. 

TIP - I have to confess that I often find more recipes to try than there are days in my menu planner and often find it difficult choosing between them.  To help me decide I look at the ingredients to work out which recipes I have a few of the ingredients in for already which will make my grocery shop for the week a bit cheaper.  Then I look at the time it takes to prepare and cook to work out if it is feasible for me to attempt to make the recipe mid-week when time is of the essence!  By doing both these things I usually manage to narrow down the list, but if I don't I'll make a note of the recipe for another week.

Turkey, thyme and leek meatloaf

One of the recipes on my menu planner for this week was the turkey, thyme and leek meatloaf from the December 2006 issue of the Good Food magazine.  This is another recipe that I have made quite a few times in the past, but I've never tried to work out how much it costs so I am interested in working out how much it costs.  Unfortunately I am not sure exactly how accurate my calculation of the cost will be as I bought the ingredients in Asda when I was visiting my parents house up north, but I think I will have a go anyway and convert the cost to Euro.

Turkey mince is not something that I have noticed for sale in my local shops, so if anyone reading this knows where I might be able to find some turkey mince I'd be grateful if you could point me in the right direction.  My local butcher doesn't sell it.  So, sometimes when I visit my parents I take a trip to Asda to buy some turkey mince specifically for this recipe.

I soften my leeks in a couple of squirts of fry lite instead of sunflower oil to lower the fat content and tend to use dried thyme instead of sprigs of fresh thyme.  Other than that I tend to stick closely to the recipe.  From previous experience I find that smoked bacon tastes a bit better on the top of the meatloaf than unsmoked.

The method of suggests putting the meatloaf under the grill to make the top crisp on top, however, I have found that it gets quite crispy in the oven so I've never bothered with this stage. 

The suggestion at the end of the recipe has tempted me a couple of the times in the past, but my husband has only recently started to eat butternut squash and cranberries so I haven't tried it yet.  I hope to try it sometime in the near future as I think the substitutions suggested sound delicious.

Cost - The turkey mince cost £1.98, the leeks cost £1 and the bacon was £1.  I had an egg, bread and dried thyme in and I've estimated 50p for them.  This brings the total cost to £4.48 which converts to €5.48 according the xe.com.  This feeds my family for two nights along with potatoes and vegetables.  This means that a meal for my family costs €4.20ish depending on what vegetables I serve.

Quick chicken chasseur

I have made this Quick chicken chasseur recipe from the good food magazine a number of times in the past but had forgotten about it until my husband requested it one day.  Previously we have had it with various different types of potatoes - mash, boiled and even chips - and rice.  To be honest, while I am sure it is supposed to be served with potatoes my family seem to prefer it when it comes with rice.  We had it for dinner last week, but I am only getting a chance to write about it now.

It is ready really quickly making it an ideal mid-week dinner to prepare when you get home from work and have to get something on the dinner table quickly.

The can of chopped tomatoes I used didn't have any garlic in them, so I added a couple of gloves of garlic at the start of cooking.  I usually don't bother adding the flour to the recipe and I use bacon medallions rather than streaky rashers in order to lower the fat content of the recipe.  I didn't have any fresh parsley in so I used some dried parsley and I added this towards the end of the cooking time.  When I made this for dinner last week I used two cans of chopped tomatoes instead of one.

Cost - Although I have made this recipe many times before, I have never worked out the cost of it so I am interested to see how much it works out as now.  As I was making it for two people and one child, I only used 2 chicken breasts and 3 bacon medallions.   The chicken breasts where bought on offer for €10 for 12, making the cost of the chicken that I used €1.67.  The bacon medallions were 75 cent - I bought them on offer for €1.50 a while ago and put them in the freezer.  The mushrooms were 99 cent, the chopped tomatoes cost €1.33 and I have allowed 50 cent for the garlic, dried parsley and beef stock cube.

