Results tagged “leftovers” from Mostly Eating
Potatoes are the traditional starchy addition to frittatas and tortilla but unless you have the pre-requisite "handful of leftover boiled potatoes" lingering in your fridge (we never do), including potatoes can add an unwanted extra stage to the cooking. Parsnips are quicker to cook and much tastier than spuds and more importantly allow the frittata to keeps its allure as a one pan supper.
I've used Gouda which has a caramel sweetness that complements the parsnips and red onion beautifully but most types of cheese that you might have in your fridge would work. All types of wintery leafy green can be substituted including chard, savoy cabbage or even thinly sliced brussels sprouts.
This combination of juicy fresh fruit, sweet dried fruit and a hint of spice was my food flask breakfast for a very early train journey a few weeks back, inspired by a leftover bowl of quinoa. Porridge (possibly more commonly known as oatmeal?) is my regular nutritious winter breakfast in many, many different guises, but quinoa makes a very pleasant change from oats. Quinoa, it turns out, is also a much more forgiving grain to prepare in the morning rush. Povided that you cook a little extra earlier in the week, this essentially just entails reheating; there’s no need to wait for that magic moment when those "oats floating in milk" magically elasticise into real, gooey porridge. Plus like porridge, this breakfast is really, really filling stuff, most likely because of the low glycaemic index of the grain which means that it keeps your blood glucose levels on an even keel well into the morning. The mix of fresh and dried fruit covers water-soluble vitamins (particularly vitamin C), minerals and fibre all in one. Porridge and quinoa are nutritionally similar in many ways; both are wholegrains and both low GI provided that you choose the right sort of oats. Quinoa has a GI of 51 (classified as low), old-fashioned rolled oats 42 (also low) while instant porridge is 82 (high GI). Other nutritional aspects are more of a trade-off; porridge has its cholesterol-busting soluble fibre, while quinoa is higher in protein.
The quinoa can be soaked in the milk overnight but don’t worry about that too much - this dish still works fine made just before eating. If you're wondering why I'm suggesting adding honey to something that already contains naturally sweet dried fruit and clementines, the reality is that quinoa often has a very distinctive earthy note to it (the kind of flavour a wine buff would describe as a tad vegetal). A little drizzle of honey among all of these other healthy ingredients is not going to cause any lasting damage but if you use a sweetened milk like certain soy milks then you might not need it.
Last Sunday was all about using up the ends of a roast chicken from a couple of weeks before, plus sundry other odds and ends from the fridge. I was so pleased with the end result I thought I’d share it here: a homely chicken casserole with seasonal veggies, spelt and light dumplings made with rosemary and lemon.Like most people, we’re feeling the credit crunch a little bit around this way. I’m loathe to cut our food buying in any dramatic way (not surprisingly, eating well is a fairly big priority in our house) so it is a softly, softly approach at the moment. For me part of the deal of being an occasional omnivore means buying higher welfare standard meat and going back from this to cheaper alternatives just isn’t an option. A small organic chicken is surprisingly economical, not to mention tastier than the ubiquitous pale chicken breast fillet. This way the whole of the chicken gets used up, plus there’s something quietly satisfying in a domesticated way about stretching a chicken out to three or four meals.
Here’s what I had left in my fridge:
- Chicken stock – the really good stuff, the sort that sets to a quivering jelly in the fridge. The stock was made from the carcass of a roast chicken that I didn’t have time to turn into stock straight away but slung into the freezer until the next weekend.
- Half a tub of crème fraiche – whenever I buy crème fraiche for a recipe there is always some leftover; every recipe uses half a pot or less!
- A chunk of sourdough – of course the breadcrumbs don’t have to be made from sourdough but the bottom line is that good bread makes good breadcrumbs. Slightly dry, stale bread is even better than fresh, but fresh will work fine too.
- Seasonal vegetables – I’ve used carrot and leek, the seasonal vegetables that I had odds and ends of in the fridge. Celery, squash, onion, fennel and turnip would also work well here.
- Rosemary and bay – not technically in the fridge, but unlike more delicate species, rosemary and bay are the only herbs to consistently survive both my horticultural efforts and the British climate
Moo Moos is an immensely popular milkshake joint in Oxford’s historic covered market. Their milkshake repertoire is astounding; if it’s sweet, they can turn it into a milkshake. You should see their menu, which goes all the way through the confectionary lexicon from Snickers, Kit Kat and Cream Egg milkshakes to the more biscuity Jammy Dodger and Oreo versions. The mind boggles at some of the suggestions; lemon drizzle cake milkshake anyone? The milkshakes aren’t really my thing; the real draw for me is the fruit smoothies or more specifically, the peach and raspberry smoothie. In the absence of any figs on my fig tree this year I’ve made myself busy perfecting my own take Moo Moos' peach and raspberry smoothie. It turns out that making a thick, frozen yogurt style smoothie is a cinch; just put the yogurt in the freezer for an hour before you want your drink (I know, what took me so long to figure that one out). My version uses nectarines instead of peaches (good peaches are hard to come by in the UK) which are still a match made in heaven for raspberries. A drop of orange flower water adds a lovely floral scent and somehow makes the smoothie feel like more of a grown-up drink.
