Hommage à Deb

Deb from home life simplified has been inspiring me of late with her weekly meal plans . She and I have the same taste in food it seems. I, however, can't bring myself to post everything we ate last week every week, I would have to hang my head in shame at the repetitive, unbalanced diet that is ours. It's not all bad though. In fact, sometimes there are a few really good things, so I'll just post those instead. Maybe somebody will get a few ideas. Or not.

Like Deb, heck, no I'm going to be lazy about this and just copy and paste from her site (is that ok?)

Please note that most of my meals are not being eaten by my kids so I will indicate if a meal is one for our whole family.  Between our desire to eat foods with a lot of spices and our kids desire to eat foods that don’t touch or freak them out we only eat the same foods an average of twice a week.  We are working on this so you will see more family style meals in the next 6 months.

except I'm a lazy mother and we aren't working on this.

This week saw us with

Black beans (cooked from dry with just a bit of epazote, dried chilli and chicken stock) with rice and pico de gallo salsa

mr HLS's chicken tikka using the second half of the marinade which I had frozen. I hadn't made chicken tikka before, so have no comparisons, but this recipe is AMAZING. We ate it with Nigel Slater's fragrant rice from the 30 minute cook (one of my very most used books), and a fresh tomato chutney I found in an Indian cook book, but is to all intents and purposes pico de gallo salsa. Still, the astringency fits perfectly.

Lasagne, again using up freezer stocks. I had tonnes of ragu, and I do make good ragu, but I make seriously lousy lasagne. I need help. Please!

Home made pizza with buffalo's milk mozzarella (just 'cause it was on 2 for 1 at the supermarket), rucola-rocket-arugula-what ever you want to call that stuff and fresh tomatoes. The tomatoes go in the oven on the pizza, the rucola gets dumped on once it comes out of the oven. My dear husband is pizza baker around here, he makes the dough in batches and freezes it in portions in freezer bags. Yeast being the clever stuff it is seems not to care that it gets frozen. You just need to remember to pull the dough out of the freezer at about lunch time. By dinner time it will have quite literally risen again. We've even been known to defrost it in the microwave, but extreme caution is needed!

What else have I cooked this week?

Oh, yeah, these muffins. The recipe's for a bread but I made it into muffins. They're good! http://allrecipes.com/recipe/banana-pumpkin-bread/detail.aspx



 and Nigella Lawson's grandma's bean and barley soup I needed to use up a bag of mixed legumes which had been hanging around my cupboard for at least a couple of years longer than I care to remember. I feared it was going to be rather too worthy and wholefoody, but it is saved by the parsnip. And a liberal dousing with olive oil and parmesan at the table. Saves most things I find.

Tonight's dinner will be an experiment involving pappardelle (would use tagliatelle, but for some bizzare reason my husband doesn't like them), salmon, zucchini, saffron and some lemon zest. I'll let you know how it turns out.

Our tried, tested and fail safe pizza dough recipe (from the Joy of Cooking )

Enough for 2 crusts. We usually double the recipe

Combine in a large mixing bowl or the bowl of a heavy duty mixer and let stand until the yeast is dissolved, about 5 minutes:
        1 package (2 1/4 tsp) active dry yeast
        1 1/3 cups hand warm  water
Add:
        3 1/2 to 3 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
        2 tbs olive oil
        1 tbs salt (yes, really)
Mix by hand or on low speed for about 1 minute to blend all the ingredients. Knead for about 10 minutes by hand or with the dough hook on low to medium speed until the dough is smooth and elastic. Transfer the dough to a bowl lightly coated with olive oil and turn it over once to coat with oil. Cover and let rise in a warm place (the kitchen does just fine) until doubled in volume, 1 to 1 1/2 hours).

Preheat the oven to HOT we use 250c / 475f. Cut the dough in 2, stick the part you're going to freeze into a freezer bag and freeze. Roll out the other part as thin as you can. We make oblong pizza for the sake of convenience. This amount should perfectly fit on to one of the tin shelves in your oven. A little tip from my friend Sol who got the tip from a pizza baker is to dust your counter top with fine semolina before rolling, rather than just using flour. It is better, but we used flour for years and it was still just fine.        


Don't bother make a sauce for the pizza, a can of chopped tomatoes is perfectly acceptable. We use polpa which is finer but not as fine as passata, but use what you've got. If they aren't salted, sprinkle over some salt

1 125g / 5 oz mozzarella chopped very finely will be (just) enough to sprinkle over


the husband has to add dried oregano, the jury's still out on this one.

Then add your toppings, drizzle the whole lot with olive oil and bake for 12 minutes.

Ok, that just took me over an hour and a half on a beautiful autumn afternoon. And I don't have any fancy formatting or stuff. I think I'm going to have to get rather quicker if I'm to keep it up!