In Praise of Leftovers

I love to cook. I love to eat. I love to go out to restaurants and eat. 

Those are my primary directives, to borrow a Star Trek expression. I have a couple of others.

Waste nothing. Get good value out of whatever I buy.

Combining all those together means when I go to a restaurant I always bring home a doggie-bag so I always get a second (sometimes a third!) meal out of my restaurant meal. That saves money and I exercise my creativity transforming one chef's ideas into my own.

Portion control is another advantage. Because I know I am not going to eat everything on the plate, I save the calories for another day.

That probably sounds obsessive, compulsive or just nuts, but there you have it. Me in a nutshell.

For Zesterdaily I posted two recipes that demonstrate the method in my madness.

Bread Custard with Raisins and Dried Cranberries

Don't waste food. That's what my grandmother always told me. I took that simple idea to heart.

When we go out to eat, I bring home what we don't eat. Especially the bread. Why let good bread get thrown away? And if you're in the grocery store, and you see a loaf of marked-down white bread, buy it and you'll be able to make a dessert that's as easy-to-make as it is elegant looking and delicious.

Bread Custard with Raisins and Dried Cranberries

Unlike traditional bread puddings, this dessert is designed to come out of the pan.

Yield 4-6 servings

Time 30 minutes preparation, 60 minutes baking

Ingredients

2 eggs
1 cup heavy cream
1/2 cup + 1 teaspoon sugar
6 slices white bread
1 tablespoon dark raisins
1 tablespoon golden raisins
1 tablespoon dried cranberries
1 tablespoon whole raw almonds, roughly chopped
1 teaspoon sweet butter, melted

Method

Soak the raisins and cranberries in the cream for an hour or overnight.

Pre-heat the oven to 350. Toast the bread in the oven for 4-5 minutes on each side until lightly toasted. Set aside.

Heat 1 teaspoon of sugar in a nonstick skillet over a low flame. Add the chopped almonds. Stir frequently until sugar begins to melt. After the almonds have been coated with the melted sugar, remove from the pan and chop on a cutting board.

Make the custard-base by using a fork to beat together the eggs and sugar. Add the cream with the raisins and dried cranberries. Stir well.

Put water into a small bowl. Taking 2-3 slices of toasted bread at a time, dip the bread in the water for a few seconds. Carefully squeeze out the water and tear the bread into pieces and drop into the custard. Mix well.

Instead of using a standard baking pan, use a 9" round take-out container. Why? Because the thin, aluminum-sided take-out container is flexible and that makes removing the bread custard easy.

Paint the inside of the take-out container with melted butter. Pour in the custard-bread mixture. Put into a water bath (1" of water in a pan larger than the take-out container).

Bake for 30 minutes, remove from the oven. Sprinkle the caramelized chopped almonds on top of the custard. Loosely lay a piece of aluminum foil over the custard to prevent the top from burning before the custard is set

Return to the oven for another 15 - 30 minutes. The custard is done when you touch the top and it only slightly jiggles (shouldn't be "wet"). Then remove from the oven and let cool on a wire rack.

When cooled, the custard will shrink slightly allowing for easy removal from the pan. Place one hand on top, flip it over, and carefully remove the cake from the pan. Place a plate on the bottom and flip it over.

Serve warm dusted with powdered sugar or topped with whipped cream or ice cream.

Chicken with Rice and Beans from a Restaurant Turns into Homemade Soup

Figuring out what your kids want to eat can be a challenge. Our son, Michael, has gone through a lot of food-phases. When he was little, he became a vegetarian after he saw Babe. A few years later at his grandparents' 50th wedding anniversary dinner, he announced that he was going to eat a hamburger to celebrate their marriage. Now he's the starting quarterback on the high school football team, so he's on a training regimen. He stays away from fats and prefers to eat whole grains. We don't always know what to cook for him, and fast-food is a big no-no. Luckily a staple for him is the roast chicken from an LA landmark, the Cuban restaurant Versailles. The chicken comes with fried plantains, rice, and black beans. Michael likes it all, except for the beans. Which is ok with me, because I use them to make a black bean and vegetable soup.

I love getting another meal out of left-overs. From Michael's take-out, I use the roast chicken bones to make stock. He doesn't eat all the rice, so I have some for the soup. As is traditional with many Cuban dishes, a mound of raw, sliced onions comes on top of the chicken. Needless to say, he doesn't eat any of the onions, so they're all for me.

The result is a delicious soup, with latin-flavors and a healthy, clean taste. I like to add bacon or sausage, but if you're a vegetarian, like my friends Marjorie and Grace, don't add the bacon and use water instead of the chicken stock. If you're making the soup with ingredients from the market, you can use the black beans made by any of the Latin brands like Goya. (Just a side note, the best black beans I've ever eaten were ones I had in Costa Rica where my parents lived for 20 years. Unbelievably delicious.)

Black Bean and Vegetable Soup

½ cup chopped onions
2 garlic cloves, peeled, finely chopped
1 ½ cups black beans, cooked
1 piece of bacon, finely chopped
¼ cup finely chopped carrots
¼ cup finely chopped broccoli stems, peeled
½ cup finely chopped Italian parsley
½ cup cooked long grain rice
2 cups homemade chicken stock
1 teaspoon olive oil
Sour cream (optional)
Homemade croutons (optional)

In a saucepan, sauté the onions, bacon, garlic, carrots, and broccoli in olive oil until lightly browned. Add the beans, rice, and chicken stock and simmer for 10 minutes.

Serve in a bowl and top with croutons or sour cream.

Preparation Time: 10 minutes. Cooking Time: 20 minutes.

Second Life: Ginger Pork and Rice Turns into a Delicious Soup

"Never waste food." When my grandmother showed me how to cook scrambled eggs, she ran her finger inside the shell to get out all the egg. Waste made her crazy. My mother was the same way. When we'd go to a restaurant, what we didn't eat, came home, much to my father's embarrassment.

To my mother, the prime rib my father didn't eat at Lawry's, reheated at home, made a great snack, and it was free. The gigantic baked potato with sour cream and chives I couldn't finish, turned into the best breakfast potatoes. I learned that the food we brought home from the restaurant had a second life...if you know a couple of tricks

Yesterday I was doing an errand and stopped at Mitsuwa Marketplace, a Japanese supermarket, that always has great sales on high quality meats and produce. The food court inside doesn't make allowances for Western tastes. Mitsuwa has the feeling of a Tokyo-style market.

From Misasa, one of the half-dozen food stands, I bought a bento box lunch with ginger pork, miso soup, a small piece of tofu with bonito flakes, steamed Japanese rice, and pickled daikon. Everything was delicious but I couldn't finish the ginger pork or the steamed rice, so I packed them up and took them home.

In the morning I turned the left-over ginger pork and steamed rice into a hot soup with rice, pork, carrots, and broccoli. The flavors from the bento box lived on, reconstituted into a nourishing soup, perfect for the rainy day. Which made me happy, because it tasted great and because I didn't waste any food.

Creating a hearty soup, using a cooked meat and rice, fresh vegetables, and a stock, is really very easy. All it takes is remembering to bring home the left-overs.

3 cups homemade chicken stock
1 cup ginger pork, cooked, sliced
1 shallot, peeled, sliced
1 carrot, washed peeled, cut into 1" long batons
1 small broccoli florette, washed, sliced into bite-sized pieces
1 cup steamed rice, cooked

Heat the chicken stock on a medium flame. Add the pork, shallot, carrot, and broccoli. Simmer for 10 minutes. Add the cooked rice and cook another 5 minutes.

Serves 1. Preparation Time: 5 minutes. Cooking Time: 15 minutes.