Dear Laura
No, darling, there’s no need to go and buy a St Bernard, just because you’ve got several little pots of leftovers around the place! It would be considerably cheaper to buy a bigger freezer and a lot more little pots. In the meantime, just how much can you have accumulated in only a week?
If you didn’t either over-cook or over-butter your rice, you will be able to re-heat it in boiling water and serve it with a stew. Knowing you, I imagine your leftover rice is thick with butter and highly seasoned with black pepper. That makes it perfect for a quick fry-up, perhaps with some chopped onions and mushrooms added to it, to serve with a nice piece of grilled steak or – more likely at this time of the month – a couple of sausages. You could cut the carrots a bit smaller and put them in with the rice, but don’t add the peas, as they tend to take on the texture of bird-shot if cooked twice. Chuck them into the salad instead. You can serve a salad with anything that doesn’t have built-in gravy!
You say you haven’t enough left of either the savoury mince or the spaghetti sauce to make another meal. So – mix them together! What you have now is the base for a shepherd’s pie. Just cover with mashed potato and reheat in the oven. At the last moment, top with a mixture of grated cheese and breadcrumbs and pop under the grill.
Or how about savoury pancakes with cheese sauce? You can use the same mixture for the pancakes as for Yorkshire pudding, with a touch more milk, but if you are low on eggs, you can make the same amount of pancake batter with only one egg and some extra milk. The fat in the pan must be smoking hot (I use a mixture of butter and oil) and there mustn’t be too much of it. Don’t try to do more than one thing at a time if the one thing is making pancakes! Make them, stack them, and stuff them later.
Having got your pile of pancakes, put 1-2 spoons of your glorious leftover mince-mess on each. Roll them up, tuck the ends under, arrange in a casserole, cover with cheese sauce, put the lid on and re-heat gently in the oven. (Don’t dare to call it cannelloni – unless you are prepared to risk a Mafia contract on your cooking pot!)
The cheese sauce is terribly easy, provided you don’t look at a cookery book! Those eminent publications assume that you have the patience of Job, the luck of the devil and a team of washers-up. Forget about making a white roux or a brown roux or any other sort of roux. It is not easy to fry flour in butter until it turns into a smooth paste without lumps. I can’t do it, after decades of trying! What is easy, is cornflour.
Bring the milk to the boil. Meanwhile, mix cornflour (you will need about one heaped teaspoon to 250ml boiled milk) with a little bit of cold milk. Add some of the hot milk and stir well. Then add the cornflour mixture to the rest of the hot milk and bring back to the boil, slowly, stirring constantly. Add the grated cheese and keep stirring until it’s all melted. How much cheese you use depends on what you want the sauce for. Not a great deal for savoury pancakes, but lots of it with macaroni or cauliflower, or anything else where cheese is the main protein.
If you find cheese sauce figuring frequently on your menu, you could do well to experiment with mature instead of ordinary cheddar. It is a bit more expensive, but you need about 30 percent less to achieve the same flavour level. As for using up fancy cheeses that are past their best – I’m not in favour of the idea. You grandmother reckons a bit of blue cheese makes the sauce more piquant. That’s fine if you like the piquancy of decaying hockey socks! As for Camembert that smells of ammonia – your father wouldn’t eat the stuff until it was strong enough to open the fridge door by itself but the only really good use I’ve ever found for it was to keep British customs officials away from my luggage!
Love Mom
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