still searching for my cooking mojo.....(sigh)

Wed Jul 28:
* tonkatsu (instant shaker type tonkatsu coating!)
* mashed potato
* carrots sauteed in maple syrup and butter
* asparagus spears
* white bread
*

Thurs Jul 29:
* squid and vege stir fry in oyster sauce
* tofu
* rice
* ししとう
* gyoza

Fri Jul 30:
* fried rice (I seem to be eating less rice, so we are having leftovers every night again even though I only make 2go of rice....the freezer is getting overloaded with rice!!)
* mabo nasu
* left over squid vege stir fry
* salad

lasagna

Made a lasagna for lunch, and there was leftovers (which J couldn't believe - he asked me "didn't they like it" lol, but we had already had a delish cake my friend brought over for morning tea less than an hour before hand)

Also some salad leftovers, so that was dinner!

Lasagna- meat with grated pumpkin, carrot and spinach (recipe below)
Salad - lettuce, tomato, green beans, carrots and mushrooms in one and lettuce, SD tomatoes and daikon in the other.

I had the leftover pasta from last night, and mini meat pie.

K had peanut butter sandwhiches (she wanted bread and I wasn't in the mood to argue!! She had a good lunch, tho)

********* (edit)
I don't really have a recipe anymore for Lasagna - this is one dish I can now cook without having one!! But I got the original recipe from GaijinWife, for her ラブラブlasagna, about a year ago, and now I usually tweak it depending on what I have in the fridge.

This time this is what I did:
400g pork/beef mince
1/8 pumpkin, grated
1 small carrot, grated
several leaves of spinach, finely chopped
1/2 onion, finely chopped
lasagna sheets (dry, not pre-cooked)

Brown the mince, remove from frypan
In same pan, add a bit of oil if necessary then fry off the onion until translucent in colour, add pumpkin, carrot and cook until tender. Add spinach and cook for just a few minutes.
Return mince back to frypan, and add meat sauce flavouring (I use Rumic, a powdered flavouring) and just a bit of water

White sauce:
40g butter
2TBS (heaped) of flour
2&1/2 cups(?) milk

Meanwhile, melt butter on low heat in saucepan, add flour and mix well until glubby. Slowly add milk a little at a time, stirring constantly until it starts to get a bit glubby at the bottom while stirring. Allow to come to a bit of a simmer, then turn off heat.

Layer a dish that fits in the oven with meat and vege mixture, lasagna sheets (not cooked!! this is what makes this recipe so simple), then たっぷりwhite sauce, repeat. make sure the top layer is well covered with white sauce. Sprinkle grated cheese on top.

microwave for 20mins
Then in oven at 150deg for 20min or until top is golden brown with melted cheese!!

I still think I am layering たっぷり with white sauce, but sometimes even not enough and the bits of pasta sticking out at the top get hard in the oven. Next time - more sauce!!!!!

the grated pumpkin in this makes it nice and creamy!

a real frugal friday

Lunch was leftover pasta with fresh bread (soft white loaf today - I wanted to make cheese bread, but it turns out you can't do that on timer, and I wanted it for breaky too, oh well)

Dinner was leftover curry and rice (I seem to have amassed about 5go of cooked rice in the freezer - time to move it on) and last night's leftovers too. Worked out well as J went for a haircut after work, so K ate early (unagi and rice, miso soup and egg roll) then we had a bath, then all I had to do was reheat when J got home.

And that's it for today.

Frugal Friday again

J was supposed to be having dinner out with clients, but mailed me at lunch time to say it was cancelled and he would be home for dinner (damn, he gave me enough notice, I couldn't NOT make anything)...but I didn't want to go shopping, so it was another night of scratching something together from the almighty (and seemingly never ending) supply of chinese cabbage and daikon.

薄切り大根と白菜
　I didn't want to make a whole lot and have it left over, so only used about half the amounts of daikon and cabbage, but it seemed like a lot when cooking so I used the whole amounts of flavourings - which meant that it turned out a bit too strong (and there was a whole amount left, haha) But I think it would be nice piled on the rice

nabe leftovers, semi-雑炊 style (well, threw an egg in there anyway)

cabbage and hotate cream煮. Had some dried scallops that I "brought back to life"?/reconstituted?/un-dried? (not sure what it the process is called) to use for this. Didn't make a pasta out of it, just the topping. Enough left over now for a pasta dish out of it for lunch tomorrow - forward thinking ;)

squid, cooked under the fish grill and served with soy sauce-mayo. Simple and delish.

rice and 山のくらげ which K got into!! She likes her tsumami, be she cant wait until she gets beer with it, haha

this little piggy....

