Whole lamb shoulder, not diced lamb shoulder
My grand plans for a lovely lamb hotpot on a cold wintry day (a Cookbook Challenge from The Pie Room by Calum Franklin) were foiled by the fact I didn’t read the recipe properly, and didn’t buy the correct ingredients. I read 2kg lamb shoulder, immediately decided to halve the recipe because that is a lot of lamb and it’s expensive, but didn’t notice that it wasn’t diced lamb shoulder (which I bought) but a whole lamb shoulder which needed to be roasted at the start of the whole process. Whoops.
Stew and dumpballs
Although I would normally just make it up, the point of Cookbook Challenge is to follow a recipe correctly and expand my cookery repertoire, so we had lamb stew and dumplings (“dumpballs” as Ioan calls them) instead. And very nice it was too (especially with a big dollop of mint jelly), and the hotpot will be booked in for a date in the future.
Another recipe not followed
Although I was going to say that otherwise I followed the meal plan exactly, I realise I did not, as Nigella’s pasta with lemon, garlic and breadcrumbs ended up being spaghetti with leftover sauce from the previous day’s (also Nigella’s) chicken with garlic cream sauce (which I very nearly ruined but ended up being amazing and one of our new favourite meals). I did copy the breadcrumb idea though, and it was delicious:
Leftover chicken
The leftover roast chicken from the dish made it onto the menu on Tuesday, served with chips (ahem, it was supposed to be with vegetables … another day not actually following the meal plan exactly!), and some spicy mayonnaise made with last week’s leftover spicy Korean sauce, which I just mixed with some mayo from a jar:
I did stick to the menu otherwise, with a lovely tomato risotto topped with roasted salmon fillet:
And a cheeky Big Mac and fries on takeaway Friday:
Menu plan – week 3 2021
- Monday – gnocchi with butter, sage, garlic and pine kernels by Simon Hopkinson for this week’s Cookbook Challenge
- Tuesday – pork chops and veggies
- Wednesday – cottage pie
- Thursday – lightly dusted fish and veg
- Friday – it’s our anniversary weekend (25 years!) so we are treating ourselves to a fancy takeaway from Atul Kochhar’s Kanishka restaurant
- Saturday – prawn and chilli pasta
- Sunday – toad in the hole
Will I stick to the menu this week? Let’s hope so! What will you be eating? Share your meal plans to inspire me.