The total cost of recipe €5.24.  As I indicated I only used two chicken breasts as I was only intending to serve two adult portions and one child's portion.  However, adding the extra can of chopped tomatoes bulked up the meal enough for me to be able to get extra portions from the pan for dinner another night, so I managed to get 4 adult and 2 child portions for this price, making the cost for me (minus the rice) €2.62 which is really good.  This works out much cheaper than using 4 chicken breasts to get the same number of servings.

TIP - As I am trying to give my baby as much of the same food as we are eating I refrain from adding the stock cube until the same point that I add the Worcestershire sauce so that I can give him a little of the chicken chasseur to try.  I then let the pan simmer for a few more minutes before lifting it off the heat and serving.

Meal planner for 23/4/2012 to 27/4/2012

My meal plan for this week is only covering Monday to Friday as I was visiting my parents this weekend so didn't need to worry about my menu for Saturday and Sunday.  This means that my grocery spend for this week should be well within budget. 

So, the menu plan is as follows:-
Monday dinner - Turkey, thyme and leek meatloaf, baby boiled potatoes and green beans
Tuesday dinner - Leftovers
Wednesday dinner - Chicken stir fry
Thursday dinner - Cannellini bean salad with roast cherry tomatoes and chorizo and jacket potatoes
Friday dinner - Spag bol

Lunches for the week will be tuna salads, sandwiches and soup.

Skinny Irish stew

For dinner tonight we had skinny Irish stew.  The
recipe is from Olive magazine's December 2011 issue.  I found it on the Good Food magazine website by searching for using the words 'lamb' and 'stew'. 

I confess that I have never actually made a stew with lamb before - I've always used beef as that is what my mother did.  Yet every recipe I come across for Irish stew has lamb in it.  From talking to friends, they all use beef in their stew as well, so I'd love to know where all the Irish people are who use lamb in their stew!  Anyway, I decided it was about time I give it a go.

The recipe is fairly simple and easy to make.  All you have to do is brown the lamb, add the onion and through in the rest of the ingredients then simmer for an hour.  The fact that it has to simmer for an hour means that it is not that ideal for making on a work night when quick dinners are more suitable.  For this reason I chose to make it the night before and reheat when I got home.

I used some extra carrots as I had them in and figured I might as well bulk up the stew a little instead of leaving the carrots in the fridge to potentially go off.  I had no chives or parsley in, so instead I used some dried parsley.  I also had no lamb stock cubes in the house so I used a chicken stock cube instead.  It was really tasty, but if I make it again I'd like to try it with the lamb stock to see what it tastes like.  I'd also like to use some fresh parsley and add the chives as well, though it tasted fine without the chives and with dried parsley.

Cost - It is difficult for me to work out the cost the skinny Irish stew as it uses some ingredients that I already had in the house - I had the lamb in the freezer and the pearl barley.  If I remember correctly the lamb was €3.  The potatoes cost €1.29, the carrots cost €1.99 and the onion was 10 cent.  I have allowed 50 cent for the stock cube, pearl barley and for the dried parsley.  I have enough to do dinner for our house for two nights, so the recipe works out at €3.44 for each night.  Not bad.

TIP - You could make this a bit cheaper by just using ordinary carrots instead of Chantenay carrots.  My local Dunnes sells 1kg for 99 cent, so this would make the cost of the carrots just 20 cent, reducing the overall cost of the stew by €1.79.  To be honest though, the Chantenay carrots tasted lovely in this stew.

TIP 2 - This recipe has only 341 calories per serving which is quite good for such a filling dinner.  If you wanted to lower the calories and the fat further, you could leave out the olive oil and brown the meat in it's own juices.  I used the olive oil for brown my meat, but to be honest I really didn't need to so next time I make it I'll be leaving it out.

The ultimate soda bread

Tonight I made the dinner for tomorrow night before hitting the hay - soda bread and soup (leek, potato and bacon).  The soda bread that I make is from the March 2007 issue of Goodfood magazine.  It is one of Angela Nilsen's 'ultimate' recipes from her 'The Ultimate Recipe Book'.  I (sadly) do not own a copy of her book, but GF magazine has published quite a few of them and they have a number of them available on their website - but not the one that I made this evening.  A lot of her recipes are makeovers of old favourites in an effort to make them healthier - lower fat, lower salt, lower sugar etc.