Just a repeat of the pork dish that Nay shared a while back. We have heaps of tomatoes in the fridge, so made a fresh tomato and onion whiteish sauce to go with it. Served with mash potato, steamed carrots, cabbage and snow peas, and pumpkin/maitake left overs.

So simple yet so yummy - nice comfort food. No way I am gonna keep to a 2kg preg. weight gain for the next month either.....oh well!

not chinese

When J rang at lunch time he was on his way to the Chinese restaurant.....so I had to quickly re-think my dinner plans (which *were* えびチリand八宝菜 - as it turns out, it was a good thing, because although I *thought* we had bought a 白菜 at the 道の駅 on the way home from Gunma, turns out we didn't so, it would have been freak out stations at 6pm when I realised there was no cabbage!)

In keeping with frugal friday (only because I couldn't be bothered going out in the rain) our menu was with stuff in fridge/freezer:

大根と牛筋の煮込み

　焼き長ネギ with 梅肉　sauce

spinach and egg drop soup

salad with 大根, red and yellow capscium　and 和風 dressing.

salmon roe on rice for K - at 2 years old, I know!!

The negi was yummy - like something from an izakaya. Soup - really good too! And daikon and meat was good, but could have used more タレ and time 煮込んで-ring. Still, tender and good.

fabulous frugal friday

J has his work Xmas party (end of the year party) tonight, so it was just us gals.
I think I may have whipped up the most delish pasta dish - so simple and tasty (although if J was here, he would probably have said it was not a strong enough taste..)

And it was a veritable rainbow of colours, all cooked in one pan to boot with:

green beans

red capscium

yellow capsicum

eringi mushrooms

spinach

and macaroni pasta
I simple fried a bit in olive oil, then added the spinach and water it had been soaking in, then added the pasta and a stock cube and voila it was simple dinner tonight.

For K's I actually did it seperately, chopped up all the ingredients really teeny-tiny (added some carrot too) and then added a hamburg we had in the frezer. Squirted in a bit of tomato sauce and simmered it down to make her dinner, and enough for 2 more meals (emergency freezer food!)
She made me take a photo of hers too, so here it is:


She didn't even know she was eating healthy veges, and had 3 (THREE!!) serves of pasta. I think the fact that she likes to add the parmesan cheese on it helped her appetite along too, but man, it looked like she hadn't been fed in days.



All in all, a fulfilling meal, and got to use up a lot of veges before we go away for the weekend.

get some pork on ya fork

I went down to the new Sanwa supermarket this morning - new as in grand opening day. The hoards of people lining up to get into the big shiny new shopping centre put me right off though, so I stuck with the small supermarket down by the station , that disappointed me by not having any chicken carckasses. But I did get some pork, and 牛すじ and a few cheapie veges, didn't go overboard.

Anyway, being Frugal Friday and all, I used up leftovers to go with the pork, following this great recipe from Nay. I had to adapt it as had no cream, so made up a little white sauce and used up the half leftover tin of diced tomatoes from the other night. J even commented on how nice the sauce was, bonus!!

Dinner:

pork chops with creamy tomato sauce

steamed cabbage

mashed potato

I seem to be making more 洋 dinners recently, not sure why. I may have come to an impasse with my Japanese food repartee...will have to search out some more/new recipes next week, maybe BEFORE I go shopping to make sure I have the ingredients to make them. Hey that's a good idea - menu planning!

frugal Wednesday (on a roll!)

Still only using what is in the house:

cabbage and ham soup

chicken and eggplant

さつまいもとにんじんのきんぴら

rice (the old one, cooked up with 備長炭 of course

left over いくら

kimchee






(do I need to mention that while the rice and soup is my individual serve, the chicken/eggplant is a shared dish? don't wanna look like a piggy, hehe)

and in the process, I learnt the kanji for mirin (味醂）ha!


Even prepared tomorrow night's chicken cream stew while I was at it! yay for me, lol.

frugal Tuesday

Still trying to save pennies and use up what is in the fridge and cupboard rather than keep buying bits and pieces. So today was a mish-mash of left over vegies:
* eggplant
* shiitake mushrooms
* enoki mushrooms
* broccoli
* onion
* bacon

served in a tomato sauce with spiral pasta.

