The Thrifty Cookbook: 476 Ways to Eat Well With Leftovers (48 page)

Beef with swede and kale
Tear or dice the meat and add it to mashed swede and finely shredded cooked kale before frying.

Pork with celeriac and leeks
Tear or dice the meat and add it to mashed celeriac and finely sliced raw leeks before frying.

Christmas leftover hash
Anything goes. Tear or dice any combination of leftover turkey, ham, bacon and sausages. Mash or dice any combination of leftover roast potatoes, parsnips and carrots. Finely shred leftover Brussels sprouts and crumble any leftover stuffings. Mix everything together, add a beaten egg or not, as you like, and shallow-fry in one big or several small patties. Finish with a handful of chopped herbs.

There is no recipe as such for this dish because, frankly, the quantities don’t matter and the vegetables you use will be determined by what you have available. It’s a classic Mediterranean peasant dish made in the heaviest, widest frying pan you have – gutsy with garlic and fragrant with dry-earth herbs such as thyme, rosemary and sage.

I make this dish most when there are gluts of slim French beans around in mid-summer, so fresh that they hardly even need to be topped and tailed. If you want to speed things up, you could boil them for a scant couple of minutes first and drain them well. Almost any leftover green vegetables can be fried with potatoes like this, with a couple of cloves of garlic and some herbs. For spinach, broccoli and cauliflower, add a good pinch of dried chilli flakes too.

olive oil

garlic – as many cloves as you like, roughly chopped

slim French beans

an equal quantity of leftover cooked potatoes, roughly diced

thyme, rosemary or sage, chopped

salt and pepper

Heat some oil in a wide, heavy frying pan. Throw in the garlic first, followed by the beans and potatoes. Fry gently until the beans are cooked and the potatoes just turning golden, but watch that the garlic doesn’t catch and burn or it will become bitter. Add some chopped herbs, stir well and cook for a couple of minutes, then season to taste.

Serve hot or, even better on a hot day, at room temperature, with a hunk of good bread.

Broad beans and fresh coriander
If you grow your own broad beans, or know someone who does, gather up a few of them when they are very young and fry them in their pods with a good handful of coriander. Anything other than immature pods will be tough.

Middle Eastern spices
You can use any green vegetables in this way. Keep the garlic but replace the herbs with chopped fresh coriander and add ground cinnamon and cayenne pepper to taste.

Mangetout
A sweetly delicious alternative to beans. No need to blanch them first.

Fennel, potatoes and bacon
Cook finely sliced fennel and chopped bacon along with the diced potatoes. Allow them all to brown gently in the pan.

Leftover meat
Chicken, ham and pork work particularly well with fresh green vegetables. After Christmas, shredded chard is delicious with leftover diced ham.

Cured meat
The last few slices of chorizo, salami or prosciutto can all be added to the pan – particularly good with French beans or mangetout.

Black pudding and parsnips
Any kind of leftover sausage is lovely with diced parsnips. Use leftover parsnips, or fry diced raw parsnips (in place of the potatoes) and let them soften before adding the sausage.

The frying pan is really useful for making quick ‘stews’ of leftover meat, cut into strips and coated with a rich creamy or herby sauce. In some ways, the process is very similar to making the pie fillings on
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, though because pastry is not involved, the stews will be sloppier.

The two recipes that follow specify beef and chicken, but no one’s holding you to it – and each can be easily adapted for the kind of leftovers that you want to use up.

Of
course
stroganoff is best when made with strips of raw beef fillet. But the memorable thing about it is its strong mushroom and cream sauce and the classic recipe can be adapted for using up the remains of the beef joint. Happily, beef leftovers are generally pretty rare, which helps to keep them juicy as well as deepening the flavour of the dish.

Serves 4

a little butter or oil

1 onion, finely sliced

2 tablespoons plain flour

2 tablespoons paprika, plus extra to serve

4 teacups (about 400g) leftover beef, cut into strips

300g small mushrooms, wiped and sliced

a small glass of white wine

200ml beef stock

250ml soured cream

a small bunch of parsley, chopped

salt and pepper

Heat a little butter or oil in a wide frying pan, add the onion and cook until just turning golden.

In a bowl, mix the flour and paprika with a good pinch of salt and a grind of pepper. Toss in the beef strips, making sure that they are well coated. Shake off excess flour and then add the meat to the onion, turning it in the oil until they are well amalgamated. Add the mushrooms and stir well for a minute. Add the wine, stir again and simmer for 2 minutes. Pour in the stock, bring to the boil and simmer gently for 5-10 minutes, until the mushrooms are tender. The dish should not be sloppy – the point of the flour is to thicken the sauce. Add the cream and heat through very gently for a couple of minutes – don’t let the mixture boil or the cream will separate.

Serve hot on a bed of rice or flat noodles, sprinkled with a little paprika and the chopped parsley.