Saucy Dressings aims to complete this post – four weeks’ menus and recipes, plus a few spare by the end of 2023.

Every year an additional week’s menu, with the links to the individual recipes, is added.

For food in season in February, follow this link.

For eleven pieces of pink and rosy music to cook to in February, follow this link.

You might also be interested in these posts:

• Eight romantic and not too soppy films for Valentine’s Day
• Poleaxed peaches and oranges to celebrate the battaglia delle arance
• How the make the best, and the fluffiest, pancakes, what to put in them, and what have MPs got to do with it
• Wonders of the Woodspeen – Peter Eaton’s do-it-yourself menu for Valentine’s Day

---

Week’s menu for February: number one

This month I’m off to the States so I’ll be looking into brownies and chocolate chip cookies; and drinking an appropriate Manhattan. We have Valentine’s Day – excuse for all food and drink pink, red, heart-shaped and chocolate. 19th February 2015 heralds the new Chinese Year of the Sheep (or goat) – so we’ll be exploring mutton and the goats’ cheese, Riblaire.

Purple sprouting is the new vegetable on the block so we’ll be incorporating that first taste of spring into some recipes to pep up our winter-jaded palates.

There is also Pancake Day – follow this link for how to make pancakes.

Saturday lunch:

• Chinese eggs with tomatoes which I learnt to make and eat in China

OR

• a duo of chicken wraps

OR

• pretty paneer with spinach, peas and dark, grainy rice and a golden lemony sauce – a hearty and different vegetarian lunch

FOLLOWED BY

• the best classic recipe for chocolate chip cookies which I learnt to make in Canada

Sunday evening:

• taco-topped tomatoed beef pie – cottage pie with edge
• tomato and lime salad

Monday evening chicken:

• chicken tagine with preserved lemons and other north African ingredients
• be-berried brownies

Tuesday evening:

• leftovers or night out!

Wednesday evening meat:

• gypsy camp marinated mutton ragout

OR

• pork and rhubarb pie

AND

• purple sprouting broccoli

Thursday evening dinner party:

• with drinks: baked whole fig with goats’ cheese wrapped in Parma ham
• starter: roast peppers with tomatoes

OR

• starter: Röperhof-inspired frothy white goat cheese, rolled in crispy breadcrumbs, with red grapes
• main course: utmost of chicken fried in bother macao
• pudding: chocolate mousse with plums in crème de cassis

OR

• pudding: St Clement’s coffee and cherry terrific trifle

Thank God it’s Friday drink:

• Manhattan

Friday evening fish:

• 12 angry men sea bass with jasmine rice and tamari-glazed sprouts

---

Week’s menu for February: number two

“Now from his breast into the eyes the ache
of longing mounted, and he wept at last,
his dear wife, clear and faithful, in his arms,
longed for as the sunwarmed earth is longed for by a swimmer
spent in rough water where his ship went down
under Poseidon’s blows, gale winds and tons of sea.
Few men can keep alive through a big serf
to crawl, clotted with brine, on kindly beaches
in joy, in joy, knowing the abyss behind:
and so she too rejoiced, her gaze upon her husband,
her white arms round him pressed as though forever.”

Homer, The Odyssey

Saturday lunch:

• concocted cabbage collation – an unusual pairing of cabbage with avocado, which you can make into a hearty lunch by adding nutty lentils

OR

• spiced and roasted aubergine

OR

• carrot, coriander and orange soup inspired by the Queen of Herbs

Sunday brunch

• Poached eggs atop garlic mushrooms licked with chocolatey chilli

Sunday evening pasta or rice:

• vampire’s enemy cauliflower pasta

OR

• comfortable kedgeree

Monday evening rabbit-chicken-prawn:

• ménage a trois rabbit-chicken-prawn pie with sesame cabbage

Tuesday evening:

Leftovers or night out!