There are many, many other ingredients that you can add to smoothies to get you out of a smoothie rut:
Good things to add to smoothies that don’t add calories
- I’m all for a bit of floral honey to pep up lacklustre fruit but spices such as nutmeg, allspice, cinnamon, and vanilla extract can all create an illusion of sweetness without adding calories
- Orange flower water and rosewater give a decadent floral scent, as in today's recipe and my fig and rosewater smoothie
- A squeeze of lemon or lime juice can really make those fruit flavours pop
- Kathryn from Limes and Lycopene intriguingly suggests a slosh of cold herbal tea such as peppermint or rooibos
- For a touch of warmth and spice add grated ginger or even a touch of fresh chilli. I suspect lemongrass would be good too, but it is probably best put through the juicer rather than the blender.
- Unsweetened pumpkin puree is useful as very low calorie thickener
- Garden herbs such as mint, basil and lemon verbena all add welcome freshness
Last week was all about those ingredients that sound like they are going to be wholegrains but turn out not to be. This week is a little of the opposite - I have been cooking with cous cous. Now those clever foodie types amongst you will know that cous cous isn’t really a grain at all, despite it’s teeny tiny appearance, but that it is actually little tiny pieces of pasta. But surprisingly perhaps, you can get still get wholegrain cous cous; simply cous cous made from wholewheat flour.The cous cous, sumac, pepper and date salad featured here is a very simple recipe. Everybody makes a salad like this every now and then - perfect as a side dish or as a packed lunch to take to work. Every time I make it this salad it is slightly different, however the ideas behind it are always the same. I have five broad categories of ingredient in mind to make sure that my salad provides a good range of nutrients:
A wholegrain – choose from quinoa, brown rice, buckwheat, wholegrain spelt, wholewheat cous cous and millet or whatever else you fancy. Wholegrains are higher in vitamins and minerals than their refined equivalents and full of fibre. People often find that wholegrains are more filling than refined carbohydrates, so a wholegrain salad is perfect for keeping you energetic and wide awake well into the afternoon.
Fresh vegetables – any chopped fresh or lightly blanched vegetables such as peppers, green beans, radish, tomato, grated carrot, courgette, spring onion, red onion, cucumber or sweetcorn. All of these will count towards your five a day as well as providing vitamins, potassium and fibre. I like to include something that I know will give me a decent amount of vitamin C – usually red or yellow peppers. You can of course use leftover roasted vegetables, in which case how about complementing them with some chopped fresh fruit so that you still get plenty of Vitamin C?
Dried fruit – dates, apricots, figs, sour cherries etc will all add an appealing sweet note to your salad. Most dried fruits are very high in fibre and usually rich in minerals (particularly iron and sometimes also calcium).
Nuts or seeds – these provide healthy fats, more fibre and a little bit of protein. Most importantly they add bags of texture and flavour.
Flavour enhancers – a little something to boost the flavour. I used sumac, which adds a lovely tart note against the sweet dried dates (not to mention an exotic pink hue!). But pretty much anything goes; lemon juice, black pepper, fresh or dried herbs, chilli sauce, spices, seasoning mixes. The idea is to boost the flavour of your lunch without needing to add large amounts of calories or salt.
Kristin at Cookthink has made an unbelievably frugal scrap soup from odds and ends I would never have thought to use such as broccoli stems, discarded chilli seeds and leftover shrimp shells. Definitely a recipe to check out for inspiration if you are trying to reduce your food waste
Another creative solution to kitchen waste, Dayna has been freezing the crusts from her daughter's sandwiches to make a divine chocolate cherry bread pudding
A new to me blog to check out, Just Braise which is written by Stacey Ornstein who also writes about dairy issues for the Sustainable Table and is working on a book with Mark Bittman
Omega three packed pasta from a can. Sardines are a great source of omega 3 fats and iron, and in the case of canned sardines that still have the soft bones in them, calcium too. That old staple sardines on toast is a very convenient lunch but if you are looking for a more substantial way to use sardines (with a vegetable thrown in) check out Susan at Food Blogga's recipe for Sicilian Sardine and Broccoli Rabe Pasta
Does anyone fancy some fungus casserole for tea? I'm a regular Quorn eater but if you are a bit suspicious about it and would like to know more before diving in then there is a good article by dietitian Jane Clarke about the advantages and disadvantages of eating Quorn. Then if you're convinced you can get stir-frying or tackle my freezer staple of vegetarian Quorn chilli
First job this morning was a big shop to stock up on healthy foods for snacking on while I’m in London and on the way there and back. On the list was easily portable fresh fruit, almonds, oatcakes and individual low fat fruit yogurts.
