It was one of those things that my granny always insisted on: finding ways to use leftovers and never wasting food. Even though I've grown up eating leftovers, I've never liked eating a big plate of odds and ends, a spoonful here and bite there.
I wondered if that's why Americans waste about 27 percent of their available food. But what if you could turn those tidbits into something luscious? I guarantee that you won't be tempted to toss that handful of broccoli florets, those spoonfuls of blue cheese crumbles or your remaining half a jar of olives.
First I took a look in my freezer before proceeding on to my self-imposed "Top Chef" challenge. Frozen dough disks didn't look that interesting resting in my freezer door, until I remembered that they're Goya empanada wrappers that you can fill with just about anything. Bingo!
The debate this column fueled last week concerning the standard baseline tip isn't the sort of thing most servers spend much time considering: We'd all like our patrons to leave us lots and lots of money, thanks.
But that doesn't mean there aren't service issues upon which front-of-the-housers may never agree. I'm thinking here of doggie bagging, a practice that I've seen pit close friends against one another. The contentious question is who does the boxing.
At the white tablecloth restaurants where I've worked, it's understood that the task of wrapping a guest's half-eaten food in foil – ideally sculpted into a graceful swan – falls to the server (although since foie gras and lobster tail make for notoriously bad leftovers, many diners opt to have the vestiges of their five-star meals scraped straight into the trash.)
That's not always the case at slightly more casual restaurants, where many servers routinely plop Styrofoam boxes onto their guests' tables. As a veteran of fancy dining rooms, I always figured those servers were lazy. Turns out, they're looking out for their guests' interests.
Few of us want to make a complicated lasagna for solo dining -- by day six, you'll never want to see lasagna again! In this feature, AOL Food intern Sarah LeTrent taste-tests simple recipes suitable for those requiring a "table for one."
"What's for dinner?" Those of us flying solo find ourselves at the mercy of this painstakingly simple question every evening. The problem is finding the time, money and energy to cook something that will truly satisfy those hunger pangs.
Bibimbap is a popular Korean dish suitable for solo dining on rainy summer evenings. Its translation is literally "mixed rice." Tossed together just before serving, the dish might include carrots, mushrooms, mung bean sprouts, chili paste, sesame seeds or oil -- really anything your heart desires. This diner is fond of adding a fried egg -- the cherry on top of the sundae, as it were.
We admit it. After last week we're kinda sick of ham and reached our saturation point with our delicious but waaayyy too plentiful braided baked challah. Still, being loath to toss out any viable leftovers, we decided this weekend's cooking projects should be all about respite and reformatting.
Hence, a Friday night meal of hard-fried leftover Cheerwine ham with freshly-grated parmesan, egg and black pepper over radiatore (crinkly-shaped) pasta for a makeshift carbonara, and finally (for the sake of our sanity and marriage) a furlough in another part of the barnyard. Saturday night's chicken rubbed all over with a lazy pesto -- basil, garlic, lemon juice and olive oil whirred through the food processor -- was delectable straight from the oven. Somehow it was even more satisfying with the leftovers, bones and giblets cooked down for an herbed-up chicken soup with radiatore a day later.
We trotted back to the pig pen with smoked ribs slathered in mustard on Sunday, but that was just to keep us from making an all-day gobblefest of our challah bread pudding buttermilk ice cream. See, our challah recipe (we like Flickr user mollyali's recipe, pictured above) yields two big braids, and though we foist some on friends and flip up plenty of French toast throughout the week, inevitably a portion goes stale, and we were taught not to waste. Bread pudding seemed a simple solution, but we'd had a cup or ten of caffeine by that point and an awful lot of buttermilk on hand from the ongoing Biscuit Mission. So we got to cranking up some ice cream.
Get the recipe after the jump and use the comments to let us know if ramps are up yet where you are, whether you busted out the grill, or tell us whatever else you rustled up this weekend.
We can only imagine it wasn't just us having a culinarily significant weekend, what with the late-breaking Seders and Easter feasting. Sure, Monday drudgery is upon us, but howzabout dishing up your biggest cooking tales of the past few days?
