Recently, I wrote about how our meals slide into each other – one dish segues into the next in a relatively seamless manner. Let me illustrate the point by describing to you what we ate last week.
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For our lunch with Bizzy Lizzy and Peter, I’d baked Buratto flour sourdough loaves – we ate two and froze the remainder for a later date.
On Tuesday, I turned our leftover lunch cheese into fromage fort – French brie, mascarpone reale, buffalo parmesan and West Dorset cheddar were blitzed together in the mini food processor with a clove of garlic, a splash of Kirsch and ¼ cup of white wine. This cheese spread isn’t for the faint of heart or stomach, but I adore it…
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We also had leftover ricotta from lunch – on Wednesday, it was drained, then spooned into a small pie dish, sprinkled with crumbled dried sage, black pepper and our homemade chilli flakes, and baked until firm (I popped it into the oven while the pulled pork was on – see below).
Big Boy ate this for lunch on Friday, accompanied by defrosted Buratto sourdough…
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On Wednesday, I roasted a large pork neck in the Römertopf to make pulled pork…
I froze four 250g portions of the meat and two boxes of defatted stock for future meals, and served the rest with rice, homemade frijoles negros refritos, chipotle salsa and cheese. The leftovers from this meal – a small quantity of saved pan drippings and some cooked rice – were stored in the fridge.
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Since the oven was on anyway, I baked one of our butternut trombies at the same time. We ate half with dinner, and stashed the other half in the fridge…
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Now, remember our monster squash?
We cut it open on Friday, and found orange, Jap pumpkin-like flesh…
I thought it might be nice stuffed, so I deseeded it, then put half into the oven to bake as I prepared the filling.
I made a batch of empanada filling (using the saved fat from the pulled pork to fry the onions), then stirred in the leftover cooked rice. Once the squash was nearly done, I spooned most of the mix into it, then topped it with cheese, and returned it to the oven to finish baking…
Small Man doesn’t like pumpkin, so I baked the remaining meat and rice mixture on a separate plate for him…
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On Saturday, I combined the leftover third of the roasted monster squash (the top section, which was free of rice and meat) with the baked butternut from a few days before, added in a box of the frozen defatted stock from the pulled pork…and made soup!
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As you know, I love trying new recipes, but this is how they often come about. Rather than reading about a dish and then going out to buy ingredients, we’re much more likely to see what we have on hand, and then try to figure out a way to make use of it.
Our primary motivation is to minimise waste (be it food or electricity), but the joy of creating something new from something old comes a close second. Being able to make do with what we have on hand is both frugal and empowering. It’s also a huge timesaver – a couple of nights ago, I defrosted one of the 250g portions of pulled pork to make tacos for an easy midweek dinner.
Do your meals slide into one another? So often food blogs and magazines are filled with glamorous photos of restaurant-style dishes, but I’m far more interested in how people eat on a day to day basis. How do you feed your family midweek, when life is frantic?
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