Saucy Dressings aims to complete this post – four weeks’ menus and recipes, plus a few spare by the end of 2022. Every year an additional week’s menu, with the links to the individual recipes, is added.

 

 

For food in season in March, follow this link.

For music to listen to while cooking in March, follow this link.

In March we have St David’s Day, St Patrick’s Day and Mother’s Day. So you might also be interested in these posts:

 

• Frances Jones-Davis, editor of Cambria magazine, on Welsh cuisine
• The Old Foodie, on Welsh leeks
• Welsh rabbit..or Welsh rarebit… or even caws pob cymreig

• St Patrick’s boozy bread and butter pudding
• Green Spot Irish Whiskey
• St Patrick’s light-as-air chocolate tart

• Mothers’ Day Hoggonoff
• The five mothers, or is it eleven? All about sauces
• How mothers in Modena fit out their daughters with a dowry

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Week’s menu for March: number one

“Spring was moving in the air above and in the earth below and around him, penetrating even his dark and lowly little house with its spirit of divine discontent and longing.”

Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

Saturday lunch:

• two saints and a tart – a Welsh leek and Irish blue cheese quiche

OR

• black olive and white fish luscious lunch open sandwich

OR

• salad of crispy croutons, prawns and marinated feta

FOLLOWED BY

• lemon and blueberry drizzle-squidgies

Sunday evening mince:

• Irish colcannon with Irish sausages (spot the theme?)

OR

• Baked Asian sea bass

WITH

• Special cauliflower roasted in turmeric oil with black nigella seeds

Monday evening meat:

• scallopini ai funghi – from Youghal (in Ireland)

Shrove Tuesday:

Pancakes!

Wednesday evening poultry:

• Chicken schnitzels, splendid with seeds, golden with turmeric
• Roast baby tomatoes, or juicy Spanish red peppers, with a lemon-thyme yoghurt sauce

OR

• Charlotte’s caramelised carrots

OR

• juicy chicken thighs with blue cheese sauce, crushed lemony potatoes, and a crisp green salad, or buttered romanesco or broccoli

Thursday evening dinner party:

• with drinks: umami mixed and whole nuts
• starter: warm Welsh goats’ cheese, fig and honey salad

OR

• starter: it’s-a-doddle duck liver pâté
• main course: chicken with kumquats; basmati rice and a green salad
• pudding: St Patrick’s light-as-air chocolate tart

OR

• pudding: chocolate and peanut butter fondant – sort of molten Snickers!

Thank God It’s Friday drink:

• Connemara whisky

and to eat with it

• tapenade, cauliflower and cream cheese dip

Friday evening fish:

• fried fillet of perch or cobbler with wonderful wedge potatoes

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Week’s menu for March: number two

“…surely it is the spring that stirs the heart more profoundly [than autumn]. Then, birdsong is full of the feel of spring, the plants beneath the hedges bud into leaf in the warm sunlight, the slowly deepening season brings soft mists, while the blossoms at last begin to open, only to meet with ceaseless winds and rain that send them flurrying restlessly to earth. Until the leaves appear on the boughs, the heart is endlessly perturbed.”

Kenkō, A Cup of Sake Beneath the Cherry Trees (written circa 1330)

For this week then the dinner party menu is the famed Great British Menu. And there are other classics such as chicken liver pate and bubble and squeak. But the chicken with Paris pastry and the sea bass accompanied by the Thai coconut rice add a touch of the exotic. It’s St David’s day today so you could watch the gentle, feel-good, Englishman who went up a hill, but came down a mountain, which stars Hugh Grant, as usual charmingly playing himself, and is all about Welshness (see clip below). The soundtrack is equally gentle – just what you need when attempting the albeit pared-down challenge of the  Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte. 

Saturday lunch:

• chicken liver pate
• no-knead bread
• sun-drenched red pepper salad

OR

• peppery mushroom mustard salad with paprika dusted sourdough

OR

• storecupboard prawns, beans, and feta

Sunday evening:

• bubble and squeak cakes with poached eggs and wow wow sauce

OR

• A happy, hygge wild mushroom and morel sauce to go with tagliatelle

Monday evening chicken:

• Stairway to heaven hens in Paris pastry

Tuesday evening:

• leftovers or night out!