We'll go first. 'Round these parts, we rustled up our very first Sweet Potato Kugel (Elijah even asked for seconds), braised and glazed an Easter ham in Cheerwine cherry soda, bourbon and pomegranate molasses, and shook up a few Ramos Gin Fizzes from all the extra eggs lying about. Somehow, it all managed to coexist quite peacefully in both our hearts and digestive systems, and while we didn't get 'round to sourcing the lambs' blood for the Icelandic Slatur we've been double-dog-dared to make, there's always next weekend.
For now, we're hungry for your tales of kitchen woes and triumps. Didja best a crust that's been troubling you, or experiment with an unfamiliar veggie? Dish 'em up in the comments below.
What to do with the leftovers? It's one of the great questions of cooking, if not of life. Lately, I've been making pizza with them. Truly, if you keep some pre-made crusts on hand (or mix up your own dough in advance), you can quickly turn last night's dinner into today's lunch.
For example, faced with leftover pork cutlets and some bacon that needed to get used up, I added some red onions, red peppers, mozzarella cheese and canned pineapple to make perhaps the greatest Hawaiian pizza I have ever had.
Some leftover chicken and an abundance of cilantro was turned into Thai pizza with the addition of some shredded carrots, green onions and peanut sauce. Made tacos last night? Taco pizza. Leftover steak and mushrooms? Philly cheesesteak pizza. Got a lot of bits left over from last night's hostessing cheese plate? Super-extra cheese pizza. There are as many possibilities as your imagine and your refrigerator can hold.
The best thing about embarking on a mission to perfect one's biscuit making? You end up with an awful lot of delicious biscuits to eat. The worst thing? Holy heck, that's a lot of biscuits. I'm lucky enough to be married to an enthusiastic biscuit eater, but I don't want to try his patience too badly this early on, 'cause there are dozens more batches to be rolled out before the year is up.
Solution -- adapt one of his most dearly beloved dishes, his grandmother and mother's Memama and Mimiwag's Chicken & Dumplings a bit to accommodate extra biscuits as ersatz dumplings. The original recipe employs long, rolled strips of dough (which some have argued render it as a much more regionally specific Chicken & Pastry formation, but that's a whole 'nother post), but in lieu of that, I halved the biscuits (from the best batch thus far -- #6 White Lily All Purpose with 50/50 Lard/Butter) and stewed them into the sumptuous broth of a whole, cooked-down chicken until they were softened, but not soggy. That night, with a side of sauteed, vinegar-dashed Swiss chard, it was heaven. Two days later, plated with tangy collards -- otherworldy.
Have a favored use for extra biscuits? I beg of you, share it in the comments below.
For years now, I've been a huge fan of the fact that there are some foods that just get better over time. I remember that as a kid, my mom's spaghetti sauce was always better the second day (and she always made enough for at least two nights worth of meals). These days, when I make ratatouille (which I've been doing on a near-weekly basis in an attempt to use us all the tomatoes, eggplant, peppers and zucchini from my farm share), I try to do it the day before I plan on serving it, so that it can mellow and get silky during the resting time.
The team at YumSugar has put together a slide show of five dinners that improve with time that could be a new source of cooking inspiration. In these days, where we're all pressed for time, it's great to have a selection of meals in the arsenal that can be prepped during a spare moment and then stashed in the fridge, ready to be eaten at your convenience.
Have you ever made up a great stir-fry or fajita mix and then struggle to eat all the tasty veggies before they go bad? There are other ways to use those great, leftover veggies.
Kind little rituals seem to go a long way toward making marriage work, so almost every weekend, I make my husband some sweet tea. He's a Southern boy by birth (Brooklynian by marriage), and having a big ol' pitcher easily grabbable in the fridge seems to right any Mason Dixon imbalance he might be suffering at the time. I've got it down to a science, proportion-wise, but this past weekend, his itch for a sugar fix kicked in while I was at the grocery store. What he made tasted divine, but there was just too much for one pitcher, and not enough refrigerator room for a second.
