Reverse Meal Planning

threepenny_bit

Yum! After reading all the beans, cheese and potato threads today they are featuring heavily in my meal plan lol! 

Primrose

Delicious home grown French beans, courgette, kohl rabi,, red pepper  and other vegs in a cheese sauce today, baked in oven until cheesy top went brown and crispy.    Good way of using up various vegs.   Certainly didn't miss not having any meat.

Suffolk_lass

Out on our dog walk we were gifted a good handful of runner beans (the pigeons and mice had all of ours this year) - so we had steamed beans with a dob of butter, salt, pepper and a sprinkle of grated cheese, with 2 poached eggs each. Yum. The beans were just reminiscent of asparagus tips. I must make sure we have lamb rogan josh tonight

rtandon27

We did a good job this past week using up the contents of the fridge.  Nothing particularly exciting on the menu, just repeats of our tried and true meals.  We now have an empty fridge, just in time for the grocery order today!  Plan for the next three weeks is to finiah emptying the freezer completely, in time for our move

ruby_eskimo

Glad I've managed to inspire a few of you 😆  Using up some of the leftover chicken from a roast at the weekend into a chicken and leek risotto.  It will also get rid of one of the boxes of risotto rice that's been in the cupboard for ages, plus the last of the parmesan from the fridge and some chicken stock that's been in the freezer for a while too.  Making space and getting through things slowly but surely.

Primrose

This freezer emptying/defrosting thing is a continual conundrum for me.
Has anybody  yet perfected the art of getting it empty enough to defrost when you,re continually restocking it with "grow your own" veg /fruit?   

Autumn & winter always finds them  really full, and with only two of us and a fridge/freezer in kitchen + a garage freezer  we never seem to run them down enough.  Perhaps a challenge to live only from the freezers for a month is what we need but the contents are more veg& fruit than anything else ao it wouldn,t be a very balanced diet. .

Anybody else have this problem? 

joedenise

Another fairly easy dinner tonight.  Pork chops from the freezer, some mash and veg of some sort from the freezer, probably some of the runner beans and some peas.

I'm another who seems to have loads of veg in both the kitchen freezer and the outside freezer, although do have quite a bit of meat too.  I find my problem is that when I cook I tend to cook 4 portions and there are only 2 of us so every time I get something out of the freezer I cook a meal and end up putting 2 portions in the freezer which more often than not takes up as much if not more room than the original ingredient taken from the freezer!

When I defrost the freezer I just take everything out and cover it with an old quilt to keep frozen and then use a steamer to defrost it and wipe dry with a chamois leather type cloth before putting everything back.  I can do my chest freezer is about 30 minutes that way.

ruby_eskimo

I struggle too @Primrose with the freezer thing because we can't actually unplug our freezer so defrosting it is difficult 😂  I go through periods of definitely eating more freezer based meals to run it down enough so that we can quickly keep things in a cool bag while I hack away at the built up ice.  Think we're almost there, one more week and should be good to give it another go.

Having another Korean meal this evening - Tteokbokki (spicy rice cake stew basically) which is using up rice cakes and fish cakes from the freezer along with the last of the dumplings for DH.

Primrose

Query for the salmon eaters on here.
How  is it possible to remove that "muddy" taste which we seem to increasingly find in much farmed salmon these days?

Would soaking in cold water help? (like it does to remove excess brine from ham hocks before cooking? )

ruby_eskimo

Primrose said:

Query for the salmon eaters on here.
How  is it possible to remove that "muddy" taste which we seem to increasingly find in much farmed salmon these days?

Would soaking in cold water help? (like it does to remove excess brine from ham hocks before cooking? )

Mix either baking soda or vinegar into the water you're soaking it in might help, but I would only soak it for about 30 minutes.