I'm really not great at menu planning, I have realised. In the Before Times, I mostly just cooked 3 dishes in a week, getting 2 meals from each. Plus breakfast toast and (if feeling agin the canteen soup at work) one portable weekday lunch dish like cheese and crackers or a dip plus veg. Now, as we've said several times, there are so bloody many more meals. I'm mainly cooking 6 things each week - a couple of lunch things, four dinner things, and leftovers from one dinner to cover the lunches that aren't otherwise catered. It's not that many more, but boy does it show I have preferences. And especially because of my weekly vegetable/veggie/white meat/anything diet. Thatmhelps with long term variety, but in the short term, not so much. Next week is chicken-and-fish week and everything is going to be in the oven. This is veggie week and it's been wall to wall pancakes.
And tomatoes. I've got three tomato dishes on the go. Two of them made tonight. I am a tad ridiculous. But they were all good. And I've no energy to replan. Things are not so easy at the moment, and a tomato is about what I can cope with.
They are good, though. First a potato and pasta in broth - essentially minestrone, started with celery and alliums, diced potatoes, stock and a tin of tomatoes.
Finish with a few handfuls of broken or small pasta (finally got shot of some dregs of spaghetti \o/), and some hard cheese. Parmesan, for example. Very good.
Two days later and I'm making tomato soup again... this one's cream of tomato with cardamom, from Scandilicious. Very simple - an onion fried, a load of ground cardamom added, then tinned tomatoes:creamed coconut:stock at roughly 3:1:3 (I used a tin of tomatoes, the same amount of stock, and about half a small carton of creamed coconut). The recipe helpfully warns you it will go an unpleasant pink colour at this point.
But it cooks out absolutely fine. Gentle, wintry soup - it may be springing outside, but it's still definitely soup weather.
Finally, something with a bit of texture. Guess what - it's a fritter. I really am a bit stuck in a rut. But it's another good Clair Thompson fritters-and-veg recipe, where you use the same ingredients two ways. I infallibly cock these up by putting all of an ingredient into half the mix, but this time I managed to salvage it.
The stuff you're going to use twice is: spring onion (a bunch), chopped garlic (plenty), chopped tomato (600g for 4 people), chopped sundried tomato (150g for 4), chopped parsley.
Half the green/white things and maybe a quarter of the tomatoes go into making a sauce, spiced with a splash of vinegar and a shake of cinnamon, lightly cooked for maybe 5 minutes together (after you soften the spring onions, which doesn't take long).
Cooked for a few minutes only, then mixed into a tin of white beans and scattered with feta.
The rest go into a mixing bowl, to add some flour and a tsp baking powder (the recipe says 150g flour or more for the full amount. I was working by guess, and had an annoying spare egg which I wanted to use up - and wasn't planning to deep fry these as per the recipe anyway, so I'm unreliable here. But it's relatively minimal flour in this case, trusting the egg to hold them together, which it did.
Serve together for a cheerful, colourful plateful. Even if it's a bit of a mess, it mixes up the warm/hot/crunchy/starchy things nicely. And tonight was a night when chopping stuff was a good distraction. Sometimes cooking is something I want to get through fast; sometimes it's a proper break from too much thinking.
Tomatoes are cheerful even winter ones which aren't always the reddest. I'm not really a soup maker but the fritters sound fun and adaptable. Hope the brain quietens a bit.
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