Meal Planning, January 15, 2012
An easy plan week; we poked through the freezer and are down to the bare bottom of last year's meat share: a pound of bacon and a few pounds of lamb stew meat. We're saving the bacon for later:
I can declare last year's meat-only share a thumping success; we've used everything but the bacon, and the bacon isn't exactly hard to use. This year we're getting dairy and meat, and they've already started giving out cheese... yum! The meat won't be in installments, but instead we'll get it at once, a whole lamb. I figure it will probably be the bulk of our meat for the year, so I should start looking for more creative lamb recipes. (Not that I get tired of lamb stew.) After this year we should have a better idea of how much we go through in a year, much as we figured that out with the fruit last year, and we can know if we want to supplement with a fall beef order or just buy bits-as-we-go since there are farmers who will sell piecemeal.
- Lamb Tagine with Chickpeas and Apricots -- we even have some lamb stock that we can use in this.
- Brown rice. This is local(ish), grown near Chico, I think, so makes a good staple.
- Romanesco that I ordered last week, after months of flaking on our nice order people. (Tapping orders into websites is haaard.) This can just be steamed; I love the delicate flavor it has, and of course I always enjoy fractal vegetables.
- We have oh-so-much leek and potato and mushroom soup frozen, so even though it's not very thematic with the tagine, it would be silly to make more soup that fits in with it better. Good winter potage, at any rate.
- Some kind of vinaigrette. This is not the best time of the year for salad, but I'm counting my blessings that we live in the part of the country where we can get fresh greens and onions and things.
- If the fruit is anything like last week, tangerines, kiwifruit... and are there still pluots? Really? Well, we'll eat 'em if they're still around. Otherwise it's time to break into the blueberries we froze last summer.
I can declare last year's meat-only share a thumping success; we've used everything but the bacon, and the bacon isn't exactly hard to use. This year we're getting dairy and meat, and they've already started giving out cheese... yum! The meat won't be in installments, but instead we'll get it at once, a whole lamb. I figure it will probably be the bulk of our meat for the year, so I should start looking for more creative lamb recipes. (Not that I get tired of lamb stew.) After this year we should have a better idea of how much we go through in a year, much as we figured that out with the fruit last year, and we can know if we want to supplement with a fall beef order or just buy bits-as-we-go since there are farmers who will sell piecemeal.