Not Just a Man's World

I’m not the fastest chef on the planet, preferring to tinker around and take my time, so Chris, my partner, cooks from Sunday night through to Friday.  We also have a fairly standard fixed menu for those days, carefully calculated out for ease of cooking, ease of shopping and ease of keeping to the diet.

Saturday lunch and dinner and Sunday lunch are usually my chances to get creative and, as always happens when I’m on a cutting diet, suddenly I find myself filled with lots of ideas of new menus to try.  Here’s what I tried out this weekend.

Saturday dinner

For the last 4 weeks, with winter fast approaching, I’ve finally started learning how to cook a roast dinner.  Roast dinner (the way we have it) is the ultimate in paleo meals.

• Roast joint – big enough to produce meat for two for dinner and for at least five lunch servings.
• Plenty of roasted shallots and roasted whole garlic cloves – thrown round the joint 45 mins before it finishes cooking.  We usually use a whole garlic bulb for two of us.
• Broccoli – an entire head of it.
• Some other veg (usually a brassica) if we’re hungry – we weren’t this weekend.

In the last four weeks we’ve been buying whatever joint has been reduced at the supermarket and have ended up with a pork joint for three weeks.  I’m proud to report a success rate on the cracking of 100% so far so I’m not sure why everyone struggles so much to get it to crackle.

Saturday and Sunday lunch

I’ve been cooking the same thing on both the Saturday and Sunday lunches.  It gives me a chance to try something out and then amend the mistakes the next day.  In the last few weeks I’ve done Black Pepper Chicken Caesar Salad and Stuffed Chicken Breasts (stuffed with cheese and wrapped in bacon).  The inspiration for these usually comes from whatever is reduced in the supermarket on Friday night. 

This week’s reduced basket included some white fish, asparagus, curly kale and leaks.

Voila!  What you see there is:

• A bed of steamed curly kale
• Some fried leaks topping off the kale
• A piece of foil-baked haddock (it was cod on Saturday)
• Some steamed asparagus
• The world’s most delicious tomato sauce (if I do say so myself).

I was particularly pleased with the tomato sauce, taken from the Good Housekeeping cookbook, so I’m sharing it here:

Ingredients (made two portions of the size shown):
1 can (400g) chopped tomatoes
1 tbsp olive oil
1 crushed garlic clove
Zest of half a lemon
1 tsp dried oregano

Directions:

1. Put all ingredients in a saucepan.  Cover and simmer for 20 minutes.
2. Remove lid and continue simmering for 10 minutes to reduce  to the desired thickness.  The recipe called for salt, pepper and a couple of tablespoons of chopped fresh basil to be added when you take the lid off which I suspect makes it more of a pizza topping or pasta sauce – but for the white fish I left it as it was.

It came out creamy, rich, and totally paleo.

So, to help keep my cookery mind focused through the winter months I may keep sharing some of these experiments with you all, though I may not be so cruel as to provide a photo of a roasted meat joint every week!

Related posts:

1. Paleo kitchen experiments: perfect pot roast
2. Paleo recipes: roast pork with crackling
3. Paleo kitchen experiments – meatballs and roasted veg
4. Paleo recipes: Chorizo sausage in a tomato sauce and paleo tapas