Weekly meals plan

[nineseven]

Mushrooms, spinach pasta with wild garlic pesto
Spinach, parmesan orzo with pork chops
Kedgeree
Chicken, purple sprouting broccoli with fried gnocchi
Leek & blue cheese risotto with pangritata
Giant pigs in blankets with mash, peas and onion gravy
Cardoon gratin with crusty bread and salad

Wild garlic pesto

I always want your menus, Disco

[wendy james]

Apple, borlotti and chard cassoulet
Black bean and peanut stew
Pasta with lemony olive tapenade
Peanut butter udon
Spanish chickpea stew
Mushroom tikka masala
Taco night - fillings will be tangy black beans; smoky mushroom and limey cashew cream; chargrilled corn & pepper and salsa

[Disco]

Wild garlic pesto

I always want your menus, Disco

Well I hope you will approve of the minor change to the spinach and parmesan orzo as I forgot I needed the spinach and threw it in some soup today so I will be stirring some wild garlic pesto through it instead.

I am also adding slow cooked short beef ribs with pancetta and chestnut mushrooms as an additional meal to this week's plan.

[nineseven]

I approve of both of these revisions. Please proceed.

[Mountain Goat]

I also definitely approve. I keep looking here for inspiration, of which I am DEVOID, because everything sounds nice. I am excited to hear how the cardoon turns out, where did you get it from? I have "seen" cardoons as an idea for plants that are both attractive and edible and know from that that they are similar to artichokes in taste but have never seen one in actual life (to eat, I've seen plants) - is it from a kind person's garden or is somewhere selling it?

I have quasi finalised this week, lapsing into laziness in thought and action as the week goes on:

Beetroot, goat's cheese and walnut tart with salad
Salmon with black beans, chilli, lime, avocado (I had some salsas/lime/coriander left over from a meal kit that needed using up)
Toad with onion gravy, carrots, spring greens
Fish finger (pollock to you) sandwich
Slow roasted pork belly, smoked cheddar cauliflower cheese, spring greens, something to cut through - possibly pickled leeks in the cauli cheese as I have a surfeit of leeks but am thinking on. Apple is the obvious but necessitates shopping and cba.

Oh and I definitely revise as I go through the week but usually roughly stick to it as the plan is a valiant effort to eat things before they die and I don't want to incur wastage. But I often make a less or more complicated version depending on how much time/energy I end up having, or change things if I have less/more of an ingredient than I thought, or something looks closer to needing eating urgently than I expected etc.

[Disco]

I am glad of the approval.

The cardoons are coming in my - Riverford - vegetable box tomorrow. I am quite excited as they are a vehicle to get cream into my face.

Your menu is very appealing to me. I could eat it all right now.

[Mountain Goat]

Ooh. Abel and Cole need to step up.

Thank you, I am so bored of my own ideas.

[Disco]

I might have to get some pork belly to copy you. The giant pigs in blankets can stay in the freezer. I have a cauli and leeks arriving too.

[nineseven]

I am so bored of my food too. I thought I ate quite a varied diet but looking at my food diary I basically eat the same 7-10 meals on rotation. It's definitely a disadvantage of living by myself and batch cooking/freezing portions. I'm trying to try new recipes now. Maybe I will just copy everything Disco eats

[Derek Nimmo]

I'm fed up to the back teeth of my own cooking too, and am trying to add in the odd new recipe - this seared tuna thing from Waitrose was my most recent one, is much more than the sum of its parts and is calorie-friendly if you're mindful of such things. (And is also easy to halve / double.)

[Mountain Goat]

Maybe seven of us should get together and think of one dish each a week that we can all make. I feel empathy with my mum who cooked pretty much the same thing every week (roast beef on Sun, bubble and squeak on Mon, steak and kidney pie on Tues etc). I do do new things a lot but am turning more frequently than usual to old easy mindless favourites plus new things just seem to follow the same pattern, ie select main ingredient that needs eating, think about what it goes with that I have, elect standard format for those ingredients such as pie, pasta, quiche, risotto, burger, soup, noodles, pick a condiment/sauce/punch of flavour suitable to the geography of that format, consider whether it might want egg/cheese/pangratata/herbs on top, work out if I can get some of this massive backlog of carrots involved, fall asleep.

I love seared tuna and now want it but have a backlog of fish in the freezer I need to burn through before it gets...freezer burn.

[Disco]

Bloody carrots! I've got millions of them.

[Squirrel]

Same, Disco.

I’m also bored. We all eat together as a family now Mr S is home all the time which is more convenient, but the type of family-friendly meals my children eat are rarely what I would choose otherwise.
In fact I’ve been meaning to start a family meal ideas thread.

[Disco]

The cardoons have arrived.

[Ella77]

Gosh!

[emma_p]

After you mentioned cardoons, I keep seeing them!

I’m going to check out Eataly London at the weekend who had some.

[Ella77]

That's so near my office, I'm looking forward to going.

[Disco]

I've got two more bunches of it! It had better be worth the effort.

[emma_p]

That's so near my office, I'm looking forward to going.

I LOVED the one in NYC and always visited it. It had best live up to my expectations!

[Disco]

So I’ve binned the cardoons, poured a gin and we’re having calamari with fries instead.