Meal Planning – Recipe Development

For a couple of weeks now, through careful meal planning, we have managed to make all our meals without any shopping at all. Yup! You got that right! ‘Not even milk’? I hear you ask? No. We buy long life pasteurized milk so we have used what we have at home. How about bread? Well to be perfectly honest, in our family, we don’t have much bread. Most of us are not fans of sandwiches. When we do have bread, we have it with homemade soup and our bread rolls are homemade.

We had to do a grocery shop on Sunday because we had run out of most of the basics we usually have in the fridge, freezer, and cupboards. Before the shopping trip, we planned the meals and went out purposefully to go purchase, for the most part, just what we needed for the meals for the week. In addition to the main shop, we also buy a few canned food to store away in our pantry.

 

This is something we do most times particularly approaching Winter. So we will buy canned tomatoes and other vegetables, soups, baked beans and the like. That way, we avoid spending too much time out in the cold during Winter. We don’t fancy spending lots of time in the cold. Here’s another tip too: if you have sufficient storage space, then it helps to buy items like pasta and powdered milk to store away as, like most canned foods, they have a long shelf life.

Having to find ingredients for meals from a fast depleting food source has led to some creativity and dare I say, recipe development. At the end of this I will share with you a recipe we have developed which is a so tasty and if you are not told, you might not be able to guess the main ingredient! Read on.

So this week we have had:

Sunday: Roast Chicken Dinner with Carrots and Brocolli

Monday: Tuna Pasta Bake

Tuesday: Chicken and Egg Fried Rice with sweet corn and Peas (Chicken from Sunday’s Roast dinner)

Wednesday: Spaghetti Bolognaise and Salad

Thursday: Jacket Potatoes with Spicy Mince, Cheese, and Cole Slaw

Friday: Home-made Pizza on Baguettes with a personal choice of toppings 

Saturday: Soup and Bread Rolls

 

So here is the recipe I promised:

 

Mature Courgette and Salted Cod Stir Fry

1/3 of a large Courgette

200g Salted Cod

1 Onion

2 Carrots

6 – 8 Mushrooms

2 Tomatoes

2 Cloves garlic

Salt and Pepper to taste

oil

(Other vegetables of personal choice)

Method

Place salted cod in water to boil. After boiling for 5 minutes, pour off that water and boil again for a further 5 minutes. Leave to soak in cold water.

Wash and peel Courgette and carrots and then grate. Wash and chop mushrooms and tomatoes. 

Prepare and chop onion and garlic. 

Remove the salted cod from the water. Drain completely. Break into pieces.

Saute the onion, tomatoes, and garlic. Stir for 3 minutes. Then add the salted cod and mushroom. Cook for a further 2 minutes. Introduce the vegetables to the pan in order of which needs a longer length of time needed for cooking.

Add salt and pepper about a minute before the pan is removed from the flame. Serve hot.

 

 

This is a very versatile dish which can be adapted by adding a variety of other vegetables according to what is available. Even frozen vegetables can be added to the mix.

If you do try it, let me know how you like it. By the way, this is now one of our family favourites. Instead of mature courgette, we usually use shredded cabbage. 

I’m happy to share meal planning ideas each week with Katy Kicker and others.

Have a good week ahead and if you have ‘developed’ any recipes of your own, let’s test them out! Feel free to share them in the comments below.