Meal Planning (w/c November 24, 2013)

I had a couple of cooking disasters, which I didn’t get the chance to recover from – so last week, I thought I’d skip the normal meal planning posts and take the opportunity to play around with a few things.  As we’re heading into the holiday season, I thought I’d post a couple of recipes for entertaining instead– a fresh salsa that’s great with tortilla chips and caramelized onions for serving with cheese and crackers.

Click here to view or print a copy of the plan with the shopping list.

This week’s breakfast is baked beans made in the Thermomix served on a slice on multi-grain toast.  The recipe is here.

Lunch for Monday and Tuesday is the chicken drumsticks with eggplant and lentils.  The recipe can be found here.

Monday’s dinner is going to be a crispy skin salmon served with a cauliflower purée and pan-fried snow peas.  I’m going to see if I can cook the cauliflower in the Thermomix bowl while cooking the salmon and snow peas in the Varoma.  The draft recipe for the purée is below.

Tuesday’s dinner and Wednesday’s lunch will be the tofu, eggplant and pork mince stir-fry with dry fried green beans.  The recipe for the stir-fry is here – and the bean recipe is here.

Wednesday’s dinner and Thursday’s lunch is going to be a redo of the penne and sausage dish.  I’m going for a drier sauce by taking a can of tomatoes out of the original recipe.

Draft Recipes

Cauliflower Purée

Ingredients

400g cauliflower florets

1/2 onion, peeled and halved

20g butter

20g milk

Salt and pepper, to season

Instructions

1. Add onion into the Thermomix bowl and chop with the measuring cup (MC) on for 3 seconds/Speed 5

2. Scrape down the sides of the bowl, add butter and sauté with the MC off for 2 minutes/100C/Speed 1

3. Add cauliflower, milk and 20g of water into the bowl and cook for 10-12 minutes/Varoma/Speed 1 (or until cooked)

4. Add salt and pepper and purée with the MC on for 1 minute – going slowly from Speed 1 to Speed 8