My suggestions for what to cook this weekend include British food – because, well, you know, The Queen – Burmese salads, a curry beef pie, and beef Stroganoff, because it’s been a while. We’ve got recipes for everything for you from English pies and Scotch Eggs to Irish stew. I’ve also included recipes for Burmese salads, simply because they’re the best.
With our British friends in mind over the the last week, we’ve been cooking British food – everything from my shakshuka inpired full English breakfast recipe, which I posted last weekend, to the British comfort food recipes for everything from a classic cottage pie and Scotch eggs to fish pot pies and a deeply flavoured Irish stew I shared a few days ago.
And let’s not forget the recipes for fish and chips, sausage rolls, and salmon and colcannon that featured in our British-themed weekend meal ideas for last week’s edition of What to Cook this Weekend. I’ve got a few more British recipes for you today.
If you’re a first-time visitor to Grantourismo, What to Cook this Weekend is a very random weekly-ish recipe series with ideas for often easy, occasionally challenging, but always memorable weekend meals. We publish the series weekly, unless life gets in the way.
My weekend cooking suggestions for you might include dishes we’re cooking here at home, which we think you might enjoy, recipes that we’re developing and testing out for our cookbooks, or recipes we’d like to cook if we had the time, which we think you’d like.
All of our recipes come from our recipe archives, which are jam-packed with loads of recipes: from family recipes and nostalgic recipes from our childhoods to recipes for dishes from around the world that we learnt to cook on our travels and dishes that we cook at home here in Cambodia.
Many of our most popular recipes are from a series called The Dish, on the quintessential dishes of places we settled into when we launched Grantourismo with our 12 month global grand tour back on New Year’s Day 2010. They include everything from a Moroccan Moroccan lamb tajine with prunes and almonds to this classic Toulouse cassoulet.
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Now let me share my ideas as to what to cook this weekend.
What to Cook This Weekend – British Food, Burmese Salads, Curry Beef Pies, Beef Stroganoff
Saturday Breakfast – Irish Colcannon Recipe with Fried Egg and Crispy Bacon for Weekend Eggs
This Irish colcannon recipe with fried egg and crispy bacon is one of my top suggestions for what to cook this weekend. It will make you an Irish breakfast colcannon – or brunch colcannon if you prefer.
The recipe makes a deliciously-rich traditional Irish colcannon dish of mashed potatoes with butter, milk, cabbage, spring onions, and bacon, and we top the colcannon with a fried egg and crispy bacon.
Our thinking was that if we can have breakfast tacos, breakfast salads, breakfast congees, and savoury breakfast porridges simply by adding bacon and eggs, then why not breakfast colcannon with fried eggs and crispy bacon?
Our best tip to making this Irish colcannon recipe with fried egg and crispy bacon is one that every bacon lover should know. If you’re stir-frying any vegetables for a dish where bacon is also going to be fried, cook the bacon first. Bacon fat is magic.
We created this Irish colcannon recipe for our Weekend Eggs series of quintessential eggs dishes from around the world. If breakfast is too early for mashed potatoes, perhaps browse our Weekend Eggs archive for more breakfast ideas.
Irish Colcannon Recipe with Fried Egg and Crispy Bacon for Weekend Eggs, the Irish Edition
Saturday Lunch – Shan Tomato Salad Recipe and a Curry Beef Pie
This Shan tomato salad recipe with shallots, sesame and coriander is another of my top suggestions for what to cook this weekend. I like the idea of a light lunch after such a heavy breakfast, too. Except I’m making a curry beef pie to go with it.
The Shan tomato salad recipe makes a sweet tomato salad textured with crunchy purple onions, sesame seeds and crispy fried shallots and garlic, and fragrant fresh coriander.
Hailing from beautiful Shan State in northeastern Myanmar – a fertile region of forested mountains, rolling hills and serene lakes – this delicious Shan tomato salad is mostly made with green tomatoes in Shan State and is typically eaten as a refreshing accompaniment to rich curries (such as this Burmese Indian-style chicken curry), although we’ve also had it with red tomatoes.
Shan cuisine, like many of Myanmar’s cuisines – and all of the northern Southeast Asian cuisines, in fact – is distinguished by its fantastic salads. Over the years I’ve heard travellers praise the salads but complain about Myanmar’s oily curries, not realising that the salads are accompaniments to those very curries, providing a refreshing contrast.
This, of course, is a Shan salad, as is this delicious Shan vermicelli noodle salad but we also have recipes for Burmese salads, such as this Burmese raw cabbage salad and the cucumber salad recipe I shared this week. If you’re a salad lover like I am, I encourage you to explore the astonishing arrays of salads from Myanmar.
Shan Tomato Salad Recipe with Shallots, Sesame and Coriander from Shan State, Myanmar
Curry Beef Pie Recipe Made With Cambodian Saraman Curry
Terence created this curry beef pie recipe made with Cambodian Saraman curry at the start of the pandemic as we were terribly homesick for Australia but we were also in the midst of testing Cambodian recipes for our Cambodian cookbook and culinary history.
His recipe takes a classic Cambodian curry and marries it to the iconic Australian meat pie, Australia’s favourite savoury pastry, which of course has its origins in the British meat pie. Given that some of the most popular pies in Australia are made with chunky beef and gravy, the texture of Cambodia’s richest curry was perfectly suited to making this spicy meat pie.
