Cook the Cookbook Project- week 13

 

This week the menu was a fun one featuring a meat and vegetable pie and a salad.

Overall the menu was excellent.

To start the meal the menu called for a glass of grapefruit juice to be served. My mom used to serve a glass of juice to start the meal off on a regular basis but her go to was always either plain tomato or more often some V-8. I don’t remember her ever serving a different juice than those at dinner. We did have grapefruit juice at breakfast a lot though.

The meat and vegetable pie took a while to make since it was basically just a beef stew (with no potatoes) that was then transferred to a casserole dish, topped with some biscuits and baked long enough to bake the biscuits. My only critic was that in my opinion the gravy portion needed to be thickened to make it a better dish. Over all I really enjoyed the dish and I think I will be working on a version of my own to post on here in the future.

The salad was really good and while I have made similar ones in the past I never think to do so. It was just a very basic green salad with some bacon tossed in. The dressing was then made using the hot bacon fat as the oil portion and poured hot over the salad. Very yummy indeed.

The menu called for more biscuits to be served alongside the meal. The pie recipe called for the cook to use the recipe on a box of Bisquick to make the topping and the rest of the batch to be baked alongside. I did decide to skip the jelly for the biscuit because I wasn’t really in the mood. Especially right after the tart juice.

The dessert this week was called a “Chocolate Blanc Mange” I was very intrigued because the name of the dish was unfamiliar to me. After looking over the recipe and then doing a Google search for more info I now know that it is a very thick pudding that is thickened with just cornstarch. It is very smooth and silky. It was very easy to make with just a few ingredients that are normally in my kitchen.

 

 

So what are my thoughts this week? I have to say this menu did not have the familiar feelings I’ve gotten from a lot of the others. I don’t think that other than the fact my mom did serve juice sometimes and she made Bisquick biscuits pretty often. I don’t remember my mom making the recipes that were in the menu this week. I still am finding most of the recipes to be very bland a lot of the time and these recipes were no different in that respect. Also the biscuits on the side in addition to the ones on top of the pie seemed like a lot, but also much like what my mom served back in the day.