It's been a long time since I posted on this blog. I returned today for a very good reason.
I came up with a new recipe! Back in Mississippi, I got so good at using all my food scraps that I stopped inventing new recipes. There was no reason to. I only bought what I needed, and I used what I bought. But then, we moved in with my parents. Let's just say my family members aren't food waste warriors. Still, I try to live my conscience, and we're all on the same page in that regard. That's why I was able to serve my family a pot full of "stuff I found in the fridge," and they were game to try it. Soup as a Way to Use Up Food I've heard this over and over again: "When you have a bunch of scraps in your fridge, throw it all into a pot and make soup." I love the idea, but I was too nervous to try it. What if the soup was terrible, and then I wasted even more food? But today, I had no choice. Like most Americans, my parents keep their fridge crammed with as much food as they can fit. It drives me nuts. Today, none of it made sense as a meal. My mom was making homemade bread. "I wish we had soup to go with this," she said. I took a deep breath and decided to give it a try. I made soup out of scraps. Thankfully, the soup was delicious. We had no soup leftover, which disappointed everyone. I wish we could have more! Broth versus Stock Part of what made this recipe so good was the stock instead of broth. Broth is water that has been boiled with animal bones; stock is water boiled with bones, vegetables, and herbs. Typically, you drain out the juice and toss all the boiled vegetables, which I don't like, for obvious reasons. I often keep vegetable scraps in the freezer (onion skins, carrot peels, celery leaves, etc.), and when the bag is full, I'll boil it with a rotisserie chicken carcass and some salt, garlic, pepper, bay leaves, and basil. I usually freeze the stock until I decide to make soup. You can buy stock at the store right next to the broth. If you don't have any stock, you'll want to add garlic and herbs to your soup. That's it! Easy, and delicious. Another scrap saved! Creamy Cauliflower and Sausage Soup
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I love roasting vegetables. It's an easy, delicious way to add a lot of produce to a meal. The other day, I decided to try out a new recipe that called for eight different vegetables. (Cue ominous music.) When you buy eight vegetables, you end up with a LOT of vegetables. We would never eat them in time if I roasted all of them at once, so I cut the recipe in half. I usually cut my recipes in half anyway, especially when it's a new recipe and I don't know if it will turn out. I am grateful for my foresight, because the roasted vegetables were terrible. My husband, who is usually a good sport when dinner isn't super, picked out the vegetables he didn't like, and it took a great deal of firmness to get my children to finish them.
(If you feel making my family eat gross vegetables is cruel, I will point out that un-tasty nutritious food is a first-world problem.) Reheating the leftovers made the vegetables even worse. There was no way I was going to roast the rest of the vegetables in my fridge. Which left me with a significant problem: what could I do with the odd assortment of vegetables I was now stuck with? I puzzled over this problem for a while until I realized procrastinating it any longer would lead to waste, so I put all the vegetables I owned on the counter and would not leave until I had a plan to use them. There are a few recipes that are so simple, I finish them and just sort of stand there feeling like I missed something. "Is that really it?" I wonder. I feel that way with baked potatoes. When recipes are so simple that I feel like I'm getting away with something, the usually go in the crock pot. Anyone who has used a crock pot knows of its magic; you dump in the ingredients, leave the house, and come home to dinner. I have yet to test the limits of everything a crock pot can do, and for a long time, it seemed like the only crock pot recipes I could find were shredded meat (like my Green Chili Tacos) and pot roast. I wanted to make complete meals in the crock pot, not part of a meal. Then my mom made me ham lentil soup when she was over, and I am forever grateful, because we needed a good ham recipe. My husband's job gives him one free turkey every Thanksgiving and one free ham every Christmas, and the ham so huge that we have slabs of it crowding our freezer all year long. So, this recipe is #anotherscrapsaved
Since all the ingredients besides the ham are dirt cheap -- lentils, carrots, celery -- it's basically free dinner for us. ...which is convenient, since I've made a goal to save $300 a month in groceries. It's going well so far, but I haven't quite made my goal, so it's too soon for me to present my methods. Stay tuned. But you came here to learn about ham and lentil soup, so without further ado, here's my fav cheap/easy/yummy soup
The title of this post is not overly-exaggerated click bait. This recipe will seriously only take ten minutes of your time – in fact, it’s the easiest recipe I use.