We made bread again today, so K and I took egg s/w (the last of the 2 eggs!!) for lunch on our playdate.

Friday night surprise

So I had in my mind that I was going to make a quiche, but realised half way through the day that, surprise, surprise, J had used all but 2 off the eggs in his egg roll last night. So no quiche possible. Worked out well, as I hadn't made the pie crust yet (am having trouble getting motivated to make it again).

So it was a quick change of plans to:

spag bol

salad (lettuce, 水菜, button mushies, tomato, cucumber)

えのきbacon巻き

broccoli

K is just waiting to dig in!

A touch Korean

A BIG day out at a playdate, and we didn't get home until close to 4pm, both uf us utterly buggered. All the way home I was wondering what I could do for dinner - K was asleep in the car, so I didn't really have the option of stopping off to pick up anything on the way home either. Well, a bit of serious thinking cap action later and I came up with (da-dah!):

牛肉キムチ炒め (although we didn't have any コチェジャン, there was 豆板醤 and テンメンジャン though, hehe. it was lacking a bit of flavour coz of this)。And as luck would have it, the recipe requires nira, which we have left over from our pad thai the other night! yay, fridge-clean out to boot. I was sooo wondering what I was gonna do with that other half a bunch of nira - it always happens that I end up with it sitting there for ages only to throw it out, since I no longer bother trying to make home made gyoza (it was a disaster the first time, and not much better the 2nd or 3rd times - so NOT worth bothering I decided), the only other recipe I know that calls for nira, lol!

So using only what is in the house/freezer/fridge, I am going to scrounge up yet another meal. I feel like I am making progress on my plan to reduce the もったいない in the house, and where possible cut down on spending in regards to food. So, yay for frugal friday on a Thursday.

Will add the left over 牛すじトマト煮こみ (for me and K, probably to eat before J even gets home we all ate this together tonight) and some rice, salad (lots of lettuce still), miso soup for J, flavoured bean sprouts (like Korean style) that I must have bought yesterday with tonight's dinner in mind, like a premonition, and, well, surely that is enough? Or maybe even make an egg roll if I am feeling in the mood. We DO have about 3 doz eggs to use up (after a miscalculation at Costcos - not realising that we still had almost a dozen in fridge at home, oops!!). (edit: made an impromptu zucchini champuru that sort of toned down the korean)

Actually, all this thinking about kimchee has got me craving 石焼ビビンバ! And yaki-niku.....

thursday and friday on review

J wrote an email to say that he had to go out with clients for dinner on Thursday night, so we just had the left-overs of the chicken soup, K also had some しらす with rice, her fav at the moment.

After a big day of Halloween party at playgroup, and a night before where I had about 2-3 hours sleep max, topped off with a massive headache, I was wasted and went to be wih K at 9pm before J even got home.

Felt a bit better today after taking it easy. Went to go buy bread for lunch, only to realise that the carseat was still out of the car, after a toilet accident a few days ago (it had been washed, but not put back) so we flagged the fresh bread and had spag on toast for lunch.

Dinner tonight was a success:

potato bake, with a delish white sauce touched up with some maggi stock cubes, oh,, the flavour!! and bacon, onion and carrot hidden in amongst the potato, you know, for nutritional value (and a frugal friday-ing type empty the fridge move)

steak

yellow and orange capsicum and eringi mushrooms, stir fried in butter and seasalt

salad - sunny lettuce, tomato and avocado

and the best part - J brought home a French stick!! so we devoured that with the French butter! yum.

cleaning out the fridge before the weekend

And that is what our dinner amounts to - frugal friday I guess:

* Salmon
* spinach egg roll - I am gonna try this one out, see how we go!
* tofu - still haven't actually put it out once this week, as keep on forgetting at the last minute! Tonight is definately 冷奴
* asparagus spears sauted in butter
* some inari-zushi I bought for lunch but didn't eat
* noodle soup (just from a packet)
* salad, of course
* left over eggplant and mince stuffing, probably gonna give this to K with rice
* pickles
* eda-mame
I think that is about it, hope I remember to put it all out. Nothing exciting, but hopefully the number of different foods will make up for the lack of volume in each. And of course, we need to leave room for MR. Donuts for dessert anyway!!