Useful extras
April 18, 2009
Rethink your leftovers
Challenge Yourself for: 24 Hours
So, you’ve mastered making extras for leftovers, but somehow you can’t stomach another night of lentil stew or roast chicken. What’s next? Add to your repertoire with recipes designed to incorporate leftovers from other meals. Stews, soups, foccacia sandwiches… these dishes and many more rely on fillings that can be borrowed from earlier feasts. Today, challenge yourself to find a recipe that reuses all or part of the original dish. Some ideas:
• Any poultry or meat dish can be sliced up and tossed on greens or slid into a sandwich.
• Leftover vegetables or potatoes are ideal in a soup or stew.
• Tomato-based soups and sauces can provide a base for a pasta sauce.
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I use all sorts of leftovers to make interesting nes “breakfast for dinner” entrees, especially omlettes and scrambled eggs. I have even found that it is a great way to sneak vegetables into a meal for, kids and those friends that insist on eating like five-year-olds. If you call it a sloppy joe omlette, you can use a tiny bit of sloppy joe mix, egg whites, and sneak in green peppers, tomatoes and even kidney beans…they will love the texture and have no idea how you jazzed up somthing that sounds so mundane.
leftover rice is always a great hit here when made into fried rice —- so nutritious with you controlling what goes in instead of getting it from a chinese restaurant and economical. We like ours with eggs and whatever leftover meat we have (pork, chicken) or you can strictly go with veggies.
Leftovers from Asian style stir-fry makes an excellent base for hot & sour soup!
Meat, veggies, pasta and rice all make great “bones” for a nice soup when we’re tired of regular meat and side dish meals around here. And when we have leftovers from preparing meals they go either to our two pot-bellied pigs or on our compost pile next to the pony pen.:)
Crustless quiches are also great for using leftovers. I use leftover turkey bacon, boiled or roasted potatoes, vegetables (especially broccoli, cauliflower, and asparagus) as the filling, and then make an egg-white quiche out of the whole thing. (A little cheese on top is nice.)
Other favorites:
Using leftover roasted chicken for biscuit-topped pot pies, chicken noodle (or rice!) soup, soup and mash (like a thicker version of the chicken soup – without the noodles – all over mashed potatoes), chicken enchiladas or burritos, etc. There’s really no end to what you can do!
Using leftover rice and beans in taco salads, chilis, soups, burritos, or even as the base for huevos rancheros. (My husband loves that last one!)
Frittatas and quesadillas are great ways to use leftovers