Breakfast will be eaten on the train, speeding through the glorious Oxfordshire and Berkshire countryside. I’ve made a tray full of Cassie’s breakfast bars, which are bursting with oats, seeds and dried fruit and I’m planning to have this for breakfast on at least three of the days, with yogurt and fruit on the other two for variety.
In the spirit of saving energy as well as time, while I had the oven on for the breakfast bars I roasted some vegetables in olive oil. The roasted peppers, red onions and half of the butternut squash will be made into a chilli, soy and lemon-dressed brown rice salad for lunch on the first couple of days (with enough for hubbie to have some too).
The other half of the roasted squash is all cooked and so we’re all set-up to make my butternut squash and red lentil dahl one evening with minimal effort.
I'm keeping the snowy graphic for now as it snowed here big time at the weekend. Roll on spring.
- Use your loaf and minimise food waste with a seasonal take on panzanella, a traditional Italian salad just made for using up slightly stale but otherwise good quality bread. Deb at Smitten Kitchen has made a spring panzanella with asparagus, leeks and white beans. I love Deb's idea of rounding out the original recipe with a bit of protein by adding a can of beans.
- 3 meals from one chicken - David Latt writes on the NY Times Bitten blog about being the perfect house guest and cooking three meals from one chicken as a thank you to his hosts. He can come stay with me any time!
- Use it all up vegetable pancakes from cookinpanda are a nifty way to make good use of all of those vegetable odds and ends in the fridge, served with a delicious avocado and ginger yogurt sauce
- Go Emma! Hollywood's obsession with size zero has gone a bit too far of late so kudos to British actress Emma Thompson for taking to task the producers of her latest movie, Brideshead revisited, after telling teeny-tiny co-star Hayley Atwell that she had to use weight. And winning!
Friday is Burns night, a celebration of all things Scottish and first proper foodie celebration of the new-year for many. By all means serve your haggis in the traditional way with neeps and tatties (mashed swede and potato for the uninitiated) but make sure that you shop generously and have some leftovers to play with. Warm haggis served with soft floury tortilla wraps and creamy tzatziki is an unexpected match made in heaven!
Wonderful Scottish food champion and cookbook author Sue Lawrence talked about this idea on Great Food Live last year and it was one of those combinations that made perfect intuitive sense. Haggis spice blends are closely guarded secrets but the spices at the core are also staples of Greek cookery (pepper, cloves and nutmeg), making haggis a natural match for tzatziki. I couldn’t bear to wait until January to try this out and hitting the shops to buy a haggis (veggie in this case) in mid-November I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to find one. This version of Sue’s dish is made with vegetarian haggis and a winter tzatziki, a fancy way of saying that it is tzatziki made with dried mint, thus neatly avoiding the need to buy air-freighted herbs from the supermarket.
I adore Meeta’s definition of comfort food - “food that hugs you from the inside”. Sums up this kind of food just right doesn’t it?
Dal is very special class of comfort food; it feels like a comfort food (all soft and squishy), it tastes like a comfort food (soothing but moreish) and you can dip your choice of bread into it or shovel with a spoon, bowl to chin. All good stuff. But unlike other comfort foods, dal need not have a touch of cheese, butter, chocolate or cream to their name. In fact they are positively brimming with nutritional benefits, especially when you combine them with a vegetable as in this butternut squash and red lentil variation.
The cinnamon, turmeric and cumin lend a very gentle touch here, imparting aroma to the lentils and squash rather than spice. A tarka is simply a garnish, in this case slow cooked red onion, fiery chilli and garlic. Tarka are generally made using ghee, a saturated fat heavy clarified butter, replaced here by olive oil.
All of those enthusiastic things I said about beans being “agriculturally sustainable and nutritionally multi-tasking” hold true for lentils and I plan to get to know them even better this year. Red lentils are a forgiving place to start if cooking with lentils is new to you, disintegrating into the requisite creamy puree whatever you do to them.
- On Monday I was pondering to myself about how useful it would be to have a website where you could just type in a postcode and get a list of all of your local food producers, preferably in a cool google maps mash-up type of way. Two days later the answer appeared in my inbox via the River Cottage Newsletter: FreeRange Review.com. Enter your postcode for a list of producers within a thirty five mile radius of your address (UK only, for now anyway).
