A Gorgeous Lunch made entirely of Leftovers!

~  Menu  ~

Lovely Vegetable Soup

Croutons

White Wine Spritzer

½ a Pastry Thing with Clotted Cream & Fresh Fruit

Coffee

This would look good on Pinterest
don't you think?

This lovely meal was made entirely of leftovers most of which a lesser woman than I may well have thrown away!  They comprised:

~   A few stalks of asparagus (I’d eaten the tips)

~   Some really old baby leeks that we bought cheap as they were out of date about a month ago (seriously!) which were fine after I pulled off the outer leaves.

~   A mislaid mystery potato which my friend Jenny from Jenny Eatwell's Rhubarb & Ginger thinks is an Apache Potato and I think she is right.

~   Some leftover peas from last night’s dinner.

~   Ham stock after cooking a ham – obviously!

~   The stale end crust off my real man’s loaf of bread (yes we eat different breads most of the time too!)

~   A pastry trimming which I cooked alongside my manly man’s pie for dinner but had no particular plans for it.

~   The last one of my doughnut peaches.

~   Half a punnet of blueberries I stuck in the freezer the other day as I couldn’t think what to do with them. When I thawed them this morning were all mushy and wet.
~   A handful of fresh blueberries.

~   Two days out of date clotted cream.

Even the wine was the very end of a bottle so had to be augmented with sparkling water!

The specifics …

Summery Vegetable Soup

~   I coarsely chopped the leeks and cooked them as I would cook onions till soft and sweet. 

~   When they were buttery tender I peeled and sliced the potato and added it to the leeks.

~   I poured enough ham stock to just cover the potato, brought to a boil, turned down the heat, covered and simmered till almost tender.

~   Coarsely chopped the asparagus (discarding the woody ends) and added to the soup for the last few minutes of cooking.

~   When all was tender I mashed it with my  and then stirred in the peas and enough cream to make a soupy consistency.

This soup is based, as almost all the soups I make are, on my super flexible soup recipe!

How to Make Croutons

See here for my Crouton Philosophy, in this case I left out the balsamic vinegar.

Lunch Pudding

After making my real man his second pie of the week (!) I had just a small square of leftover, (and yes, bought in) puff pastry so I bunged it in the oven alongside the pie.  No skin off my nose after all!  It has been sitting around for a couple of days. 

I cooked the mushy blueberries  with a spoonful of sugar till they burst and then strained them through a nylon sieve.  The peach was just a peach.  The clotted cream tasted fine when I stuck my finger in it.  I am not a great adherent of best before dates except where raw meat is concerned.  And just look at this …

Not bad for Leftovers!  The reason I only had half is that this is the sort of food we both like, damn it!

Creative Ways to Use Up Leftovers

I love cooking with leftovers, to me they are are not just something that you reheat and eat again – they are ingredients, inspiration, maybe a cook’s treat or the start of a different and delicious new meal.

For this reason I have written a book, Creative Ways to Use Up Leftovers, giving every recipe, idea, handy tip, cook's treat, storage info and food pairing idea I can think of for 450 potential leftovers.

Read more here.