Of course, it takes 3-8 hours after you prep it to cook it.
It seems to me that the longer something takes to cook, the easier it is to make. If you plan ahead an hour or two – or eight – quite often all you have to do is toss ingredients together and put them in the oven or crockpot.
I have a new Easter tradition!
Lots of recipes call for only one or two carrots: chicken pot pie, chicken noodle soup, casseroles. But stores don't let you buy only one or two carrots. They usually only sell them in 1 lb, 2 lb, 5 lb, and 10 lb bags.
I used to only cook with baby carrots for that very reason. I figured we could snack on whatever we didnât cook, since weâre all too spoiled to snack on regular carrots. But baby carrots cost more, and they can still go bad if you donât snack on them.
Brace yourself for the best way to use leftover french fries... and possibly my new favorite breakfast!
One of my readers contacted me to say he had leftovers after a dinner of cheddar wurst hot dogs and tater rounds, so he "put an egg on it" and converted them into breakfast. He placed the taters and diced sausages in muffin tins, cracked an egg over each, and baked until the eggs were set.
If you want to get into the Christmas spirit, this recipe will fill your kitchen with all the best Christmas smells.
A reader sent me a cool idea: make Dutch babies (also known as German pancakes) to use up fruit that’s still edible, but not fresh enough to eat plain. When she first mentioned this, I thought she meant to use the overripe fruit as a topping. I make strawberry toppings for waffles and pancakes frequently; just slice the strawberries, stir in sugar, and wait for the sugar to suck out all the juices, making syrup. Peaches are also delicious this way. I also use blueberries as a topping by cooking them in sugar over the stove, with a little cinnamon and lemon juice. Most fruit can make a good topping, even past the peak of freshness, but my reader didn’t mean for me to put the fruit on top of the dutch babies; her suggestion was to put the fruit inside. She sent me this link forCherry Almond Dutch Babies as an example. My mind immediately went to Apple Dutch Babies because my mom used to make them all the time. There were six people in my family, which meant there were a lot of apples to peel and core. My mom had an apple peeler that made the job a synch; she just turned the handle and thin strips of peel like spaghetti easily slid off. We used to love draping the peels around our arms and feeding them into our mouths like tickets at an arcade while we waited for dinner to be done. My mind also went to Apple Dutch Babies because at the time, I happened to have four shriveling Honey Crisp Apples on my window sill. I know what you’re thinking; what kind of a monster allows Honey Crisp Apples, aka nectar from the gods, to shrivel on a window sill. Well, they were on sale and honey crisp is basically my favorite fruit ever, so I stocked up. Shopping sales is not always the best idea when reducing food waste. You can use pretty much any apple for this recipe except Red Delicious, which would more appropriately be called Red Disgusting. Tart apples like granny smith are usually favored for recipes, especially pies, but for this, I prefer sweet apples like fuji or gala. The honey crisps were amazing, if you feel like splurging. I made this recipe the other day, and the smells were intoxicating. Baked apple. Melted butter. Cinnamon. Nutmeg. Cloves. I want to make this recipe again for the smell alone. This recipe is best when made in a cast iron skillet, both for texture and for lessening the amount of dirty dishes. If you want to double the recipe, though, you can transfer the ingredients to a casserole dish and increase the cooking time. Apple Dutch Babies 3 Tb butter 3 apples ¼ cup brown sugar ½ tsp cinnamon ½ tsp nutmeg 1/8 tsp cloves ½ cup milk 3 eggs ¼ cup flour ¼ tsp baking powder
French toast is the easiest solution to any stale bread problem. You can use any kind of bread: hot dog buns, hamburger buns, brioche, baguettes.
