This week a the behest of my eldest, when we sat down to make out the meal plan, he wanted to base it on the song "Today is Monday". For those of you not famliar with it, this is a traditional American folk song that is in the counting-cumulative tradition, starting out with "Today is Monday, today is Monday...Monday, string beans, all you hungry children, come and eat it up", adding another dish each day, e.g. "Tuesday spaghetti, Monday string beans, all you hungry children, come and eat it up." Wednesdays Soup (ZOOP), Thursday Roast Beef, Friday Fresh Fish, Saturday Chicken, Sunday Ice Cream.
Duncan knows this song from the Eric Carle book illustrating it, which is a little weird (it has animals doing all the eating, including a fox with a whole chicken in its mouth on Saturday, but on the last page it has all children having a feast). This is one of those songs that's so old the origins appear to be really obscure, and that it's gone through changes, not always being about food (sometimes chores, as in "Monday's a washin'"), and the "menu" has changed over the years (I've seen versions with Shepherd's pie, Hassenpfeffer, "pudding", etc.) I knew the song originally with "Wednesday Prince Spaghetti day," which has to be some kind of weird advertising-induced New England 1960s warp.
In any event, here's what we ate this week:
Monday: cold string bean salad with fresh tomatoes and feta, with anchovies-olive oil dressing. Cold roasted potatoes and bread and cheese on the side.
Tuesday: wheat spaghetti with sauce from a jar, mixed greens on the side.
Wednesday: pizza and salad at Pizza My Heart. What, you say? It's ZOOP? Well, the Pizza My Heart was a fundraiser day for Duncan's school. Fortuntely, hot lunch at school on Wednesday was....ZOOOOP! So we solved that little dilemma for Dunc, and Izzy got Pizza at night.
Thursday: it was soccer night, so a full-on Roast Beef was out of the question. We're very strapped for time on Thursdays right now. So the roast beef was ground beef, roasted, in an, um, frying pan, with simple veggies on the side.
Friday: fresh fish! Well, it was a problem getting fresh fish on Friday since I've been doing the marketing on Sunday since I went back to work, which makes it a problem to have fresh fish on a Friday at a reasonable hour. So I broke out the frozen salmon cakes and crab cakes, which we made Fresh from the frozen package. So there, that just shows you how much I've loosened up on the meal thing now that necessity has forced me to do so. We had some lovely fresh peppers and squash in our veggie box this week, and I made a nice mixed veggie side dish. Served with some thai rice noodles.
Saturday: chicken. Hoo boy, I made up a whole chicken, roasted Bob Blumer style: lime juice, soy sauce, brown sugar, a little corn starch, salt and pepper, with the fresh lime rinds stuffed inside the chicken. Had a problem with the thawing of the chicken so the cook time went a bit over, and I think I should have charred the skin with the rub a bit, but it was nice, very tasty. More veggies from the box, tomatoes from our garden, another fresh bean and cheese salad (at Duncan's request), and brown rice. The reduction from the chicken (with the fat drained off) made a wonderfully piquant gravy which was awesome on the rice, too.
Sunday, ice cream. Well, despite Duncan's request, we didn't eat ice cream for dinner, it was for dessert. (We bought some from the store, forgot to buy cream for the ice cream maker.) For our main courses, we had some leftover frozen couscous stew supplemented with some lamb I got a deal on at the store today, and we had some weird greens with cilantro and fresh tomatoes from our garden for an extra veggie (although the stew was plenty veggilicious to begin with.)
Maybe it wasn't the most elaborate or creative menu, but it took a lot less time to whip up than this week's menu plan, that's for sure.
