Strike While the Oven is Hot

One of the ways of coping with after-work exhaustion is to cook some of your meals in advance. A couple of Sundays ago thats exactly what I did...

Saving time like this can only work if you have been shopping with cooking-ahead in mind. I had bought a piece of boned, stuffed shoulder of pork and some minced beef. I also checked that I had flour, butter and eggs in the store cupboards.The night before I made a batch of rich (2:1 flour to butter) shortcrust pastry. In the food processor this took 5 minutes,no more. I rolled the pastry in cling film, and left it in the fridge to rest overnight.
The pastry went to line two flan tins, was baked blind and turned into vegetable and cheese flans (or quiches, for the more pretentious of us.)
The flans were baked at gas 4, which was also the temperature I roasted the pork at. Whilst these were in the oven I made a beef chilli. Somehow adding the chilli heat and some(tinned)kidney beans makes mince-for-two go twice as far.

All in, I spent about two hours actually cooking, and by the time I finished we had the main ingredients for our dinners for the rest of the week.

I was particularly pleased with a couple of neat bits of technique with the flan cases which I tried for the first time...

More Tomorrow....