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

The weather really dictated what we felt like eating this week.

Monday was a stunning spring day so we opted for a spring risotto of peas, broad beans, asparagus and the essential scattering of mint.

Tuesday saw us home a little later than intended so we had pasta with Rob’s “Aristos” sauce (find whatever’s in the fridge and pantry and make something up!), which was tomato-based with sliced chorizo and green beans.

Despite the soft rain that started falling as soon as we got home on Wednesday evening Rob dressed up in polar fleece and a beanie (my personal BBQ gnome!) and cooked up some sliced fennel, red onion, eggplant, asparagus and zucchini, we served it with some couscous, a tomato sauce and feta.

The rainy grey weather continued so we felt like comfort food, Shepherd’s pie (although it was beef mince so I guess it should be Cottage pie) did the trick! Which meant that at the end of the week we could just reheat the pie and serve it with some spinach!

Saturday of course was the AFL Grand Final Day, and we always pretend to be avid followers of the game just to eat the football food. After picking up vegetables, bread and meat at Salamanca we dropped into Jackman & McRoss, and saw they had a special “footy” pizza. We took it home to warm up for lunch, covered in sliced beef, caramelized onions, cherry tomatoes and cheese. It was delicious, and sadly we ate too much of it! That night after the big game was over, Rob cooked the frankfurters on the BBQ, with some onions in beer! They didn’t taste too bad in squishy white buns with mustard and of course tomato sauce!

For lunch on Sunday I made some guacamole with enough Tabasco sauce to make my lips tingle (no fresh chilies in the house) to eat with corn chips in the sun. Making the most of our extra hour of light in the evening, Rob cooked rib-eye steaks and baked potatoes in the BBQ (are we picking up on a recurring theme yet), and a piece of pork belly for dinner tonight. I think the Weber is going to get a serious workout over the next 6 months!

What has been on the menu at your place this week?