Pack your own lunch recipes

Pack your own lunch recipes - May 2017

Are you still with me? Packing your own lunch and/or cooking in bulk to save money and avoid nasty takeaway food?

We always cook in bulk in the weekend and make all our lunches for the following week. These are ideas for lunch or just bulk cooking. You can find recipes from previous months here. I also share them on Instagram each Sunday or Monday night (you will also see them on the Facebook page). I hope these posts are inspiring you to cook from scratch and take your own lunch to work - both to save money and eat better.

I'm not great at following recipes, and I'm also not good at writing them, because I tend to just use up what we have in the fridge/pantry/garden, things that are on special or we've been given at our local produce share. I'll tell you what I made, but I'm not saying you should follow exactly, just use it as a rough guide and use up whatever you have handy too.

You might think that we just seems to eat the same things all the time. And now that I've started documenting our lunches, it does look like that! I don't get sick of it though. How can you get sick of tasty, quality meat and lots of fresh veges? That's the best meal I can think of. No wonder we hardly ever eat out!

Week 1: Lamb curry

I've done curry before and I'll do it again, its an easy one in the slow cooker and great for using up those tougher (and tastier) cuts of meat. This time it was lamb shoulder chops. Recipe is the same as February.

Week 2: Roast Lamb

This is another favourite and so easy in the slow cooker. I just brown the roast in a frying pan and put it in the slow cooker with onion, carrot, stock, bay leaves and rosemary. After all day or overnight in the slow cooker the roast meat falls off the bone and its just delicious. Recipe details also in February (rolled roast).

Week 3: Beef rolled roast (again!)

Yep, another rolled roast, we did have several of these last time the butcher came, and I saved them because they are my favourite, but now we have so many left, its one a month until they are used up! These are so yummy because I made the filling from bread-crumbs, garlic and herbs. You know where the recipe is... February.

Week 4: Roast chicken (in a power outage)

The power went out at 530pm just as I had laid down after working/cleaning/pottering all day and thinking I could get half an hour rest before going back into the kitchen! So as it was getting dark I had to get up again and chop veges in the remaining light of the day. Fortunately the chicken was already in the Weber BBQ and nearly cooked by then, and we have the gas cooktop for the veges, so dinner and lunch were not affected by the power outage, and it came back on around 830pm, just in time to do the dishes and clean up the kitchen!

The roast chicken recipe is back in January. They are homegrown roosters, so rather precious (we only have 12 or so to eat each year and its a lot of work to make them!).

Nothing new to share this month, but just posting anyway to reinforce that we keep eating similar meals each week and just enjoying that good meat and fresh veges. What do you have for lunch?

Farm update - August 2017

Its been cold this month, and very nice to have the fire going every night. Here's a photo of my boy in his cape, great for late night woofing at things. Most of July we were either preparing for the butcher to come or putting meat away. Its always a big job, but its only once a year, and its all done now. My lovely neighbour came over to help, so it was fun to have the company and work together. Taz was a champion once again as she helped us to move cattle in the yards ready to load for the market. Gus is not at that level yet and had to stay home (he cries when he gets left behind, but he just gets in the way and scatters the cattle). We have had a few sprinkles of rain here and there, but also plenty of cold nights, so the grass is mostly dead and dry, waiting for the warmer weather to revive our summer-active pasture. Gus in his cape Taz after she helped to move cattle Food and cooking It was all about beef in July and we are v...

Cooking and eating beans

When I was growing up, my family never ate many dried beans, they just weren't something that was used much in NZ cuisine. If I did eat beans, it was always from a can (and most likely baked beans). And until recently I was still using beans from a can, but it can be difficult to get organic beans, and to find cans not lined with BPA. Then I had an opportunity to buy some organic dry goods in bulk, so I bought 5kg of kidney beans, 5kg of adzuki beans and 5kg of chickpea (garbanzo beans). I know, that is a lot of beans. And then I didn't really know what to do with them! Not just what dishes to put them in, but how to prepare them, I just didn't know what method to use. So I decided it was time to learn how to use all these beans that I bought, here's what I found out. I started with an excellent ebook called The Everything Beans Book , from Katie at Kitchen Stewardship, which has lots of bean recipes, but more importantly, an explanation of h...

Guest post: Is there a place for power tools in the garden?

One of my regular readers and commenters offered to write a guest post about a horticulture course, its quite a funny read, with some serious insights into our technology obsession. If you'd like to submit a guest post, email me at eight.acres.liz {at} gmail.com. While I am always happy to share links back to your blog or website, this contributor preferred to remain anonymous. I hope you enjoy their story.... -**- -**- -**- -**- -**- -**- -**- -**- -**- -**- -**- -**- -**- -**- Just a few days ago our daily horticulture classes were interrupted by an invitation to review some new gardening gadgets. The idea was to open half a dozen of electric hand trimmers , test them and fill in some review about their goods and bads. As nothing is more dear to a student – even a “hort “ one - to escape routine and mess around till lunchtime, we opened the boxes and got down to business. What did we...

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