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3 bags full. week 1

It's finally chilly outside (here in the US) and the crazy season is upon us. Thanksgiving just gone and Christmas, Chanukkah and New Years are looming. We've all spent a lot of time in the kitchen, so this is a good week to keep cooking simple.  

Simple, quick and easy.

A Monday morning raid of the fridge revealed some delicious smoked chipotle salmon which had made it through the week unscathed. The fruit bowl had a couple of potatoes and three rather fetid bananas. So it was roast jacket potatoes with smoked salmon, sour cream and cilantro for dinner and saved-from-the-trash-can banana cread for dessert.

I made one tomato and beef ragu (ragu mama) which I deliberately kept free of herbs and spices. It is really just tomato, beef and onion with a little seasoning and a lot of time on the stove top.

It got some heat under it Tuesday afternoon, when I got home from shopping. I cooked it slowly for about 4 hours (while I was grilling some fresh sausages and making the potato and parsnip mash). Chilled it overnight, fished out the bones on Wednesday and heated it slowly for another couple of hours. The meat was fall-apart tender and the sauce had reduced to an inferno-red. I served it alongside some great, fat pasta tubes which had been tossed with green beans, garlic, oil / butter and chili. By keeping the spices in with the pasta, the sauce remained unsullied.

Thursday, I added some smoky paprika and mushrooms to the leftover sauce, transforming it into a rich goulash. Served with some potatoes boiled in their jackets and smothered in butter, dill and pepper, this was a feel-good dinner for a chilly night.

Friday was one of those nights where folks dropped by for some wine and cheese and by the time we pondered dinner, we realised that none of us were really hungry any more. The cranberry chutney from earlier in the week was delicious with some torn baguette and brie.

Saturday felt like a good time to tuck into some greens, but I had some great root vegetables lurking in the cripser, so I made my Wombat salad (named so because like the eponymous marsupial - and a good number of Aussie blokes- it's quite something to eat roots and leaves)

Sunday night is all about sloppy joes (added some beans and spices to the remnants of the ragu-lash) in front of the telly, but the afternoon is my favourite time to bake a cake or something to appease my sweet tooth through the week.