If you’d rather do something a little more exciting with your stale bread, I’d like to share with you a special Christmas tradition in my family. I grew up in Portland, Oregon, and in Portland, Oregon, doing the same thing twice is so passé. Tradition? Not much of a concern. We don’t like to repeat what we did the day before, much less year after year. That’s how you end up with Portland delicacies such as lavender ice cream with candied orange peels and chocolate bars made with bacon grease. (Great, now I feel homesick.) My family didn’t have Christmas traditions as much as it had Christmas trends. If we really liked a holiday food we’d have it again as many or as few times as we wanted. Shepherd’s pie was a pretty common occurrence because Jesus was the Good Shepherd, but it was never a requirement. Shepherd’s pie made out of lamb, by the way. I went on a rant about this on Facebook, and I’m going to go on another rant here: if you use ground beef in your Shepherd’s pie, it isn’t Shepherd’s pie at all. It is Cowboy’s pie. Another family trend was eggnog French toast with sugar plum spice syrup. I still remember the first time my dad made it. There was something magical about how the different Christmas smells danced around the kitchen. It became a central memory in my childhood (even though we only had it a couple of times). Then I married a Southerner, and everything about the way I do Christmas changed. My husband’s family has been eating the same foods for centuries. When I propose a new dish on Christmas, my husband’s first question is, “Do I want to eat that every year for the rest of my life?” It’s not easy to introduce meal ideas when the stakes are so high, but my eggnog French toast with sugar plum spice syrup was, surprisingly, a hit. We will never eat eggnog French toast on Christmas morning. That sacred slot has been awarded to Sourdough Waffles, which is what Andrew has had for breakfast at every special occasion – especially Christmas morning – since time immemorial. Instead, eggnog French toast with sugar plum spice syrup is our tradition for the day we decorate the Christmas tree. It’s a tradition I love, and I could actually do it every year for the rest of my life. NOTE: My dad actually makes this recipe with croissants. When I was a kid I thought this was the height of sophistication, but there were some logistical problems I noticed when I made it as an adult. Croissants are mostly air, and when you turn them into French toast, they deflate into thin slabs. I’ve been experimenting with different kinds of bread to use for this recipe and have yet to settle on anything, so feel free to run your own experiments. And of course, you can use any syrup. I’m sure maple syrup would be fine, though for me, I couldn’t have it with anything other than sugar plum spice tea. Also, you can use this syrup recipe to make syrup out of any kind of tea. Like a chai syrup. Aw, man. I can’t believe I only just now thought of that. Chai syrup would be amazing. Merry Christmas! Eggnog French Toast and Sugar Plum Spice Syrup a pint of eggnog bread 2 Sugar Plum Spice tea bags 1 cup of water 2 cups of sugar
I have the feeling most of us have a lot of leftover food to deal with right now. Perhaps more than you can handle.
There’s a lot you can do with your leftovers. After all, it was a carcass soup recipe on Thanksgiving that gave me the idea for this blog in the first place. Here’s a list of some creative ideas to make this year that will convert your leftovers into delicious and original meals. Stuffing Waffles
I’ve seen lots of ideas on Pinterest that use a waffle iron. I was so excited to make a waffle out of cake batter, except I pinned the idea years ago and still haven’t made it. I’ve also seen mashed potatoes, tater tots, and Thanksgiving stuffing.
