Quesadilla with the kitchen sink

Fresh food expires. As it idles in my fridge, its biological clock ticks down with the passing of every hour. So it's always my goal try to use any leftovers or open ingredients before they grow fuzz or rot.

Meanwhile, Hannah and I attended Oaklavia on Sunday, an open-street festival in downtown Oakland. There, we popped into a busy Mexican restaurant to check it out. While Hannah went to the counter to order some horchatta, I was attracted to the grocery in the back of the restaurant, which stocked fresh corn tortillas cooked in Oakland earlier in the day. They were still warm! $1 for a dozen and we were back in the street to enjoy the rest of the festival.

We had some tasty black bean tacos with the tortillas later that afternoon, but that's not what I'm getting at here. Yesterday for lunch, I rounded up what remained of an old block of cheddar, a few slice of salami, some chickpeas (from the can I opened for the pasta dish below), and some tomatoes. Then I constructed a quesadilla using the still-incredibly fresh tortillas and fried it in the cast iron pan with grapeseed oil. I salted the finished quesadilla and ate it with some plain yogurt. What needs to be said: the freshness of the tortillas made for a super crispy and flavorful meal. Not a bad use ingredients that were just waiting to go bad.

Reformatted Leftovers for Lunch

Just as Scott had an excuse for not posting in several days, so did I. On Friday, my cell phone (Blackberry Tour) decided to stop working, and because of the holiday weekend, a new one didn't arrive until yesterday. And since I use my phone to upload pictures directly to the blog, that meant no more pictures of meals (with one exception which I'll get to later). Add to that, I was moving into a new apartment with Hannah on Monday, and we were rather busy. For most of that time, my meals were rather unspectacular- simple, quick, and filling to keep things going.

Finally, I cooked our first real dinner last night. And I guess in the excitement and fun of eating on our dining room table for the first time, I forgot to take a picture. We had stir fried cabbage over rice, and boiled pork and cabbage wontons with a soy-ginger dipping sauce. I had never made dumplings before -- it turned out to be rather tricky and time consuming. The entire batch gave me 55 (!) wontons, and we cooked up 20 of them for dinner in a pot of boiling water. When we finally sat down, the work appeared to be worth it -- the wontons were as tasty wontons from a good Chinese restaurant.


On that note, for today's lunch, I fried up the leftover cabbage stir fry and rice, along with some leftover broccoli, with an egg to make a simple fried rice dish. To go along with it, I fried up a small batch of the leftover, uncooked wontons. Fantastic! They were superbly crispy on the outside and didn't taste very greasy. Even better than our first batched of boiled ones.

After dinner, Hannah baked up some lemon bars using Meyer lemons we picked from the tree in her mother's backyard in SF on Sunday. Speaking of Sunday, Hannah and I had lunch at a Mission tacqueria, which I snapped a picture of. Maybe I'll get around to posting it at some point.

Tuesday Night Dinner Scrounge: Braised Potatoes with Wine and Bacon

Pork Glut: FIN. Pork ribs: gone. Sausage: gone. Risotto: gone. Bacon: All but 1 slice, gone.

The past several days have been a success in skillfully eroding away at my leftover cache. For lunch, I finished the risotto by warming it in a small cast iron fry pan over a single layer of thinly sliced Yukon gold potatoes. Covering the pan with a lid, the potatoes became browned and crispy on the bottom, while the risotto was gently heated up to a creamy doneness. I was pleasantly surprised by my clever use of leftovers and pantry ingredients.

For dinner, I was mostly out of leftovers, and instead had to put a meal together out of pantry ingredients. I had plenty of small red and gold potatoes I purchased a week ago, but hadn't used until lunch. I also had an opened bottle of cheap white wine that I had left uncorked on the counter since cooking Friday's dinner. A taste of the wine revealed that it hadn't yet turned, so I looked through Bittman for some ideas to put it to use.

Through some luck, I came across Bittman's recipe for braised potatoes with white wine and bacon, a recipe that couldn't have been more perfect for the situation. I started by crisping the bacon, some garlic (which ended up burning), and the potatoes in the above cast iron pan. After a few minutes, I added in a few ounces of chicken stock I had left in the fridge, and a few glugs of the pleasantly-not-gnarly white wine, along with some salt, pepper, fresh thyme, and mustard. As the liquid cooked down, I added more wine to keep the potatoes submerged. I took the picture above about halfway through the cooking process.

After about 40 minutes, the potatoes were soft and ready to eat, and the liquid had cooked down to a very flavorful (possibly could have used some water instead of all that wine) and thick sauce. Just like lunch, a surprisingly efficient use of my leftover and pantry ingredients that resulted in a satisfying and flavorful meal.

Pork glut: Day 1: Breakfast

Now I have a problem. A good problem, but a problem nonetheless. I have too many pork products in my refrigerator that I need to use up.

First there are the bacon and sausage I purchased earlier in the week -- only a half pound of each, but that apparently goes a long way. Then there are about four (BIG) pork ribs left over from last night. Holy god, that's like 5 lbs of pork (including bones) in my fridge, in various stages of decay. What am I going to do???

I started off this morning using a modest amount of sausage for a patty to go on a fried egg sandwich, using some leftover sourdough from last night.

And the leftovers don't end with the pork -- I still have 3 small zucchini from last week's farmers market to use, some leftover cesar dressing, a ton of risotto, and some of those rice and beans from earlier in the week (but I may have used enough of those to justify trashing at this point).

On the plus side, there probably won't be anymore "VEGETARIAN?" tags used for the next few days.

Another salad

Pretty much the same as my salad for lunch yesterday, but this time with some arugula and mozzarella cheese tossed in as well. Nothing special, but I was in a rush to eat something before a job interview.

Salad!

Threw together a quick salad for lunch today consisting of various leftovers and farmer's market impulse buys. From the leftovers category, it contained last night's beets, some plain pasta, and a scoop of those rice and beans. I had gotten some romaine lettuce and snap peas from the FM, and included some parm and a simple vinaigrette that I whipped up fresh.

I know Scott will continue to give me shit over the vegetarian aspect of the meal. I'm hoping to get some meat in for dinner.