With a bit of advance planning, there's really no reason to ever buy breadcrumbs at the grocery store.
Posts with tag stale bread
Reduce Your Food Waste by Using up Odds and Ends
I've always been pretty good with leftovers. I always make soup out of roast chicken remains and I have a passing understanding of how to transform bits of one meal into something fresh and interesting for the next. However, at the end of each week, I still find myself throwing out more uneaten food than I'd like. In general, I dislike the waste but more poignantly, I regret depriving the ingredients of their potential (especially when I toss animal products).
However, this week, inspired by this post about food waste at the Non-Consumer Advocate, I managed to avoid waste where I might have otherwise tossed. I made a big pot of chicken soup, using up an aging hunk of red cabbage (once cooked, it was impossible to tell that it was a bit wilted), several bits of half-used onion and most happily, a painfully stale six-inch chunk of seeded baguette. I broke the bread into bits, placed some of it into the bottom of the bowls and ladled the soup on top. The once-stale bread became silky and tender, adding a lovely texture and taste to the meal.
How do you avoid food waste in your kitchen?
Homemade Breadcrumbs - Getting Back to Basics
I've made breadcrumbs a handful of times in the past, but never on a regular basis. However, I've had many missed breadcrumb opportunities as I've thrown away more crusts of bread than I'd like to admit. In an attempt to stop tossing perfectly good food, I've been trying to reinvent ingredients and last night, I made meatballs as a way to avoid waste.
The meatballs became dinner because I had a pound of local, grass-fed ground beef in the freezer and a big hunk of two week old bread (really good bread from Philly's Metropolitan Bakery) that needed to be used up. I also managed to salvage some aging green onions and the last two inches of a log of goat cheese in the process.
I always forget how easy it is to make breadcrumbs and how homemade ones enhance any food you pair them with. They gave the meatballs an appealing lightness while also allowing the exteriors to get nicely crunchy, creating a fantastic textural pairing. They're also wonderfully simple to make. My instructions are after the jump and the step-by-step pictures are in the gallery below.
Gallery: Homemade Breadcrumbs
Continue reading Homemade Breadcrumbs - Getting Back to Basics
Tip of the Day: Making the most out of your loaf of bread
Do you have problems getting a through a tasty loaf of fresh bread before it's stale?
Continue reading Tip of the Day: Making the most out of your loaf of bread
IMBB #25 roundup!
Last week, I submitted an entry for this month's Is My Blog Burning? food blogging event: Strawberry Bruschetta. Derek, who hosted the even at his blog, An Obsession with Food, has just posted a roundup, in two parts, of all the entries. If you recall, the theme was stale bread, so there are lots of bread puddings and such to be found, as well as some very innovative uses, such as using crumbs to thicken a sauce or make a quiche crust. I think that my favorite submission, simply based on aesthetics, since all the recipes sounded delicious, is the one from Bron Marshall: Brioche, Frangelico, Chocolate and Pear Cakes. Pictured here, they are like small, tender bread puddings, baked in individual tins. If you want to try your hand at the recipe, it can be found here, but I think I am content to just oogle the picture for the time being. Thanks for hosting, Derek!
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