17.3.14

Charity Challenge Day 2 - Meal Plan

Happy Saint Patrick's Day!


Day 2 of our Charity Challenge, and I thought this little fellow might distract the kids from the general lack of breakfast on the table this morning...

The egg cosy body and head are crocheted, and the rest is knitted - still more confident knitting the fiddly bits really, especially if I'm making it up as I go along.

Shame we had to share the egg…

Anyway, now you know what I spent the £12 budget on (shopping list is here) I thought I'd run through our 7 day meal plan.

You'll notice I've started and ended the week on a crowd pleaser - the other part of my cunning plan is to make some morale boosting chocolate brownies on Thursday, just when I reckon spirits will be flagging. I'll have to alter recipe quantities as I could only afford 100g of dark chocolate; but it's the good stuff - 74% cocoa.

I'll be doing some recipe fiddling with other things like the apple cake too - it all has to fit with what we've got. The apples are our own; we had a bumper crop last year and stored some in the garage. Mind you most of them are rotten, or look pretty manky…


Not great, but managed to make some reasonably decent stewed apple. A friend has kindly donated 4 eggs from her hens and a few leeks from her garden. I'll be using 4 rather soft looking potatoes I found at the bottom of the cupboard, plus 3 onions. I'll also be using up old bags of flour -some so old I wouldn't be surprised if they started moving, but I'm purposefully not looking at use-by-dates - rather not know…
I've mixed in some of the new plain flour I bought with my old strong flour, for bread-making, and so far so good. A little flat looking maybe, but the kids seem to like it.  I found half a bag of oat bran too, also of questionable age (from a failed attempt at the Dukan diet I think) and I've been adding that to the bread and muffin ingredients.

Breakfast is homemade bread, though I'm hoping there might be some pancakes left over for Thursday morning.

Sunday
Lunch  Pesto pasta with a sprinkle of cheese, then apple crumble.
Dinner Tomato and cheese pizza/garlic bread pizza and peach muffins.

Monday 
Dinner Vegetarian sausages with rosti potato and carrots. Apple cake for afters.

Tuesday
Dinner  Almost Spanish omelette and carrot muffins.

Wednesday
Dinner  Leek and carrot soup with cider bread, followed by pancakes. 

Thursday
Dinner   Not quite Puttanesca pasta and chocolate brownies.

Friday
Dinner Savoury rice and chocolate brownies.

Saturday
Lunch   Lentil soup and homemade bread followed by peach muffins.
Dinner  Tomato and cheese pizza/garlic bread pizza and whatever's left for pudding!


Such a beautiful day on Sunday, so we had our pizzas outside. It was getting a bit parky by teatime, but that didn't seem to matter, seeing as all the grub disappeared in five minutes flat. I used a whole tin of chopped tomatoes and all the passata plus an onion to make the tomato sauce, but only spread a little on the pizzas - the rest has been put away for Thursday's pasta.

I'm really conscious of rationing everything out, and using things like butter/milk sparingly. I've even grated all our cheese into a tub...just makes it look like it'll go further somehow!


I'm doing the £12 Challenge for Sport Relief - if you're interested, my page is here.