Or, what to cook in your combi steam oven, May 1-7, 2023
Welcome to my latest Steam Oven Meal Plan!
New to this blog series? Check out the first Steam Oven Meal Plan for notes about how I do my meal planning and cooking, or just dive in and add this week’s ingredients to your shopping list.
I use my steam oven every day, but I also like to share other recipes I’m cooking, from all around the web. This is the closest you’ll get to being in my kitchen in person.
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A steam oven meal plan on autopilot (coming soon!)
Bumping on from last week’s plan, I’m really happy with my newly adopted system of meal planning. It’s making me feel very much like I can sit down for 15 minutes on a Saturday or Sunday and easily plan out a solid week’s worth of interesting and delicious meals. Reducing the mental load, if you will.
My challenge over the next week is to turn my planning approach into an editable ‘thing’ for the rest of you. I’m working on a downloadable system that you’ll be able to use with all of my recipes. But seeing as none of us cook solely from one website, I also want it to be editable so you can adapt it to suit all the things you personally like to make.
For this week it’s business as usual, but do stay tuned; if you’re on my email list you’ll hear about it first right there. Not on the list? Sign up right here to be first to hear about everything in my steam oven world.
Happy cooking, see you here again soon.
Monday
I realise traditionally people ate a Sunday roast, but can we talk instead about a Monday roast? I like it much more. This one is simple and goes along in the oven, slowly becoming exactly what you want to eat when it’s the beginning of the week and Friday feels very far away. Bonus, if you make enough you’ll have fantastic lunch leftovers or the makings of a fast roasted vegetable soup for the freezer or late week lunches.
We’re going all in with the classics today; I recently taught my eldest kiddo to make a fruit crumble and I’m hoping to entice him into the kitchen again to help with this one. He’s become a more reluctant cook now that YouTube and computer games are in his orbit, so I’m always trying to make other things (read: anything that doesn’t involve a screen!) more interesting.
Tuesday
You’ll see baked chicken and rice often in our house, but everyone gets bored of the same-old seasoning mix. Tonight I’m ‘Mexicanizing’ it (I am so, so sorry if you’re of Mexican heritage, this is a true abomination). I’ll skip the rub from the recipe and replace it with a reduced-salt taco seasoning packet. A drained can of black beans goes in with the rice and liquid, along with a diced bell pepper and a couple of diced tomatoes. Cook as per the recipe and serve with sour cream. If you have fussy small humans around, a tortilla stuffed with the resulting meal makes them much more likely to declare it a great dinner.
Wednesday
I have a little pistachio pesto stashed in the freezer, and I’m going to use it on (also frozen) salmon for a fast Wednesday dinner.
In this case, skip the burnt butter sauce in the recipe below, instead dotting the finished dish with your pesto. If your salmon portions are frozen as mine are, walk on the wild side and cook straight from frozen. Add roughly 3-5 minutes to the cooking time, depending on thickness, and they’ll come out better than if you’d thawed and cooked the fish.
Thursday
I’ll be trialling a one-pan gnocchi dish tonight, after seeing a beautiful version from my favorite appliances store on Instagram. I haven’t got a firm idea of what I’ll do yet, but I’ll be steaming frozen gnocchi and adding plenty of greens along with creme fraiche and whatever else takes my fancy on the day. I’ll try to share in stories over on my own Insta, so follow along if you like.
Friday
Easy and breezy sausage bake tonight. I’ve promised I’ll let my youngest have ‘potato bullets’ (his name for tater tots or potato gems, depending where you’re reading from!). So I’m actually going to sub out the potatoes and see how the tots go baked straight in with everything else. I’ll share if it’s successful!
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Weekend
We’ll be making homemade pizzas over the weekend, one of the few things I don’t put anywhere near a steam oven! I make a simple basic pizza dough using a pound and a bit (500g) of bread flour, 2 teaspoons of yeast, one of salt and roughly a cup and a half of lukewarm water. Dump everything into a mixer with a dough hook and let it go on low speed for 10 minutes. A countertop proof for tastier dough (or, yes, a steam oven proof if I’m in a hurry) until it’s doubled in size, then knock down and divide to make 4 dough balls. I’m sure you can take things from there and add your own toppings; we all like different things but that’s the beauty of pizza!
I’d love a dedicated pizza oven but don’t have one, so instead I bake using a preheated heavy stone and a baking steel (both in the oven from cold for a good half hour preheat as high as the oven goes, then we bake two pizzas at once). They get the job done fine, baking a pizza in about 7 minutes.
While we’re on dough, I’m also going to make a fruit loaf. I bought delicious dried apricots from the bulk food store and want to do something with them before the kids eat them all!
