Tuesday 14 February 2012

Menu Week 13/02/12

MONDAY - Homemade fishcakes, wedges and mushy peas

TUESDAY - Sausages, mashed potatoes, Yorkshire puddings vegetables and onion gravy

WEDNESDAY - Stir fry and noodles

THURSDAY - Creamy pesto chicken, jacket potatoes, roasted tomatoes and peas

FRIDAY - Daughter's birthday treat, her choice. Not sure what she wants yet.

SATURDAY - Chicken/tofu fajitas

SUNDAY - Creamy tuna pasta and homemade garlic bread

The fishcakes I made last night were a big hit with me and Hubby but not with the girls. Both thought they were too lemony and daughter No2, who has an aversion to veg noticed 'green' bits in the fishcakes and demanded to know what they were. Tiny capers I said to which daughter replied, Don't like them, and proceeded to try and pick them out of the fishcakes. Ah well, you can't please them all. So I have a fishcake for my lunch now as daughter only picked at one and left the other.  I wanted to make a fishcake with more fish than potato so added a whole packet of frozen fish.

Was pleased with this fish I used. It only cost £2.00 for the 520g gram bag of pollock and it was skinned and I found no bones so was great to use in fish cakes. I'm not a lover of frozen fish when I want to eat a steamed or fried fillet but these are great to use in fish pies and the such.

I bought a 300ml tub of double cream in Tesco to have a go at making my own butter. I wanted to see if it was cheaper to make my own rather than buy. The tub of cream cost £1.08 in Tesco. I ment to buy it in Aldi because I know it's cheaper there but forgot.  I have discovered it costs more to make my own butter as I only yielded 162g of butter for my £1.08.





It's very simple to make. Pour double cream into a bowl with a good pinch of salt (if you like salted butter)





Whisk and whisk until the over whipped cream starts to turn yellow and release its butter milk.


Squeeze out the buttermilk and there you have lovely butter. I used the buttermilk to make some soda bread which I had with my butter, lovely. Butter would be great to make if you found any reduced cream other wise it's not worth it.

4 comments:

  1. I remember making butter when I was at primary school. It was in the days when we had free school milk. All the cream was taken off the top of the milk and put in to a jar, then we all had a go at shaking the jar until the cream turned in to butter, then we all had a taste of it on a cream cracker.

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  2. Great menu plan. I love homemade fishcakes and don't know why I stopped making them. Thats a good price for the fish, Pollack is eaten a lot down in Devon where my son lives. My DIL is always on the look out for reduced priced cream for making butter, and quite often gets it for 10p at her local coop. It freezes well and is great for making flavoured butters.

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  3. Did you factor in though Karen, how much it would have cost you to buy some buttermilk (pro rata) to make your soda bread? It does work out about the same if you can get the cream in bulk or end of day sales but you have the pleasure of knowing you have made it and you get the buttermilk thrown in. Thursday tea sounds yum!

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  4. I think you are right - the effort of doing it, even with the buttermilk means it is not cost effective unless you can get the cream cheap.
    Just made another batch of your fabulous bagel recipe. This time I divided the dough into 9 not 8 pieces. I will wait to see if Bob notices the slight reduction in size!
    Blessings x

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