Anyway, as the recipe is not available on the GF website I am not able to link to it and so have to type it up in order to share it.  I've made it a number of times over the years (to the point where I know the recipe by heart) and have always enjoyed it.  I am currently sitting here smelling it and trying hard to fight the temptation to jump up and tuck into it! 

Ingredients
225 g/8oz plain flour, preferably organic
225 g/8 oz plain wholemeal flour, preferably organic
2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
1 tsp salt
25g /1 oz butter, room temperature
500 ml/ 18 fl oz buttermilk

Method

1. Heat the oven to 200 degrees C/ fan 180 degrees C/ gas 6.  Butter and flour a large baking sheet.  Mix both the flours with the bicarbonate of soda and slat in the biggest bowl you have - the bigger the better to give yourself room for the mixing.  Cut the butter into pieces, then rub it into the flour mixture so it is evenly mixed in.
2. Give the buttermilk a good stir.  Create a big dip in the flour mixture, then pour in the buttermilk all at once.  You can now mix everything with your hands, or it you find it easier, start with a round-bladed knife to work in the liquid, then switch to your hands to finish off.  Start in the middle of the bowl and work towards the outside in a circular movement - the mixing should only take a few seconds.  You want to blend rather than mix, and if you do this for too long the dough will lose its lightness - so stop handling it as soon as you have a soft, sticky dough.
3. Tip the dough onto a lightly floured work surface.  With floured hands, gently shape the dough into a round.  It shouldn't be kneaded, just gently tucked and eased into a round shape.  The less it is handled the better.  Lift it onto the baking sheet.  pat it, again gently, into a round about 3cm/ 1.25 inch thick and 20cm/ 8 inch across, and very slightly rounded.  Cut a deep cross into the surface of the dough with a sharp knife.  Prick in the centre of each cut, then sprinkle the loaf with a little flour.
4. Bake for 30 mins until golden on top.  Check the underneath before removing - it should be golden and sound a bit hollow when tapped.  Transfer to a wire rack, and for a soft top lightly wrap with a clean tea towel as the loaf cools.  To serve, break the bread in the centre (for luck), then into quarters and cut into thick slices.  Best eaten fresh, while still a bit warm.  If well wrapped, the loaf will keep for a few days.

Broccoli and almond soup

Well, as I said in my menu planner for the week I intended to make some soup for the weekend but the type of soup would depend on what vegetables were on offer in the supermarket.  When I was doing my shopping broccoli was on offer for 35cent for 500g.  I bought two to use for soup and as one of the vegetables that I would serve with the roast beef dinner on Sunday.

To be honest I hadn't ever made a broccoli soup before and had only ever eaten it once when I was kept in hospital overnight while pregnant with my second child.  I liked it and was sure I'd find a recipe among my various recipe books at home.  If I hadn't I would have fallen back on the trusty Goodfood magazine website for a suitable recipe.

As luck would have it I had a choice of recipes for soups using broccoli as the main ingredient.  I decided to make broccoli and almond soup for the simple reason that I had all the ingredients - there are only 4 excluding the seasoning - in the house.  The recipe is from 'The Soup Bible', edited by Debra Mayhew.

The recipe is as follows:-

Ingredients
50 g/ 2oz/ 0.5 cup ground almonds
675 g/ 1.5lbs broccoli
900 ml/ 1.5pints / 3.75 cups of vegetable stock or water
300ml / 0.5pints / 1.25 coups of skimmed milk
salt and freshly ground black pepper

Method

1.  Preheat the oven to 180 degrees C/ gas 4.  Spread the ground almonds evenly on a baking sheet and toast in the oven for about 10 minutes until golden.  Reserve one quarter of the almonds and set aside to garnish the finished dish.
2. Cut the broccoli into small florets and steam for about 6-7 minutes until tender.
3. Place the remaining toasted almonds, broccoli, stock or water and milk in a blender and blend until smooth.  Season with salt and pepper to taste.
4. Reheat the soup and serve sprinkled with the reserved toasted almonds.

