I imagine ours is not the only post Christmas fridge with a whole heap of leftovers to work thr0ugh, and actually their part of my New Year’s resolution. There are some awful stats around each household throwing away between £420 and £610 worth of good food every year, all going into landfill.
And this year, we’re going to do throw out an awful lot less. Which does mean organising the whole family (those that follow me on Twitter may now I have threatened to divorce Dr T over the food he wastes through not labelling or putting it away properly). But we need a bit of a clear out first! So, yesterday we got through:
Upmarket & varied leftovers
Not a bad starting point, as we had some leftover foie gras pate, and MGG had some Riverford chipolata’s. And then we had to work out what to do with the leftover porchetta.
This had been a fabulous meal for 8, and we’d had a few good sandwiches from it, but we were getting less than excited about it. We ended up with
the faux pastor recipe from the Gastrokid cookbook that MGG sent me for Christmas, and it was really tasty. It involves a lot of chopping and dry frying with spices:
Mid way through
And you end up with something vaguely, kind of Mexican, almost regardless of where you started out, and it works with pretty much any kind of meat you throw at it:
Ta dah! The finished faux pastor
And you know what? No one complained about it being leftovers, no one didn’t love it, and everyone asked for it again. Perfect. Just need some leftovers! The other things I think I’m going to need to keep to this resolution are:
3. A
big stockpot for one way of using up lots of good leftovers.
4. A variety of boxes to go in the freezer, plus
a pen to label them. How many times of you looked at things in the freezer and wondered what the heck they are? Tell me it’s not just me?
So, here’s hoping there’s less waste heading out from our household. And if Dr T needs more inspiration, then I shall be taking him to The Ministry of Food exhibition at the Imperial War Museum come February!
A year in food and eating in review // Jan 2, 2011 at 7:19 am
[...] adopt more frugal measures for economic reasons as well as just being more environmentally sound. Faux pastor has figured large in the year, I highly recommend it as a great standby recipe for using up leftover roast. Ta dah! [...]