Monday's Menu with a side of our Spring garden and Cinnamon tea cake.

I like the ying and yang of this weeks Monday's Menu photo collage. Chocolate cherry cupcakes made with a jar of Bonne Maman cherry preserve right next to a very virtuous meal of steamed greens from the garden. The greens are starting to get going now, we ate three types of broccoli in our soup on Saturday, the ever present silver beet, as well as the tops of the Savoy cabbages.
I can not wait for the broad beans and peas to start. Yesterday we planted some more seedlings and seeds: lettuce, chives, sweetcorn, beetroot, rocket, radishes, and parsnips.

Anyway the menu:

Monday: Baked ziti with silver beet.
Tuesday: ahem, baked ziti with broccoli.
Wednesday: Steamed broccoli, silver beet and cabbage tops with soy sauce.
Thursday: Pork and fennel sausages on silver beet and fresh sourdough bread with home made tomato sauce.
Friday: Decided to live in the moment and headed down to Cygnet for dinner at the Red Velvet Lounge. Rob enjoyed a rump steak, with old-school chips and salad. I had the famous pork cotoletta. We shared a dessert of cherry ice cream and chocolate sauce, and we were back home by 8pm.
Saturday: The big grand final day with our annual consumption of footy food. We ate the footy franks in white squishy buns with mustard, tomato sauce and butter (that sentence confused a few of my international Instagram followers- they eventually worked out I was talking about a hot dog!) I'm afraid that they didn't make for a very photogenic food picture, but they were tasty. We used the remainder in a tomato and vegetable soup.
Sunday: Rob cooked us Patricia Well's Chicken breasts with sage and potatoes (parboiled, then sliced and cooked in butter).

My sister, her husband and my niece visited for afternoon tea yesterday, we had chocolate caramel and almond slice (similar to this recipe but with almonds), those cherry chocolate cupcakes and a simple cinnamon teacake. Which was probably the most popular! See the very simple recipe below.

Cinnamon Teacake {From Women's Weekly}

Ingredients:

60g butter, softened
2/3 cup castor sugar
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 cup self-raising flour
1/3 cup milk
15g butter, extra
3 tablespoon castor sugar, extra
1 teaspoon cinnamon

Method
Preheat oven to 160deg C (fan-forced oven)
Grease and line a 20cm cake tin.
Beat butter, sugar, egg and vanilla until light and fluffy (about 5 mins).
Stir in sifted flour and milk with a wooden spoon, beat lightly until smooth.
Spread mixture into the tin, bake for approx. 30 minutes.
Turn onto wire rack, pour over extra melted butter, sprinkle with combined extra sugar and cinnamon. Serve warm with butter.

Finally Rob headed out when it wasn't blowing a gale or pouring with rain (not many opportunities over the weekend!) and took some photos of the flower and vegetable gardens with a real camera. I'll share them on Friday, but in the mean time I'll leave you with a photo of the dogs in the flower garden. Everything is starting to look very green and lush.

Monday's Menu {Rob's baked ziti}

Silver beet is still featuring quite regularly at our dinner table at the moment. Rob snuck it into four of our meals this past week. I don't mind really. It feels so right to be eating vegetables from your own garden.

So this weeks menu:

Monday: Pea, speck and mint risotto
Tuesday: Steamed greens from the garden (silver beet, cabbage tops and purple sprouting broccoli)
Wednesday: Pasta puttanesca
Thursday: Scrambled eggs and wilted silver beet on rye toast
Friday: Tomato sugo, cacciatore salami, anchovies, olives, bocconcini and silver beet thin crust pizza
Saturday: Rob's baked ziti
Sunday: Slow roasted lamb shoulder, with potatoes and minted peas

I had a few Instagram requests for the ziti recipe, which I have shared below. In true Rob style he tinkered with the recipe, but I think when it comes to baked ziti anything goes!

Rob's baked ziti

Based on Antonio Carluccio's Ziti al forno alla Napoletana and Nigella's Rigatoni Al Forno (from Feast). Basically it was a Bolognese sauce, with cooked pasta (should be ziti but I couldn't find it so substituted penne), a béchamel sauce, mozzarella and a layer of silver beet.

Would easily feed 8 (greedy) people or 10 (more self controlled) people!

For the meat sauce:
1 onion
2 carrots
2 sticks of celery
2 cloves of garlic
50g unsmoked streaky bacon or pancetta - Rob substituted thinly sliced Cacciatore salami.
50 g butter
2 tablespoons olive oil
700g pork and veal mince
700mL bottle of tomato passata
2 tablespoons tomato puree
250ml red wine
2 bay leaves

For the béchamel
85g butter
50g plain flour
500ml milk
Salt or stock granules to taste
Freshly grated nutmeg

1 x 500g pack penne pasta
Couple of handfuls of fresh silver beet (or you could have used spinach), washed and drained.
Grated parmesan
Sliced mozzarella

Finely chop the peeled onions, peeled garlic, peeled carrots, the bacon or pancetta or salami and the celery.  Heat the butter and oil in a large pan and fry the onions, garlic and celery until softened, then add the chopped carrots.  Add the mince and fork it through until it browns in the pan as much as possible. Pour in the tomato passata, puree, red wine, and bay. Stir well and bring to the boil, then turn down the heat, partially cover and let cook gently for 2 hours, (well ours probably only cooked for an hour but it was good, you just want it to be nice and thick).

To make the white sauce, melt the butter in a saucepan then add the flour and stir and cook together to make a roux. Take off the heat briefly, and whisk in the milk – just using a hand whisk – then put back on the heat and, stirring all the time, let the sauce come to boil and bubble away for a few minutes to get rid of the floury taste. Season with salt and pepper (or you could use some crumbled stock cube or bouillon concentrate). Turn down the heat slightly and cook until slightly thickened. After turning off the heat stir some freshly grated nutmeg through the sauce.

Preheat the oven to 200˚C/fan oven 180˚C/gas 6 and put the water on for the pasta. When the water comes to the boil, add salt and cook the pasta until its al dente (don't overcook it here as it will keep cooking in the oven). Drain the pasta.

Layer the meat sauce in a buttered roasting pan, then the cooked pasta, followed by a layer of silver beet, top with the béchamel and layer the mozzarella and grated parmesan over the top.

Cook for 30- 40 minutes or until the top is crispy and golden.

Now I'm really hungry and glad that this is sitting in our fridge waiting for us to reheat for dinner tonight.