This soup was really quick and easy to make.  I decided not to garnish the finished dish with the toasted almonds which saved me a bit of money and will make my ground almonds last a bit longer.  I found it quite tasty.  In the future I might use chicken stock instead just to give it a slightly different flavour. 

Cost - This soup was really cheap for me to make owing to the fact that the broccoli was only 35 cent.  I used one and half heads of the broccoli that I bought to make the soup, costing me 53 cent.  I used about 35g of ground almonds which I have estimated at about 85 cent.  The milk was about 30 cent and I will allow 10 cent for the stock cube and seasoning.  The overall cost of the soup is € 1.78 using these estimates.

Looks like it may be a good one!

Sitting here looking out the window I can see that it looks like it is going to be a good day.  If the weather is good I am going to do some gardening.  I still have quite a bit to do to get some bits of the garden ready for planting.  As well as this, I still have quite a few seeds that I need to sow indoors so that I have some plants to plant out in a month or two.  So, I have plenty to do in the garden to keep me busy.

How do I decide what to plant?
I thought it might be a good idea to explain how I have decided which vegetables to grow.  Although I have a big garden and plenty of space to grow all sorts of vegetables, I want to make sure I get the most out of my growing space.  For that reason I made a list of the vegetables that we eat the most in our house.  I then put a star beside the items that are the most expensive, put a star beside those that are easy to grow and put a star beside those that take up the least space in the garden.  Any vegetables with two or three stars beside them I will definitely grow.  Those with one or no stars I'll think a bit more about whether or not to grow them - mostly this will boil down to space.

For example, I will definitely be growing green beans because we eat a lot of green beans in our house, they are expensive and easy to grow.  They do take up more space than some other items, but one plant will give a lot of beans.  Green beans are also good as they are relatively easy to freeze and store for use later in the year.  Also, beans are nitrogen fixing plants which means that they put nitrogen back into the soil when they are growing.  For this reason it is good to grow them in beds that I will be putting kale, spinach etc into the following year as these vegetables require a lot of nitrogen to grow.  So growing green beans has additional benefits as well as saving money!

This year I am planning on growing - kale, green beans, sugar snap peas, lettuce (various types), broccoli, potatoes, tomatoes, cucumber, onions - red and white, green beans, beetroot, parsnip, spinach, strawberries, blueberries, scallions (spring onions), radishes and one courgette plant.

Menu planner for 14/4/2012 - 21/4/2012

Last weekend I was away at a wedding which meant that I wasn't as well organised as I could have been with regards to the shopping and my meal planning.  On Monday I picked up some shopping and spent just under €60.  For dinner on Monday night I did squash and chorizo stew, Tuesday and Wednesday was chilli, Thursday we had Salmon, baby boiled potatoes and green beans and tonight we had chicken stir fry.  I had no choice but to make chilli as my daughter requested it every night the previous week, so to make her happy I promised to make it for her.

My meal plan for this next week is as follows:-
Saturday lunch - Leek and potato soup
Saturday dinner - Beef in black bean sauce
Sunday lunch - Leftover soup
Sunday dinner - Roast beef (eye of the round), roasted potatoes and vegetables
Monday dinner - Leftovers from Sundays dinner
Tuesday dinner - soup (depending what veg is on offer)
Wednesday dinner - Skinny Irish Stew
Thursday dinner - Quick chicken chasseur
Friday dinner - Herb and lemon pork chops, mash and vegetables

For lunches this week we will have sandwiches, tuna salad and soup.  The dinners that I am making will make use of meat that we have in the freezer - chicken, lamb and bacon and quite a few of the leftover ingredients in my fridge.