Wednesday evening meat:

• Barbary duck
• Greek greens and potatoes

OR

• cabbage, fennel and flecks of golden saffron

Thursday evening dinner party – The Great British Menu:

• starter: prawn cocktail
• main course: steak with wonderful wedge potatoes or root chips; or sort-of Greek salad; cheats’ béarnaise sauce or a herb or blue cheese butter
• pudding: black forest gâteau with kirsch – Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte
• after dinner drink: Irish coffee

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“Cooked as it should be, this much derided and often ridiculed dinner is still something very special indeed”

Hopkinson and Bareham, The Prawn Cocktail Years

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Thank God It’s Friday drink:

• horse’s neck

… and to nibble at with it:

• quails’ eggs on fried bread

Friday evening fish:

• sea bass fillets with ginger
• mango and coconut rice

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Week’s menu for March: number three

“’Is the spring coming?’ he said. ‘What is it like?’…

‘It is the sun shining on the rain and the rain falling on the sunshine…’”

Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden

Saturday lunch:

• pease pudding butty

OR

• herbed and charred cabbage salad with three cheeses and walnuts

OR

• peanut and papaya salad

AND

• traybake

Sunday supper:

• Mme Benoit’s tourtière
• fried little gem lettuce

Monday evening meat:

• wild boar ragu
• pici pasta
• green salad

Tuesday evening:

• leftovers or night out!

Wednesday evening poultry:

• Je prefère drunken Dijon poulet
• fresh freekeh salad with celery and mint

Thursday evening dinner party:

• with drinks: mushroom-embraced quails’ eggs
• starter: smoked salmon and avocado and sundried tomatoes

OR

• starter: Irish prawns and eggs
• main course: lamb and celeriac hotpot
• pudding:    st patrick’s day bread and butter pudding

OR

• pudding: coconut and pineapple flower pie

Thank God It’s Friday drink:

• thoughts on tej

….. and to eat with it:

• boat race cheese straws

Friday evening fish:

• pig-wrapped salmon with lemony flageolet beans and leeks in vermouth

OR

• with warm lemon orzo salad

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Week’s menu for March: number four

“In this international commerce of geese, the waste corn of Illinois is carried through the clouds to the Arctic tundras, there to combine with the waste sunlight of a nightless June to grow goslings for all the lands in between. And in this annual barter of food for light, and winter warmth for summer solitude, the whole continent receives as net profit a wild poem dropped from the murky skies upon the muds of March.”

Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, and Sketches Here and There

Saturday lunch:

• salad Niçoise

OR

• devilled kidneys

OR

• black salad of aubergines and sesame

AND

• an Italian salad of zucchini and mozzarella

FOLLOWED BY

• wardrobe cake

Sunday supper:

• sausage ring with crushed potatoes
• green salad with cream dressing

OR

• tagliatelle in a fish and yoghurt sauce with fiery butter

Monday evening meat:

• one-pot middle-eastern lamb

OR

• lamb hiding mozzarella and speared with cherry tomatoes

OR

• albóndigas…..aka Spanish meatballs in tomato sauce; with wonderful wedge potatoes and a primavera salad

Tuesday evening:

• leftovers or night out!

Wednesday evening poultry:

• chicken folded in a soft yellow blanket
• biancoli 

Thursday evening dinner party:

• with drinks: chilled vodka with blini, sour cream and shocking hot pink salmon cured in gin and beetroot
• starter: camembert cigars with fiery red accompaniments

OR

• starter: scallops with a salty chocolate sauce
• main course: veal in a curry sauce with Domini’s tenderstem broccoli and Pommes Anna
• pudding:   hot chocolate and marmalade mousse pudding

OR

• pudding: elegant chocolate rum cake inspired by Crispins

Thank God It’s Friday drink:

• Hemingway’s Gasoline

….. and to eat with it:

• savoury bacon puff pastry rolls

Friday evening fish:

• sea bass with truffle paste, endive and chorizo

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“It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade.”

Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

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