It’s been a while since I posted about the recipes I said I was going to cook a couple of weeks ago.

Well, turns out that the ingredients ended up lasting us much longer than we anticipated in that we were able to get more meals out of them than planned for – a nice surprise!

The only meal that I didn’t end up making was the pumpkin soup – just didn’t get around to it. But the pumpkin is slated for a different meal in next weeks menu plan. I’ll probably post the new menu plan in the next day or so.

All of the meals turned out really well – and we had left overs a few times as well. The meals were tasty, relatively healthy and very satisfying. I think we will probably add all of the recipes into our mix of recipes we do repeat – but we probably won’t have them again for quite a while.

It’s nice getting to try different things and not have the same old thing week in week out. And to me that is the real beauty of menu planning – aside from saving money and not having to think too much about what to cook at the end of the day – it’s all done a week or more in advance. We try new things all the time and fortunately have only ever had a couple of disasters – thank goodness.

One of the dislikes I have about a lot of the recipes I have is that they cater for more than 2 people – usually 4 but frequently up to 6. So reducing the quantities without compromising the flavours can be a bit tricky at times – although I’m definitely getting better at working out what can be reduced without having a negative effect overall. For instance, pasta/rice, vegetable serving sizes and meat quantities can be pretty much easily modified (up or down) to cater for the number of people you are cooking for. Sauces, marinades etc it’s much more difficult to reduce those without creating a disaster!

Another comment about a lot of recipes is that they seem to have a high content of all the things which are “bad” for us – oils, creams, butter etc and much leaner in the things which are good for us – as in the protein and vegetables. I wonder how much the cook book authors take into account the obesity epidemic which is hitting most of the Western World pretty heavily (pun intended) when creating their recipes. I’m all for getting people into the kitchen – but a lot of people (me included from time to time) need some guidance about what’s the best/right thing to eat and in what quantities as well. Maybe it’s time to create some cookbooks/recipe books which are made for small families or couples which are healthy balanced recipes. I know the Womens Weekly here in Australia do have a couple of good food type cook books – but even those seem to be fairly high in fat content and all those things we love but shouldn’t have in large amounts. Maybe there is a possibility there????