Making Good Food the Second Time Around

From your email, please click on the title to view the photos and comment online.

A good friend inspired me to consider the lowly leftover. She wanted to apprise me of a Depression-era meal that was associated mostly with New England – the rinktum ditty. It seems that this take on Welsh rarebit came to America from the Cheshire area of England. While it might not originally have been made from leftovers, it’s clearly a dish that makes use of kitchen odds and ends.

I decided to explore other food traditions around the world in hopes of giving you some ideas for ways to use up your leftovers. It turned out that finding this information was not as easy as I thought. Those glossy cookbooks and flashy food magazines don’t attract advertisers, readers, and subscribers with recipes for the vegetables and meat in the fridge and how to prevent them from becoming science projects. Still, I was able to find some new ideas and clues about how home cooks in other countries make use of leftovers. After all, using up extras is a great way to reduce food waste. And it’s even better when the result is a new dish that elevates those oft-forgotten ingredients.

Remembrance of leftovers past

I have fond memories of the leftovers from my youth. In particular, my mother would make hamburger-sized patties from leftover mashed potatoes, then fry them in butter. When browned on both sides, she’d serve them with reheated pot roast, all covered with gravy. And of course, when we had a leftover ham bone, my mother would make ham and dumplings. Many who, like me, had parents who grew up in the Depression, dined with people who knew how to stretch food to make meals. I’ve inherited some of that thrift myself. When I have a ham bone, I usually use it for Senate bean soup, and there’s usually enough there to serve four to six. And just last week, we had chicken pot pie made with the remains of a Sunday roasted chicken dinner.

The universal characteristic of these international leftover dishes is that they are comfort foods, warming and nourishing. Fried rice, for example, is a typical Asian dish making use of extra rice, meats, and vegetables. Koreans make bibimbap or rice porridge from leftovers. Korean rice balls use leftover sticky short-grain rice mixed with meat and vegetables or maybe eggs and pickled radish, rolled into small balls and consumed as a lunch or snack.

Ideas from Europe

The Greeks and Egyptians often make a phyllo dinner pie from leftovers. You can usually find phyllo dough in the supermarket freezer, so keep that in mind as a really simple way to jazz up a dish. If you’re eating a phyllo pie in a Greek household, don’t be surprised if it’s accompanied by French fries. Elsewhere in Europe, quiches and frittatas are often a delicious culinary end to leftover meats and vegetables. In the summer, salads are a good venue for extra meat and vegetables.

I’m more familiar with a Nordic leftover meal: the pytt i panne, or Scandinavian fry-up. It’s universal across the Nordic countries, and a version is found in Nordic-American communities in the Midwest where it’s usually referred to as hash. I’ve consumed my mother’s version of this dish any number of times, usually doused with a little ketchup. While Mrs. Farmboy’s family has strong Scottish roots, she doesn’t remember having what the Scots call stovies. Nonetheless, Gary Maclean, Scotland’s National Chef, wrote in Gary Maclean’s Scottish Kitchen that this dish is widely made in Scottish households. There is no definitive recipe, but generally, it includes stock, some sort of meat and potatoes, maybe sausage. These are simmered together on the stove for about an hour and a half until the potatoes have broken down completely and any other vegetables are cooked. It’s traditionally served with oatcakes. (Editor’s note: Mrs. Farmboy is perfectly content not to recall this.)

How do you make use of leftovers? Do you have a special recipe to share? Maybe your own version of rinktum ditty or pytt i panne?

Please click on the headline to view the blog on the website. You can log in and comment at the end of the blog to share your thoughts and start a discussion, or suggest a topic for Farmboy in the Kitchen.

If you’d like to share the blog, click on the Facebook icon or one of the others. Thanks!