Terence also developed recipes for a spicy pork minced pie filled with Cambodia’s beloved prahok k’tis, a rich pork mince, prahok, coconut cream, and pea eggplant dip; a curried chicken pie recipe based on the gently-spiced Cambodian chicken curry; and sausage rolls with eggplant and pork inspired by the Cambodian char-grilled eggplant and minced pork.
Saturday Dinner – Easy Salmon Tray Bake Recipe for Crispy Skinned Salmon with Spring Vegetables
We’ve just got our Electrolux – oven not vacuum cleaner – back from the repair shop and while it’s still not getting as hot as it should be, it will get hot enough for me to make this easy salmon tray bake recipe, which makes crispy skinned salmon fillets baked so that the skin crackles but the flesh remains moist.
I do the salmon with roasted spring vegetables that are just-done so that they’re still fresh and crunchy. Sprinkled with spring onions and fresh fragrant dill and served with lemon slices, it makes the lightest of fish dinners.
I created this recipe during our northern hemisphere spring when we had spring vegetables in abundance – zucchini, asparagus, broccoli, peas, radishes, and purple shallots – all of which are added near the end of cooking so that they’re just-done and still taste fresh and crunchy, almost like a warm salad.
If you’re a salmon lover, we have more of our best salmon recipes filed here by the way.
Easy Salmon Tray Bake Recipe for Crispy Skinned Salmon with Spring Vegetables
Sunday Breakfast – Jammy Soft-Boiled Eggs on Sourdough with Dill Cream Cheese and Homemade Pickles
I like the idea of these jammy soft-boiled eggs on sourdough with dill cream cheese and homemade pickles for breakfast Saturday. This recipe will make you a less fancy, shareable, snack version of another recipe that was inspired by my late grandfather’s daily breakfast.
If you made and enjoyed that recipe for slow fried eggs atop a creamy dill spread on toasted sourdough with crunchy gherkins, crisp radishes, drizzled with extra virgin olive oil, and sprinkled with paprika, cracked pepper and sea salt, you’ll love this.
My grandfather’s breakfast? Well, every morning papa would rise at the crack of dawn and head out to the garden to feed his chickens and pick whatever vegetables were ripe and ready to eat. He’d then make a beeline for the kitchen where he’d prepare his own breakfast.
Papa would then sit in silence as he concentrated on his plate – he was a mindful eater a few decades before it came into fashion! – and munched on a boiled egg or two, a few cloves of garlic, crunchy cucumbers and radishes just picked from his garden, homemade dill pickles, and dark rye bread, washed down with black tea with lemon… and a shot of vodka!
Jammy Soft-Boiled Eggs on Sourdough with Dill Cream Cheese and Homemade Pickles
Sunday Lunch – Baked Potato Soup Recipe with Crispy Bacon, Cheddar Cheese, Sour Cream and Spring Onions
If you didn’t make our baked potato soup recipe this week for a creamy potato soup topped with crispy bacon, sour cream, cheddar cheese, and spring onions, then why not try it for lunch this weekend? It’s another of my top suggestions for what to cook this weekend.
The delicious potato soup is not made with baked potatoes, rather it’s inspired by the traditional British baked potato or jacket potato with toppings first sold by hawkers on the streets of London back in the mid-1800s.
The recipe calls for chicken stock, but for a vegetarian version you could use vegetable stock instead, or even water and bump up the seasoning.
We always have homemade chicken stock in the fridge, which we make when we poach chicken breasts using this super simple method I explained in this chicken and potato soup recipe.
Baked Potato Soup Recipe with Crispy Bacon, Cheddar Cheese, Sour Cream and Spring Onions
Sunday Dinner – Authentic Russian Beef Stroganoff Recipe
Putin, be damned, I’m making my authentic Russian beef Stroganoff recipe tonight. I haven’t been sharing my Russian family recipes since the damn man invaded Ukraine, because most things Russian were cancelled, including Russian food it seemed. But Putin appears to be losing, so I’m going to celebrate a little with one of my favourite dishes.
I like to think of beef Stroganoff as an aristocratic Russian dish with peasant roots. There were mushrooms and beef stews centuries before this Russian beef Stroganoff recipe was said to have been invented, or perhaps more accurately, reinterpreted, by a French chef in the Stroganov dynasty’s palace kitchen.
While mushrooms and onions could well have featured in the beef Stroganoff dish served in the St Petersburg palace dining room, they didn’t appear in the early beef Stroganoff recipes. My Strog is based on a combo of my family recipe, a beef Stroganoff I fell in love with in Moscow, and the earliest documented beef Stroganoff recipes by Elena Molokhovets in A Gift to Young Housewives, dating to 1861, and Pelageya Aleksandrova-Ignatieva in Practical Basics of Culinary Arts, dating to 1899.
If you haven’t made it yet, please do and let me know what you think. Try to get hold of Sareptskaja mustard. You can buy it online, but we can’t get Amazon here so I use wholegrain mustard. Serve it with mashed potatoes and a Russian garden salad on the side, as well as dishes of homemade Russian dill pickles and sour cream.
If you’re not a beef eater, I have a whole collection of my best Stroganoff recipes here, including chicken Stroganoff and meatball Stroganoff.
Authentic Russian Beef Stroganoff Recipe for a Retro Classic from a Saint Petersburg Palace Kitchen
Please do let us know in the comments below if you make any of the recipes I’ve recommend for What to Cook This Weekend as we love to hear how our recipes turn out for you.
