Category: Leftovers

Back in Tips for Better Baking, I mentioned that the first thing to do when baking was read the recipe – ingredients and method – all the way through so you weren’t taken by surprise mid-bake.

Have you been doing so? Yes? Excellent. You would make Mary Berry proud. You might even make Paul Hollywood proud but he wouldn’t let on since he’s been practicing his inscrutable face in preparation for the new series of Bake Off – which, did I mention is coming VERY SOON?

What’s that? You haven’t been reading through the recipes before starting? Well, OK. Let’s not mention that to Mary or Paul and see if we can’t come up with a “save” of sorts.

At the end of Better Baking Tips, we talked about what do when you have no buttermilk and how to make your own self-raising flour from the good old plain stuff. But there are all sorts of things you might find yourself running out of so here are a few more last minute ingredient saves. Continue reading “The Old Bake and Switch (Useful Swaps)” →

There’s been a lot of talk recently about how no one cooks anymore, more folks depending largely on take-away. I’ve no problem ordering pizza or Chinese now & again. I love the time-saving genius of my microwave. But everyday?

The cost aside (my wallet weeps at the thought), sodium content alone gives me pause – it makes my hands feel puffy just thinking about it. But yes, sometimes I don’t want to cook or shop; I’m too tired or busy or broke. So I embrace the leftovers (hence this posts inclusion in my Looking at Leftovers series) and the basic building blocks found in my kitchen cupboards.

Quick No-Cook Meals from Leftover Chicken and Standby Staples:

Chicken looms large in the menus at TransAtlantic Towers. Chicken Pesto Pasta, roast chicken pieces, chicken stews, etc. We always have breast or thigh fillets in the freezer and keep an eye out for particularly good bargains during our regular shop). As a result, we quite often have cooked chicken in some form left over.

And while I’m perfectly content to grab a cooked chicken breast and nibble away as is, it’s nice to jazz it up a bit too.

If you have some left over chicken, why not shred it and use it in: Continue reading “Lots of Love for Leftovers (and No-Cook Meals)” →

Welcome to the first in my ingredient-focused posts in my Looking at Leftovers series (check out the kick off post to see what the rest will be about). I figured we’d start big with bread. Why big, you ask? Well, first – bread is one of the most thrown away foods in the US and the UK. It’s a big part of the leftovers landscape.

Second – big also refers to the size of the topic. Bread itself is an enormous subject – the types, the ways to make it, the ways to use it, store it, serve it.

Leftovers is also a subject worthy of considerable time and effort. So, I was unsurprised when what was supposed to be a single post decided to expand into a multi-part “series within a series.” We’ll tackle the basic issue here and discuss ideas for tackling it, then I’ll offer up some recipes and variations in the next part. Continue reading “Looking at Leftovers: Bread, Part 1 (of 2)” →

I don’t know about you but I always feel a bit guilty when I throw away food. I always feel like if I’d just taken some time or planned better, I wouldn’t be in the position of tossing half a loaf of bread in the bin.

As the kitchen at TransAtlantic Towers gets busier and busier (what with himself’s weekend cooking marathons and my baking ever on the increase) we’re trying to get more out of our food shop – shopping smarter and wasting less. Making use of leftovers and using the freezer as a pantry are both huge parts of that. And we’re not alone – lots of people I’ve spoken with have been working on the same thing in their own ways.

That’s what the Looking at Leftovers series is about – sharing what we’ve found about what sorts of things get leftover, how people are using them, saving them and thrown away less. There will be ingredient-specific posts, recipe posts and tips and tricks posts – anything I think might be useful. Continue reading “Looking at Leftovers: A Series” →