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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

lunch-from-leftovers-pinterest-image
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~   Some really old baby leeks that we bought cheap as they were out of date about a month ago (seriously!)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~   Two days out of date clotted cream.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!

soup ingredients

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!


vegetable soup made from leftovers

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 …
peach and blueberry napoleon with clotted cream

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.


leftovers cookbook


4 comments:

Jenny Eatwell said...

That soup is the food of the gods so far as I am concerned. I currently have two leeks sitting doing nothing in the fridge and soup is at the top of my mind - but it's just too hot to make it, even if I then cool it and have chilled soup! I suppose they'll wait - anyway, I've gone off eating right now, unless it's a chilled prawn accompanied by some lamb's lettuce. LOL

Jenny Eatwell said...

Oh and by the way - thank you for the mention. :D

Suzy - Sudden Lunch said...

You're welcome as heck, Jenny!

Katerina said...

You did an amazing work with leftovers! Delightful soup! Thanks for coming and linking up at The Weekend Social. All posts get pinned in our pinterest board! Please be sure to come back next week starting Thursdays at 9PM EST on culinaryflavors.gr ! I hope to see you there!