Leftovers: 54 Dinners From What Is Already in the Fridge

Leftovers: 54 Dinners From What Is Already in the Fridge The bird is carved, the ham is cut into, and the fridge is full of food that was cooked properly once. By Friday most of it goes in the bin. It did not go off. Nobody wrote down what to do with it next. Fifty-four dinners in six Parts, every one of them built out of what the day left behind. Part One is the bird: a baked turkey divan, a curry, crisp flautas, croquettes, a risotto and a bowl of ramen. Part Two is the ham, worked down to the hock and the bone. Part Three is the roast vegetables and the potatoes: bubble and squeak crisped hard in a heavy pan, colcannon, potato cakes and gnocchi from yesterday's potatoes. Part Four is the ends of the cheese board, from a blue cheese tagliatelle to a cheddar strata made with the stale loaf. Part Five is the sweet ones: the pudding, the fruit cake, the stollen and the broken chocolate. Part Six is the carcass, and the stock, the gravy and the soups that come out of it. Two rules run every recipe, stated once at the front. The food has already had its heat, so the sauce, the fat and the seasoning are finished first, and the cooked meat goes in last for the shortest time that will do. And the clock started when the meal first came off the heat, not when you get to it. Part Seven is the numbers, and every figure names the body that published it. The cooling window. The reheat temperature. The fridge running order after the day. What freezes and what never comes back. Then a keeping table for all 54, recipe by recipe, and every recipe's own Keeps line agrees with it. Where the American, Australian and British agencies disagree, both figures are printed. No stock cubes, no gravy granules, no yeast extract and no gravy browning. Every ingredient sits on the page in plain words. The Classic Edition. Black and white, made for the kitchen bench, every recipe weighed and timed, with a hand-drawn plate opening every Part. Book Twenty-Eight of MADE, NOT BOUGHT. My other books are on my Amazon author page. Luke McConachy has been cooking for more than fifteen years, and he has cooked a bit of everything. He started in bakeries at thirteen and spent six years on the early starts, making bread, pies, cakes and pastry from scratch. From there he worked his way through a number of kitchens, including more than four years at his local pub making the breakfasts and the roast of the day. He has also run his own restaurant in Thailand.