- A lot of people are writing nice things about the Love Food, Hate Waste web site and so they should. Love Food, Hate Waste is all about how to reduce food waste by using up leftovers, clever storage and simply cooking the right amount of food to begin with. It’s all well and good telling people to waste less food but what Love Food, Hate Waste does so well is to gather up armfuls of tried and tested tips from real people. Which brings me neatly onto my real reason for writing about the site: for it to be really, really useful Love Food, Hate Waste needs you to send along your food storage tips and leftover recipes – look out for the opportunities to contribute to each section or go straight to add your voice. I'm hoping to see the appearance of my favourite waste-saving gadgets which I submitted last week to the site last week: a microwave splatterguard which you can wash and re-use unlike pesky cling film and the kitchen bin with separate 'bio bucket' for collecting food waste ready to take out to the compost heap.
- Locavore eating and 100 mile diets are all the rage these days (locavore is even Word of the Year in the New Oxford American Dictionary). I’m always intrigued to read about the different challenges posed to 100 mile dieters by their local climate, agriculture and economy and I was particularly drawn to this story in the Guardian about the Fife dieters. You can follow the Fifers adventures on their blog fifediet.wordpress.com, where the food is sounding pretty tasty already, kicking off with Beetroot stew with cheesy blinis, Fennel Frond pie and Sustainable Stovies. Having lived in the kingdom of Fife as a kid I can safely say that the climate is on the chilly side so there should be some interesting tales to tell after years of living on the supermarket 'global diet'. Out with the exotic fruit but expect freshly caught seasonal seafood and the most plump and tasty raspberries in the Summer (Scottish raspberries are undoubtedly the best raspberries in the world!).
- Given my love of all things beany I’m mad keen on Treehugger’s recent recipe of the week from chef Peter Berley: Red Wine, Red Bean and Portobello Ragout. A fabulous alternative to spaghetti Bolognese and just the job for a chilly day.
- I’m sure that absolutely nobody reading this can have failed to notice that it is Menu for Hope time - the important bit of information to impart at this point is that the deadline for buying tickets is December 21st. There are lots of fabulous prizes up for grabs: check out the full list here or skip straight to the UK prizes with The Passionate Cook and Cooksister.
How do you sum up a Laksa for somebody who hasn’t tried it before? On the one hand it ticks lots of boxes that somehow bring to mind healthy thoughts: spicy; fresh-flavours; crunchy veg and soup. On the other hand it has that essential comfort-food ingredient carbohydrate (in the form of noodles), and is bathed in luscious, creamy coconut milk.
There is an interesting wikipedia page on laksa for those who like to know more about culinary traditions and history; apparently there are actually two types of laksa, curry laksa and assam laksa. I must admit that my recipe is a complete culinary hybrid with the coconut milk base of curry laksa and the sour notes of an assam laksa. The main inspiration for my recipe is in Jo Pratt’s lovely new (and surprisingly pink and girly) book, In the Mood for Food, with a few twists of my own inspired by health and storecupboard. It comes out just creamy enough to feel like a treat and has a great mix of textures. Sometimes I think it is just the small things that really make a difference, for example I’ve followed Jo’s tip to slice the prawns in half lengthways which means that you get a bit of prawn in nearly every mouthful.
Noodle soup dishes like Laksa and Miso soups are fantastic places to use up bits of leftover veg from the fridge (within reason, I suspect parsnip wouldn’t go well here). The original recipe had a couple of spring onions in it per person but given that all you have to do is chop them up and throw them in it's a good opportunity to eat a bit more veg. You can put in as much or as little as you want but for this dish to count as one of your ‘five a day’ you want to include at least 80g of veg per person.
Something that this post made me think about that I've never really considered before is whether or not coconut counts towards your fruit and veg quota. The whole ‘what counts’ thing is essentially based on scientific consensus so there isn’t a definitive answer, but my hunch is that counting coconut flesh or coconut milk as a portion would be considered counter-productive because of its very high saturated fat content. There isn't an official fruit and veg portions expert group to give a verdict on the matter but I did see that Sam, the Food Standards Agency’s nutritionist agrees with me on this (coconut apparently is considered more akin to a nut than a fruit). In this laksa the effects of the saturated fat in the coconut milk are tempered by diluting it with stock and adding some richness back in the form of peanut butter. The final result is not low-fat but the balance of fats in the dish are improved by these two adjustments. Nuts are full of monounsatured fats and replacing saturated fat with these monounsaturates can help lower LDL (bad) cholesterol levels.
