I took the bone from Sunday’s lamb leg and put it in our huge stockpot with some aromatics with a goal of producing many quarts of some highly flavorful and polyvalent stock. I love lamb with phở flavors; since there’s significant overlap with many Moroccan spices there’s a natural sympatico with the rich, gamy meat. So to the pot I added the following: a charred onion, a charred thumb of ginger, a carrot, some fresh…
Category: The Circle of Leftovers
So here’s a story of another (mostly) meatless meal, and how it ended up being part of three different dinners and a couple of lunches as well. To begin, early this week I made a stock from the chicken carcass and T-bone bones left from two recent meals (both posted already). Once made, I used some of it to make a very simple puréed kabocha squash soup using some steamed squash from the night before.…
Sometimes the available leftovers are aligned like so many lucky stars, forming a constellation that points the way to a lazy-ass dinner of surpassing tastiness. This is what was in the fridge/freezer: brown rice some chicken stock (made from pressure-cooked wings) kale pesto frozen peas 1/2 can coconut milk 1/2 onion scallions I love making risotto from leftover brown rice; the second cooking, best done with good stock, gets it to an appealingly gooey place…
There’s nothing quite so problem-solving as a chicken carcass in the fridge. Especially if it was spatchcocked, meaning the back is still raw and thus able to add extra collagen and unctch to the resulting stock. A few carrots (still those I dug before the freeze, though almost depleted), a piece of parsnip, half an onion, a dried shiitake, and some herbs made for a good base. I tossed in smashed garlic and ginger with…
What to do with bread dough that just can’t get its rise on, due to too-cold kitchen temperatures? Make flatbread, and put the rest of the dough in the laundry room to enliven. While I lovingly cooked the pita in the iron pan, using a wipe of butter for each new pillowy disc, I pressure-cooked chick peas, onion, carrot, kale, a Toulouse sausage, and herbs in some leftover soup I had made from the lamb…
Lateness often confounds my grand schemes and forces me to scramble, resulting in dinners that are far from my original intention but serviceable nonetheless. As always, freezer, pantry, and leftovers provide the difference between decent and awful. In this instance, I grabbed some boudin noir from the freezer. While they were thawing, I threw some scarlet runner beans in the pressure cooker with leeks, onions, garlic, burdock, carrot, herbs, and some smoked chicken stock. Once…
It seems kind of meat-centric around here, I know, but that’s partly because the camera was out of town and partly because some of the meatless things I’ve made lately haven’t been super photogenic. Despite what it may seem, our life is not all bacon all the time. Sorry to disappoint you. This post, for example, has no bacon in it at all, and will instead feature massive amounts of smoked and simmered non-belly pig…
We had this venison roast in the freezer, and the seal had broken so it was getting a little ice on it, so I pulled it out. Once defrosted, it was clearly more than we needed, so I cut three small steaks off of it and put the rest in the fridge. I rubbed the steaks with salt, pepper, and some herbs and let them sit while I cubed red potatoes and a turnip and…
The bones from the boar ribs- simmered for a couple of hours with an onion, carrot, and parsley- turned into a nimble yet hefty (think Chris Farley) stock which we have been putting to good use in the ensuing days. In this case the smoky, umamilicious elixir was the happy medium in which some udon found themselves, accompanied by burdock simmered with dried shiitake, blanched kale (I usually do it in the noodle water pre-noodle)…
Last week I had a vague hankering to make a chicken cacciatore-type thing, but after taking stock of what we had lying around I decided on a kind of chicken saag instead. Our turnips are getting really big, so I took chopped leaves and root and cooked them with onion until soft, then added some leftover bitter green pesto, yogurt, and a little wine and puréed it until smooth. The root really helps thicken the…