Brunch from Saturday-night Leftovers

So what do you with your leftovers?

Do you shove them in the fridge and forget about them, eventually tossing them in the garbage? Or the following day, do you get creative and make a whole new meal from your leftovers?

I had brunch at a friend's last Sunday and she unabashedly served her leftovers from the evening before, jazzed up with freshly picked veggies and herbs from her garden.

On Saturday night she'd grilled herself salmon, boiled pasta and corn, whizzed up some basil-walnut pesto, sauteed some green beans from her veggie garden, and had enough to feed herself plus some.

Hence her offer that I, and one other friend, join her for brunch on Sunday. And without much effort, that brunch turned into a fresh feast on the patio.

That's the beauty of leftovers: it takes much less effort to create a whole new meal simply by adding a couple fresh ingredients, a pretty garnish, and hungry, appreciative friends :)

Here's what she did to create the leftover dishes pictured:

Brunch from Saturday-night Leftovers
1) Toss cooked rigatoni into a bowl.
2) Scrape cooked corn from cob with a knife. Add kernels to pasta.
3) Warm leftover garlic sauteed beans in a pan, add to pasta.
4) Add marinated dried tomato pieces.
5) Saute a fresh squash in a little butter, add it warm to the above ingredients.
6) Stir basil-walnut pesto through pasta and veggies.
7) If pasta looks a little dry, drizzle with some extra olive oil

To Serve: Either serve pasta and veggies in individual bowls, and leftover salmon on a serving platter, or portion leftover salmon onto plates with pasta and veggies. Decorate with fresh basil leaves. You might also like to serve a side dish of meaty green and black olives, and or a plate of crusty bread and cheese.

We followed our delicious leftover meal with fruit: blueberries and sliced granny smith apples doused in fresh-squeezed lemon juice. The tart GS apples and lemon juice, paired with the sweet blueberries were excellent palate cleansers, as was the slightly sweetened, Darjeeling iced tea we had with our fruit dessert.

All so simple and delicious: Leftovers, they're the new gourmet!

Making the Most of Bad Fruit

A recent Market to Mouth guest, Cindy Lawrence (pic to left), read my last post on waste and responded with the following:

"What if you buy bad fruit and don't know it till you get home? The dilemma I have is do I drive back to the store or just put it in the fridge. If I put it in the fridge it inevitably goes really bad and then I throw it out, at which point I feel guilty for having thrown it out!"

When I've purchased fruit that looks perfectly fine, but once home have bitten into the apple, pear, peach etc. only to discover that its floury or even brown at the core, I'm often furious.

My intention to take the fruit back with the receipt is often set aside due to the time involved and so I do end up tossing it the trash.

However, I'm aware I have options:

1. Cut the bad fruit into pieces, discard any really bad bits, and poach the remainder until tender (about 10 mins). Poached fruit is delicious with oatmeal & yogurt for breakfast or as a snack, or served with roasted meats like chicken, turkey, ham, pork.
2. Poached or stewed fruit can be made into pies, strudel, fruit butters, muffins
   
3. If you've purchased a pound of bad fruit, consider making chutney. Apples, pears, peaches, nectarines etc, make fabulous fruit chutney.
   
4. Compost bad fruit. Very simple!
5. If none of the above dissipate the annoyance at having purchased bad fruit, hot foot it back to the store with your receipt. On the occasions I've made the effort, there's never been an issue, and I've been able to replace what I've purchased, and sometimes I've received a credit for the bad fruit.

Avoid Wasting Food & Save Dollars

Are you on a budget and do you waste food?

I came across a blog site yesterday, one that I want to draw your attention to because Wasted Food is the elephant in the room when people talk about struggling to eat well for less during these challenging economic times.

Consider honestly:

• Do you store leftovers, forget they're in the fridge, and then end up throwing them out?
• Do you forget produce in your crisper and subsequently trash it because it's moldy, rotten, shriveled?
  
• Do you end up tossing soured milk, moldy yogurt, smelly deli-meats, because their use-by dates have expired?
  
• Do you freeze food and forget it's there until it's unidentifiable & inedible due to freezer burn?
• Do you put too much food on your plate at meal times and end up tossing out what you can't eat?
• When you eat out, do you leave food on your plate? Or do you take home a doggy bag of leftovers, forget you put it in the fridge, then eventually toss it out?

You can probably think up another half-dozen scenarios in which you've wasted food, not intentionally, of course, because chances are you wouldn't intentionally waste anything if it had a one dollar, five dollar, ten dollar, fifty-dollar note attached to it.

But that's the reality of wasting food -- every time you toss out those rotten veggies, that half tub of moldy yogurt and that soured milk, the stinky deli-meat, you're tossing away a percentage of whatever you paid to purchase it.

And then, are you concerned about:

• your recession-hit income
• the rising price of groceries
  
• how much it's costing to feed just you, or you and a partner, or you and your family?
  