Wednesday evening meat:

• duckkeeper’s pie – with confit of duck

OR

• gnocchi pie of ham hock and peas

Valentine’s dinner for two:

Conceived to reduce cooking time to a minimum… plenty of time for ….other things:

• cup and saucer prawn and fennel – instant in the microwave
• rhyming venison wellington with sweetheart cabbage and cranberries
• blood orange sorbet with crunchy zest biscuits
• finished with some deep orangy red mimolette cheese and black charcoal hearts
• and a selection of slightly-less-soppy romantic films

Thank God It’s Friday Drink

• Portuguese Old Fashioned

Friday evening fish:

• sole with a gold dress

OR

• white fish fillets with preserved lemons, and hot, rosy chickpeas

---

Week’s menu for February: number three

“‘As the days lengthen, the cold strengthens’ is an old country saying. February brings the severe frosts and the snow….. But while the sun glows low and red above the frozen fields there is shelter and comparative warmth in the coppice. Here men are busy felling the undergrowth. Black they look against the thin covering of shining snow on the ground, all varieties of colour lost in their contrasting depth of tone.”

Clare Leighton, The Farmer’s Year: A Calendar of English Husbandry

Saturday lunch:

• omelette Arnold Bennett for cheats

OR

• Estonian smoked sprat open sandwich

AND

• rich, crisp, chocolatey mustard biscuits

A winter Sunday lunch:

• roast chicken with all the trimmings

Sunday supper:

• warm pork and peanut noodle salad

Monday evening meat:

• gammon steaks with damson marsala sauce
• superior sesame spinach

Tuesday evening:

• Leftovers or night out!

Wednesday evening poultry:

• One-pot lemon chicken with artichokes and mushrooms

OR

• cuminy salad of avocado, black beans and leftover chicken

Thursday evening dinner party:

• with drinks: married-all-along chipolatas with mustard mayonnaise
• starter: La bohème smoked salmon roulade
• main course: luscious and lovely filo lamb pie
• vegetable: tzatziki-coated courgettes and pecans
• pudding: poleaxed peaches and oranges

Thank God It’s Friday drink:

• Sidecar

OR

• Monkey Business! Whisky with apple balsamic vinegar
  ….. and to eat with it:
• almonds and manchego British-style

Friday evening fish:

• Clement Freud’s spiced salmon
• Roman gnocchi
• Chinese aubergines and garlic

---

Week’s menu for February: number four

“The sky is gone. It is not clouded, it is swathed in gloom. Upwards the still air thickens and there is no arch or vault of heaven. Formless and vague, it seems like some vast shadow descending. The sun has disappeared and the light there still is, is left in the atmosphere enclosed by the gloomy mist as pools are left by a receding tide.”

Richard Jeffries, Haunts of the Lapwing, 1883

Saturday lunch:

• zucchini nuraghe

OR

• Almost instant, and rather different lunch of burrata and cheat’s red cabbage

AND

• Carrot museum curator’s favourite carrot cake

Sunday supper:

• sunset inspired sweet and salty black rice with prawns

OR

• breaded calves’ livers with a bright tomato salad

Monday evening meat:

• roast rose veal with rose vermouth sauce

Tuesday evening:

Leftovers or night out!

Wednesday evening poultry:

• Indian chicken curry
• coconut rice
• tamarind aubergines

Thursday evening dinner party:

• with drinks: Yashim’s Hummus
• starter: cod with black pudding and banana

OR

• starter: a simple, smokey, rosy salmon mousse
• main course: venison fillet with
• Brazilian style shredded greens anointed with Brazilian garlic oil
• AND/OR aloo palak – potatoes with spinach
• pudding: chocolate and orange mousse

Thank God It’s Friday drink:

• red hot, super-cool lipstick cocktail from Kong in Paris
• sticky city cocktail sausages

Friday evening fish:

• Vineet-inspired black lentils and prawns

OR

• Modigliani white fish fillets with a mussel and saffron sauce

AND

• peppers stuffed with apple and mascarpone

---