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May 19, 2012
Lunching on Loaves and Fishes
I reckon that you should count half an hour per day and a pound per person per meal (including breakfast) as the basic eating overhead for adults or bigger children. Say £84 and four hours per week for the four of us. You could save £25 of that by carefully eating exclusively from value ranges, or you could spend £30 more and mostly eat premium brands or ready meals. Either everyone can take a turn cooking or one person can do it all, feel smug, and cash it in against other chores.
Anyway, I very rarely account for weekend lunches when I'm meal planning. If we have a lot of leftovers then we have Leftover Roulette, where everyone grabs something. Plus we're quite often out, or we just have toast or sandwiches, or we've got up so late that we can just have a late breakfast. But today we'd just come back from playing badminton, where Marianne and I actually won a game against Steven and Jonathan; the first time since we started a couple of months ago that any partnership has won against Steven. He was, to be fair, playing left-handed. Mind you, so were we. A proper lunch was called for.
So. This was an onion, half a pack of streaky bacon that needed eating up, a fennel bulb ditto, half a bag of slightly sad rainbow chard, all chopped up and sauteed, and then finished with the leftover sauce from yesterday's Dungeon Crawling Pork and a couple of spoons of tahini. I had planned on pasta, but while the kettle was boiling I noticed a pack of instant couscous I found tucked away at the back of the cupboard, saving a few minutes and a bit of trouble. Perhaps fifteen minutes start to finish.
This was very tasty, but salty. Bacon is salty of course; careful readers will remember that the basis of the pork sauce was the packet of BBQ sauce that came with the spice-rubbed pork, so obviously pre-packaged food tends to be salty, and the instant couscous was salty. So next time I might leave the bacon out, for all that my family love bacon and will eat any amount of green vegetables provided they're cooked with an ounce of bacon per person. Or serve it with unsalted couscous.
Tahini, meanwhile, like peanut butter, is becoming one of my go-to sauce finishers. Obviously it's fatty. But I can't really believe that it's any worse for you than an equivalent amount of sour cream or creme fraiche (I use those too).
Posted by Alison Scott at May 19, 2012 01:53 PM
Comments
My kind of cooking :)
Posted by: ramtops at May 19, 2012 07:34 PM
Hey, ramtops! I should probably give a shoutout to your blog, given how similar our cooking styles are.
Posted by: Alison Scott at May 19, 2012 10:58 PM