I do not like stuffing. Every year I dish a mouthful or two on my plate out of some strange desire to teach myself to like it, but so far my efforts have been unsuccessful. When I saw the picture of stuffing waffles, I said, “No thanks.” Then my husband approached me all excited about an idea he heard on NPR: stuffing waffles with a fried egg on top. I asked him if he was sure the egg didn’t go inside the stuffing to keep everything together, but he insisted that all you have to do is spoon the stuffing on the iron. (Pinterest gods say to mix an egg into the stuffing, so I was right.) I expected it to be a hot mess, but it was actually pretty good. I did very much enjoy the fried egg on top. Turkey Broth To make broth, submerge the turkey carcass in water and boil for four hours, then strain to make delicious broth that you can eat plain, use for soup, or freeze in one-cup portions to use in recipes. If you wantto make stock instead of broth, you boil vegetables and spices with the bones (typically onions, carrots, and celery). Turkey Carcass Soup You can get my recipe for the soup here. Gnocchi Mashed potatoes freeze well, and so does the gravy. In fact, whenever I have potatoes that are about to go soft, I often mash them and put them in the freezer. If you don’t want mashed potatoes later, there are lots of recipes that call for them as an ingredient. My go-tos are gnocchi, and mixing it with cheddar and French fried onions to use as a shell for casseroles. Both gnocchi and casseroles freeze well; just put the gnocchi dough in the freezer before boiling it. Turkey Pot Pie You can freeze turkey. If you decide to do that, give me your address so I can drive to your house and smack you upside the head. I am not a fan of freezing chicken or turkey after it’s been cooked. However, if you cut the turkey or chicken into small pieces and mix it up with gravy, vegetables, and put it in a pie shell, you don't notice the compromised state of the meat. We used some of our leftover turkey to make pot pies that we put in the freezer for later, since the last thing we need right now is another pie to finish. I’m going to post our recipe for pot pie in a day or two, but this is the recipe I originally used before I made adjustments to it. The only problem I have with this recipe is it makes enough filling for one and a half pies, and my recipe has the ingredients for just one. Turkey Sandwiches Turkey sandwiches is a tradition almost as important as the turkey itself, but if you’re tired of eating it with mayonnaise on white bread, you can get creative with Dijon mustard, cranberry sauce, avocadoes, bacon, provolone or swiss cheese, etc., or you can experiment with different kinds of bread. You can grill it, too. Roasted Potato Peels Potato peels are delicious roasted. Just drizzle with oil, sprinkle with salt, lay flat on a cookie sheet, and bake at 400 degrees for 10-15 minutes. I like to put them in a bowl on a table for my hungry kids to munch on while I’m making dinner. Turkey Salad I have not actually made this myself, but I love chicken salad, and I imagine this will be just as good. The nice thing about making your leftover turkey into a turkey salad is that it completely transforms the meat, so you don’t feel like you’re eating the same thing you’ve been eating all week just in a different way. Green Chili Turkey You can shred the turkey to use for many other recipes, like sprinkling over chips with barbeque sauce and cheddar and baking in the oven, on a barbeque pizza, in burritos with salsa and Mexican spices, or in mole. Here's a recipe from my gifted culinary school graduate friend for green chili turkey. Stuffing Muffins One of my readers had a great idea to put leftover sauteed vegetables in the bottom of a muffin tin, top it with stuffing, pack the stuffing down, and bake it until warm. Then she broke a quail egg on top and put it back in the over until the white gets solid. Just goes to show; if you ever want leftovers for breakfast, put an egg on it! Shephard’s Pie Shephard’s pie is usually made with lamb in gravy with vegetables and mashed potatoes smeared on top and cheddar cheese melted over it. If you want to be a rebel, you can use turkey instead. I guess it would be pretty similar to turkey pot pie with mashed potatoes instead of pie crust. That should be enough ideas to keep you busy! What do you do with your Thanksgiving leftovers?
I greatly appreciate all the links and ideas my readers send me. One of my readers showed me an article about a group of people in New York who are saving food that restaurants throw out.
Sorry I can't share the link; I have to cook potatoes before the turkey is done (which led to the inspiration for this post), so I don't have much time to finish this article.
The founder of the organization in New York was inspired when she ordered potato peels at a food cart and asked the owner what he did with the potatoes after peeling them. He said he threw them away.
The potato is one of the most versatile and beloved of foods. Wasting such a resource that could have easily been converted into a desirable dish...that's just bad business! Luckily, the woman asked for the potatoes and delivered buckets and buckets of them to a homeless shelter. After reeling from disbelief for a minute or two, I stopped and said, "Wait, wait, wait. People eat potato peels? Willingly?" I had to investigate. Turns out, you can roast potato peels, and they are delicious. It's a win-win all around; they're nutritious, they're free, and I can set them on a plate for my hungry kids to munch on while I finish dinner. I realized as I was peeling my potatoes today for our Thanksgiving feast that a lot of nutritious peels were probably being thrown in the trash at that very moment, so I ran to my computer in hopes that I could inspire others to save the peels before it's too late. Here's what you do.
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I will never waste food againI've been tired of throwing out food for years - not to mention tired of our huge grocery bill! I decided to make a change and vowed never to waste food again. In this blog, I'll show you how I do it. RECIPESArchives
January 2020
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