If nothing else, the nuns at St. Scorpacciata instilled in me the mortal fear of wasting food, and seeing how I'd been at the store to buy milk (which neither of us usually drink) for a Bolognese, I decided sherbet would be what saved our souls from eternal damnation. I suppose we won't know for a while if that worked, but it did taste pretty damned delicious.
I am a big fan of leftovers. I always bring home any food that remains after a meal out and when I've cooked at home, I squirrel away anything that wasn't eaten. I have no qualms about eating steamed broccoli the next day, sprinkled with salt and straight out of the container. However, there are times when I like to put the energy into my leftovers and turn them into something new.
The sandwich you see above was one of my most successful leftover transformations to date. I took a chunk of leftover braised brisket, sliced it into strips and reheated it gently in a small bit of beef stock (not so that it was swimming, just enough to give it some moisture). In another pan, I sauteed some garlic and sliced leeks together until they started to brown and then added a bunch of cleaned and chopped greens (I'm not sure what kind I used, to be honest, they were whatever had come with my CSA share the previous week). I added a bit of water, clapped the lid on and braised the greens until they were tender. I sliced a couple of hoagie rolls lengthwise, toasted them and gently smeared one side with boursin cheese.
Putting the rest of the sandwich together was easy. A layer of greens went down, then the brisket and then I just closed it up. They were amazingly tasty and happily were a full meal, as since the greens were contained within the sandwich, my personal "there must be a green vegetable with every meal" rule was satisfied.
I always thought that a muscle car was a hot rod from the late 60's- early 70's until I was driving around my old haunts of Rockland, Maine yesterday researching and shooting an article and saw this impressive Mussel Car.
That looks like it was the remains of a tasty lobster, clam, and mussel bake. Or maybe it washed up on the beach after a Nor'easter. Either way that's one heck of a vehicle. I wonder how many shellfish power it is? Does it get dive bombed by hungry gulls? Does it belongs to the offspring of Neptune's many affairs with mortals? If I follow, will it lead to a huge vat of steaming Mussel's Provence? Inquiring minds want to know.
Last week, I ran home from work to make some lunch and ended up standing in front of the fridge, struggling to creating a meal from the hodgepodge of leftovers and aging veggies. I had some sad radishes, two romaine hearts that were decidedly past their prime, a handful of meatballs, the end chunk of a seedless cucumber and half of a ciabatta roll that was so hard that it could have been used as a weapon.
Hungry and pressed for time, I started to assemble a salad, although without much enthusiasm. I peeled the outer leaves off the romaine and gave it a rough chop. I crumbled the meatballs into bits and sawed the roll into chunks. Tossing all the everything together, I doused the salad with the homemade balsamic vinaigrette I typically have in the fridge and let it sit for a minute while I made some tea.
When I turned back to the salad, the chunks of bread has softened into tasty bits of balsamic flavor. The meatballs had lost their refrigerator chill and the veggies were surprisingly crisp. What had started out as a meal of obligation (must use up food before it goes bad) had turned into a delightful and tasty lunch.
That's not my opinion, by the way. I love turkey leftovers. But Slate's Jill Hunter Pelletteri says that she's had enough with all the talk about what to do with your holiday turkey leftovers:
Every November, magazine editors and food writers, cooking gurus and TV personalities, foist turkey leftover recipes upon us. Unless we put our tired, picked-over turkey carcass to good use, they tell us, we're wasting some precious opportunity. But don't be fooled. Do not be tempted by that recipe for turkey and leek risotto. Those stringy last bits of gristle and meat that cling to your bird are better suited to the raccoons who rummage through your garbage. Do you really want to morph the centerpiece of your most ceremonial meal of the year into turkey bundles (stuffed with turkey, cream cheese, dill weed, and water chestnuts, among other things)?
Guilty as charged. But what's the fun of making a big turkey if you're not going to make soups and sandwiches and pot pies with the leftovers?!
Kind little rituals seem to go a long way toward making marriage work, so almost every weekend, I make my husband some 
That's not my opinion, by the way. I love turkey leftovers. But Slate's Jill Hunter Pelletteri 
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