If you answered yes to the above, chances are you're on a grocery budget. If you're also aware that you waste food, put simply, stop throwing the money you budget for groceries into the trash.

But how, you ask. How can you avoid wasting food?

Seriously, if we were in a depression, like the great depression of the 30's, when jobs, money and food were scare for many, then you'd naturally not waste. It's as easy as that.

Despite the current economy, citizens of developed countries still live with abundance, and abundance is a "catch 22" because it gives a false sense of there always being enough.

Okay, so let's say you do have enough, enough money to buy basic groceries, and enough groceries available to you so that there's choice. Regardless of having enough, you're still feeling the need to reduce your expenditure at the grocery store, plus you're aware that one of the ways you can do that is by reducing your waste at home. If this is you, try these simple tricks:

1. Buy only what you need. I can't stress this enough! It's tempting to buy more, but if you don't need it, won't eat it, then chances are you'll toss it out.
   
2. Clean you fridge weekly. If your fridge is uncluttered, you'll easily be able to see the fresh groceries you add each week.
   
3. Put a list on the outside of your fridge detailing what's on the inside. As you consume what's in your fridge, cross it off the list. This will help you track your perishables, food that generally needs to be consumed within a week of being purchased.
   
4. Do the same regarding the contents of your freezer.
   
5. Don't cook too much, i.e. don't cook for the masses if there are just two of you.
   
6. Don't overload your plate at mealtimes. Serve yourself just enough, and then eat what's on your plate.
   
7. If you do have leftovers (either you've cooked too much food or you put too much on your plate), be disciplined about cooking up leftovers with fresher ingredients the following day.
   
8. Leftovers can also be feed to the family pets (instead of dry or tinned food), or you could compost your degradable leftovers -- if you have a composting bin and a garden.

"Americans waste an astounding amount of food — an estimated 27 percent of the food available for consumption." This quote comes from the NYTs article: One Country's Table Scraps another Country's Meal. It's worth reading.

So if you're on a budget, and you're aware you waste food, try the 8 tips above. A few simple changes could save you a surprising amount of money.

Tips to Help you Prepare to Grocery Shop

Boulder native Wayne Yee, read posts on this blog, watched the Market to Mouth pilot then asked me if I'd go with him to Whole Foods so he could get acquainted with their deals.

Working from home, Wayne is around when his 11- and 13-year old kids get home from school and with his flexible schedule, he's also taken on some of the household duties, like the grocery shopping.

He also shared that his interest in cooking has been reignited. Apparently the family had a subscription to Cooking Light and had canceled it, but it kept arriving in the mail, so Wayne took that as an omen.

The Yee family lives just down the road from Safeway where Wayne does most of the grocery shopping because, he says, it's convenient. Periodically he takes a trip to Costco to stock up because it's cheap. "It's all about convenience and price," he said.

I responded that he's not alone in his thinking.

When we met at Whole Foods, I picked up The Good Stuff For Less flier, and The Whole Deal which is full of coupons, menu plans, shopping lists and tips, thinking Wayne would find the information helpful, but he'd already accessed both fliers online.

In fact, he'd gone to Whole Foods and Safeway's websites and done a cost comparison.

Whole Foods now has a Compare and Save flier online too. It gives shoppers the chance to review the value they're getting on certain items compared to Safeway, King Soopers and Costco.

I'm an avid online researcher and I highly recommend taking the time to go online before you do your grocery shopping as a way to prepare.

In addition to online research, consider these 6 tips before you head off to the store:

1. Look in your fridge and cupboards, what do you already have and what do you need?
2. Now think about the upcoming week, how many meals will you be eating at home? How many meals do you anticipate eating out? Are you having friends over for a meal during the upcoming week?
3. Go online and check out WFs sale items in Good Stuff For Less and discount coupons in The Whole Deal. Jot down sale items that you'd like to include in your weekly menu plan.
   
4. With 1, 2 & 3 in mind, jot down the main meals you'd like to prepare for the upcoming week. Check out WFs The Whole Deal for menu-planning ideas for singles, couples and families, and browse their recipes for ideas or peruse your favorite recipe books.
   
5. Don't be bound by your recipe books. Use them as inspiration, but allow yourself the opportunity to be creative while also considering your budget.
6. With all of the above in mind, write your shopping list for the week. I always write my list standing in front of the fridge and cupboards -- doors wide open.
   

If you implement this kind of pre-shopping strategy, by the time you get to the grocery store, you're organized and aware of what you need, don't need, what's on sale, and where in the store you need to go in order to collect the groceries you want.

And being organized means you're less likely to impulsively buy things you don't need and things you can't afford.

Having a strategy before you go shopping, and a list once you're at the store, affords you the chance to stay stress-free while shopping, and it helps you stay on budget.