Leftovers

'Love Your Leftovers' - Cookbook Spotlight

by Alexa Weibel, Posted Nov 27th 2009 @ 2:00PM

Photo: CICO Books.

"Love Your Leftovers: Feed Your Friends & Family for Next to Nothing"
By various authors
Photography by CICO Books
CICO Books -- 2009
Buy it at Amazon

With Thanksgiving 2009 now over, many are already contemplating how to transform their leftovers. "Love Your Leftovers" offers welcome creations to use your leftovers in simple, delicious, unexpected ways -- provided your pantry is stocked with a few non-essentials.

See what we tested and find out whether the book's worth buying after the jump.

Filed under: Leftovers, Cookbook Spotlight, Books, Reviews

Empanadas Make Leftovers Irresistible

COMMENTS 1

by Jennifer Iserloh, Posted Oct 5th 2009 @ 1:00PM

Photo: Jennifer Iserloh.

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!

Filed under: Leftovers, The Skinny Chef, How To

What Can I Get You Folks? - The Great Doggie Bag Debate

COMMENTS 6

by Hanna Raskin, Posted Sep 8th 2009 @ 11:30AM

Photo: dan4th, Flickr.

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.

Filed under: Leftovers, Tinfoil Swan, Chefs & Restaurants, Restaurants

Table for One - Bibimbap Till You Drop

COMMENTS 8

by Sarah LeTrent, Posted Jul 7th 2009 @ 5:00PM

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.

Filed under: Leftovers, Ingredients

Weekend Rehash and Bread Pudding Ice Cream

COMMENTS 7

by Kat Kinsman, Posted Apr 21st 2009 @ 11:00AM

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.

Filed under: Leftovers, Tinfoil Swan, Ingredients

Weekend Rehash

COMMENTS 4

by Kat Kinsman, Posted Apr 13th 2009 @ 9:30AM

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.

Filed under: Leftovers, Tinfoil Swan, Drink Recipes

Making Pizza From Leftovers

COMMENTS 3

by Lissa Townsend Rodgers, Posted Mar 12th 2009 @ 9:05AM

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.

Filed under: Leftovers

Meals that improve in the fridge overnight

COMMENTS 5

by Marisa McClellan, Posted Aug 20th 2008 @ 2:00PM

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.

What's your favorite make now, eat later dish?

Source

Filed under: On the Blogs, Leftovers

Tip of the Day: What to do with leftover veggies

COMMENTS 0

by Monika Bartyzel, Posted Aug 13th 2008 @ 6:00AM

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.

Filed under: Leftovers, Tip of the Day, Ingredients

Soul-saving sweet tea sherbet

COMMENTS 3

by Kat Kinsman, Posted Jul 15th 2008 @ 5:00PM

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.

Filed under: Leftovers, Guilty Pleasures, Ingredients, Drink Recipes