My First Attempt at Menu Planning

I'm trying out Menu Plan Monday for the very first time. I think it will help keep me motivated. I'm cheating a little bit because I had a migraine yesterday and shopped for the basics, hoping to put my menu together today, after the fact. Next week I'll sit down and plan before I shop.

Monday: Chicken Massaman with rice. I'll write up a recipe for this later. It's a Thai sweet and sour curry and it's just delicious. Even the kids love it. Again, no photos, because of said migraine. And, hubby helped cook it last night, making it extra delicious.

Tuesday: Fish with corn on the cob, mashed potatoes and vegies.

Wednesday: Roast chicken, cauliflower/brocolli and white sauce, roast potatoes, and peas and corn.

Thursday: Spaghetti and meatballs. I'm cheating with this one and using a store bought jar of sauce, but I am making my own meatballs. I need to make up a batch of my own spaghetti sauce in the next couple of weeks.

Friday: Friday is our weekly take away (take out) day. I doubt that will change, but sometimes I do insist on cooking that day.

Saturday: Chicken schnitzel with scalloped potatoes and vegies.

Sunday: Meatloaf with vegies.

I need to come up with some side dishes that don't involve potatoes. I'm not sure how well they'll go down with the family, though.

Like I said, this is my first attempt at menu planning and I know I could have done better if I allowed myself more time to think about it.

Impossible Quiche

 

I made Impossible Quiche for dinner a couple of weeks ago because I forgot to take meat out of the freezer - hate when that happens. 

What's Impossible Quiche, you ask? Well it's quiche that doesn't have a pastry crust, but it does have flour in the mix which puts a light crusting on the bottom of the mixture. I was shocked at how much my family, including my three young children, LOVED it. Not only did they ask for seconds, but they begged me to make it again "very soon, how about tomorrow?"

I looked in my fridge and pantry to see what I could whip up. I had eggs, milk, and cheese in the fridge. Some bacon in the freezer. Onion in the pantry. I immediately thought I'd whip up a quiche. Then I realised I didn't have any pastry and didn't really have time to make my own. I Googled "crustless quiche" and came up with Impossible Quiche. There were many recipes for similar things. I didn't have anything fancy like chorizo in the house, so I settled for a very basic Quiche Lorraine-style impossible quiche.

Going by the comments on the Taste.com.au site, I adjusted the recipe a bit. Here's what I came up with and it was delicious. I didn't even think to take a photo of  the finished product, but it's similar to the one the site up, only with different ingredients.

It was delicious, but not quite perfect. The first time I cooked it I used only 5 eggs and used a mixture of milk and cream, but it came out way too heavy. I'll definitely only use milk in this recipe from now on.

Late Thursday afternoon I forgot the meat again and this is how I modified the recipe again.

Impossible Quiche

Ingredients

6 large eggs

1 1/2 cups milk

1/2 cup SR flour

1 large onion

250g bacon, most of the fat cut off

grated cheese, I'm guessing it was about 1- 1 1/2 cups

salt and pepper to taste, I usually go fairly heavy on the salt with eggs

chopped parsley

1 Tbs olive oil

Directions

Preheat oven to 190C/375F

Heat oil in frypan. Finely dice onion and saute until translucent. Chop bacon and toss in same frypan as cooked onions and fry off for a few minutes. Transfer to a plate covered in paper towels to drain and cool.

In a bowl, whisk up the rest of the ingredients.

When bacon/onion mix is cool enough spoon half of it into the egg mixture and give it a whisk. Transfer this to your quiche pan/pie plate. Gently drop spoonfuls of the rest of the bacon/onion mix on top of the quiche.

 

Bake for 35mins.

Notes

The first time I tried the original recipe, all the bacon and onion sank to the bottom of the quiche. Not ideal. This time it was cooked through evenly in the quiche and perfect.

Now, the original recipe says to cook it for 45 minutes, both times my version has cooked well before that time. The first time I used one less egg and only 1 cup of liquid (half cream/half milk) and when I checked the oven at 25 minutes, it was well and truly done, if not a little overdone.

This past Thursday, my second attempt and the recipe above, I checked it at 25 minutes to see how we were going and decided to give it another 10. It came out much better. And tasted much nicer than my first attempt. It's definitely going to a dish I make often.

Getting Back to Blogging.

Please excuse me while I move things around a bit; it has been a very long time since I've used Blogger. I started blogging back in 2001 when I was pregnant with my first child. I met a wonderful group of women, many of whom I am still friends with today.

I progressed to my own domain and hosting shortly after that in many incarnations. I've written about parenting, cooking, photography, scrapbooking and card making - you name it, I've probably blogged about it.

I gave up my last domain name in 2009 after letting my blog gather dust for nearly a year. This past few months I've felt totally out of the loop. I want to get back to blogging, but more than that I want to motivate myself - if I have to blog about my experiences, I'm forced to actually have experiences. I want to force myself to cook more healthy dinners. Actually, healthy could be a bit misleading. I cook a lot of comfort food, but it has to be healthier than a Big Mac, right?

I also bake. A lot. I used to share my recipes online. I got many emails telling me how my muffins were the best they'd ever tasted. Or how my chocolate chip cookies were so delicious.

Well, now I'm on a journey of my own - I want to try new recipes, and I'm hoping that I'll be motiviated enough to photograph them and maybe I'll inspire more people to cook meals from scratch.

I'll leave it there for now. I hope you'll take this journey with me.