Cheap, high-quality and versatile

No, it’s not my new LinkedIn profile 🙂

Loved this article by Rubies & Radishes on all the ways you can use minced beef. While free-range or organic meat is the ideal, it can be too expensive to use on a regular basis but this it a viable option.

Rubies and Radishes

We normally have at least 2-3 mince based meals a week (that includes breakfasts) and I like to use the delicious minced meat from our local farm shop. It’s actually about the same price per kg as our supermarket, but don’t expect 3for2 for BOGOF offers 🙂

Muffins

Well, if I say so myself the latest batch of meat and spinach muffins were a resounding success. This time I used frozen leaf spinach instead of the frozen chopped, which I found really messy when trying to squeeze out the water, and the finished texture is much less dense.

The pork version had Chinese 5 Spice added (just a teaspoon full) and it gave a tasty, but subtle, flavour – will be quite happy eating a couple of these for breakie.

The lamb version had garam masala and cayenne pepper, and chopped raisins. I went a bit heavy handed with the spice but the 50:50 lamb:spinach ratio seemed to handle it quite well. Those will do nicely for snacks with chutney 🙂

Busy day :(

Bit of a late post today as I was disorganised this morning and had to drive to a Customer site. 

No breakie, snacks or packed lunch prepared. Gulp. Managed to survive the drive with a beaker of tea and pick up a rather nice salad and some cooked chicken from Sainsbury’s. 

Forgot to bring my own tea bags too so no caffeine for me for the rest of today – prob just as well; I have been caning it a bit lately.  

Fortunately I did have the foresight to prepare the components for dinner ahead of time – batch of ragu taken out of freezer last night, and thin slices of aubergine chargrilled on the braai Sunday night = Aubergine Parmigiana Bolognaise 🙂

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What I had for dinner last night……

With a busy schedule of washing up and ….. not much else to do last night, I set about prepping my lunch for today (chicken with roast med veg, feta cheese, pinenuts and balsamic dressing) while sorting my dinner. One of my favourites; meatballs with zoodles (zucchini noodles) and veggie sauce. Often the sauce is just passata with some S&P but, as I had a few sad looking purple and yellow carrots leftover in the larder, I snuck a few extra veg in. Shhh, don’t tell anyone! Went rather nicely with a glass of vino too 🙂 Ciao!

2013-06-25