Butterflied Bangers with Beetroot - or bread & butter. But no Brownie(s)

Did you see what I did there? I love a bit of alliteration.

So, according to Nigel Slater, there's lots of beautiful beetroot around at the moment, and he's not wrong. 

Beetroot has grown on me over the last few years, and now I really love it. It's delicious in a salad, or roasted as a side vegetable, and I've got my eye on this Balti which includes beetroot and cheddar in a kind of Anglo-Indian fusion curry. I got a great big bunch of it in my veg box this week, and curry aside, up on my Twitter feed popped our Nige as featured on the Guardian's website - a recipe for a sausage and beetroot type of pan fry: chunks of beetroot and carrot slowly fried with garlic and chopped rosemary, then add in chunks of good herby sausages to cook, and finally some red wine vinegar to finish off. Oh so simple.

I'd got my meal plan, sorted out on the basis of the contents of the veg box, and I was really keen to give the beetroot a bit more than the usual  treatment, so this fitted in perfectly. I'd also neglected the previous week's carrots so they'd ended up in a last minute carrot cake (noting wrong with that, but, you know, not necessarily the most ideal), so I wanted to give this week's carrots some love too.

I loved the idea of the sweet veg with the sausages - our butcher does some fantastic Cumberland bangers which always go down a treat. You get the idea. I was REALLY looking forward to eating this. 

I just shouldn't have attempted it last night when I was feeling grotty as you like with that most of English of things - a summer cold; when I was on a schedule to get the kids home and fed and turned around in time for Pink to go to Brownies at 6.

I should have known not to attempt something with no guidance as to cooking time, only suggestions for 'speeding things up' (i.e. use pre-cooked beetroot). My beetroot were small, so plenty of opportunity to get covered in red as I peeled them (no CSI gloves for me, Ms Lawson). I didn't start cooking early enough, and as the time approached to leave for Brownies, with Pink still not fed, I ended up having to 'butterfly' the sausage chunks (slice them down one side to open them out and cook the middles) in order to get them cooked properly for her to eat. 

And the potato chips I was making in the oven (I was baking bread at the same time, so the oven was on) hadn't cooked, so she had to have bread and butter... The rest of it had to wait on the stove as I dashed down the road to get Pink to Brownies.

Except Brownies wasn't on. In my befuddled summer cold induced haze, I had forgotten that it was cancelled.

By the time I got back home, with Pink in tow, the chips were finished, but everything else - well, let's say it hadn't necessarily benefited from sitting around...

Still good, but I'm willing to bet not quite as good as Nigel's... Better luck next time, hey.

Last night, Good Food saved my life...

A bumper issue - you'll see why!

Well, actually, most nights for the last couple of weeks, Good Food has been my saviour. That and jacket potatoes. I have been busy, busy, busy doing lots of things. The day job, the children (book day costumes, times tables etc), and also, quite exciting, some other bits and pieces . It's all been a bit of a roller coaster and I'm loving it, but it's meant that I haven't spent as much time and effort on what we're going to eat.





You see, one of the things that motivates me to cook different things is the boredom that crashes around me when I make the same things week in and week out. Meal planning helps me with this, but recently, when I've been tired and thinking about other things then tried to work out what we're going to eat I have found my mind is a blank, apart from a little voice screaming "No! Not Cottage pie AGAIN!".  

I have a large, and ever expanding collection of recipe books, and with more time on my hands, I'd happily spend hours flicking through, deciding what we're going to eat, but this hasn't been an option recently. That's where Good Food has come into it's own. I blow hot and cold about any magazine. I find that if you get more than a few issues, you start noticing things coming back round again. I've had a subscription to Good Food on and off for the last 10 years at least, but I'll have it and then leave it for a year or so. Some months are good, some are not so good. Every couple of years, I have a clear out an only keep those issues with recipes that I know I've cooked and will cook again. I'm pleased to say that I'm in a subscription year (a Christmas present) because the March issue has really saved me - it's certainly on that'll survive the next cull.

The first article that caught my eye was dedicated to 5 meals for under £25 - a working week's worth of main meals with no thought (and very little effort) required. What I really liked was that the meals involved cooking from scratch, but were quick and easy. This was going to be a post about cooking those meals specifically and whether or not it did cost me less than £25. But the road to hell is paved with good intentions and all that.  I didn't cook them in the order they specified. I made my own garlic bread, too (rather than using a dough mix), for the tomato soup with tear & share cheesy bread, and I didn't keep track of the cost. And anyway, my reliance the March Good Food mag has gone way beyond that one article and so this blog post has become my way of passing on all these brilliant meals to you. 

And don't worry that it's too late and the April edition is on the shelves already. (I know - it's ridiculous, isn't it, that we're less than 2 weeks into March, but I've had my gripe about that before, so I won't repeat that here) All these recipes are online so I've added in the links. Don't say I never do anything for you.

We loved Pasta with ham and Minty Pea Pesto - a kind of jazzed up macaroni peas.

very green - and very delicious

Piri Piri chicken with spicy rice (well, it turned into Reggae Reggae chicken because I had a half used bottle of Reggae reggae sauce in the fridge) was very popular, 

Loads of veg in that rice

and the Creamy Fish Curry was the perfect thing to finish up some disappointing white fish fillets lurking in the freezer. 

The only recipe that didn't work so well as far as I'm concerned was the Black bean beef meatballs with stir fried noodles 

but then I hadn't clocked that the recipe only required 300g mince, and I kind of fiddled around and added in too many breadcrumbs so the end result was all a little dry.

Tomato & harissa stew with cheddar dumplings   

was also a great success - particularly the dumplings, which were pleasingly cheesy but not at all heavy and appeased the courgette haters amongst us... 

Yes, yes, spot the out of season courgette. So shoot me

The Beef & Bacon meatloaf - sneaky secret ingredient half a box of stuffing mix - was a huge hit too, destined to be a regular 'quick fix' on our menu, I think (in so far as anything turns up regularly)

Meatloaf worthy of a packed lunch

Blue forewent roast for school dinner the next day JUST so he could have meatloaf sandwiches with the left overs - praise indeed. The sausage & fennel meatballs with lentils made a delicious Saturday supper, and sausage & stuffing toad in the hole with onion gravy, using up the other half of the pack of stuffing from the meatloaf, was just the ticket on a wet and rainy Friday night.

So there you have it - these were all pretty quick to knock up and very easy. Apart from the Chinese meatballs, I would make everything again. I commend each and every one of these recipes to you, and say thank you, Good Food!