My shopping list for the week includes:-

1. Milk - 2 litres full fat
2. Milk - slimline 1 litre x 3
3. Yoghurt's
4. Cheese - babybel
5. Bread
6. Streaky bacon - I have bacon in the freezer.  It isn't streaky bacon but it will be fine for the chicken chasseur.
7. Beef - eye of the round
8. Beef fillet
9. Ham
10. Lettuce - I checked this fridge and I have these in already!
11. Cucumber
12. Cherry tomatoes
13. Red onion
14. Mushrooms
15. Baby carrots
16. Baby potatoes
17. Parsnips - I checked the fridge and I have these in already!
18. Leeks - I checked the fridge and I have these in already!
19. Parsley
20. Oranges
21. Eggs
22. Bananas
23. Custard - pots of custard to go with some stewed ruhbarb that I will make with some ruhbarb I have in.
24. Weetabix - I don't really need these, but having checked the internet I know they are on offer in Lidl this week, 72 bisks for €4.39 which is 50% extra free so I am going to get some while the offer is on

This week I have a voucher from Dunnes that will give me €8 off my shopping if I spend €80.  I would like to use this voucher, but looking at my list I doubt that my spend will get me near the €80 at the moment.  I am adding a note to the bottom of my shopping list of some store cupboard items that I could do with stocking up in.  I will pick up some of these to take my shopping to €80 so that I can use the voucher.  Although this means I will be spending more money than I intended too, I think it is smart to do this as these are items I will eventually have to buy, so I may as well buy them now and get €8 worth of them for free.  The items I am adding to the bottom of my shopping list are:-

• cans chopped tomatoes
• cans of bean - cannellini, flageolet, kidney etc.
• cans of sweetcorn
• cans of peas
• teabags
• coffee
• formula
• pepper
• stock cubes (though I need to check which flavour I need most before I go)
• toilet roll
• kitchen roll

TIPS - if like me you have a voucher to use there are a few things you can do to make sure that you get the best use out of the voucher.  In this case my voucher is for money off is I spend a certain amount.  To make sure that I spend enough to be able to use the voucher I will use a calculator to tot up my spend as I go around the store.  As well as making sure I spend enough, this will also allow me to make sure that I do not go too far over the amount I need to spend to use the voucher. 

Making a list before you go of store cupboard items that you need means that you can be sure that you are spending your money on items that are off use to you rather than just blindly picking up items to increase your total spend. 

Another good tip is to have a look at the promotions on in store and pick up any of the store cupboard items that are on offer first.  If there is a particularly good promotion I will pick up a few more of these items than I will of the others.

A change of plans..and a cake.

The weather was quite good today so instead of the planned chicken with mushrooms and red wine sauce we ended up having a barbeque. 

As well as having an impromptu barbeque, my daughter and I made the Chocolate brownie cake from the March 2007 issue of Goodfood magazine.  It was really easy to make and didn't take too long in the oven.  However, when I was lifting it out of the oven it was very wobbly.  After searching the Internet I decided that perhaps that was the way it was supposed to be.  I left it to cool while we ate our dinner and then served it with ice cream.  It was very heavy and stodgy.  The outside was quite crisp while the inside was very gooey.  The cake had risen about the edges of the cake tin in the oven (despite me using a 22 cm tin instead of the specified 20 cm tin) but after cooling it had sunk right back down to the bottom of the tin.  I am not really a fan of heavy chocolate cakes or desserts in general so I doubt I will make this again.  Even my daughter wasn't fussed on it.

As well as having a barbeque and making a cake, we also got a bit of planting done today.  We have 6 strawberry plants in the garden already that we planted last year, but I bought a few runners to plant up when my daughter was disappointed by the lack of strawberries from the 6 plants last year.  She helped me to put 8 runners in pots.  I'll leave them in the pots for a few weeks before planting them out. 

We also got two beds ready for sowing potatoes.  In total I planted 5 types of potatoes.  I have put my early potatoes - Duke of York's - in a bed that I will ultimately be putting my beans in.  They will be gone by the time I am planting out my beans.  The other potatoes we planted were Maris Pipers, King Edwards, Charlotte and Kerr's pinks.  Our first potatoes will be ready in 11 weeks - in the middle of June.  From then on, anytime I am making dinner that requires potatoes I will use some from the garden, saving a little money on my food shopping bill.