Love Food Hate Waste: Pumpkin and Feta Risotto

A Slice of Cherry Pie recently alerted us to the Love Food Hate Waste campaign. It's a scary thought, that a third of all food bought is thrown away. I am big on left-overs. Not the same meal three nights over, but one night's dinner becoming a ingredient for the next. This week, pumpkin soup became pumpkin and feta risotto with pine nuts.
The recipe is fairly inexact. Chop an onion finely, and saute with 2 cloves of garlic. Add 2 cups of arborio rice, stirring until translucent. Then add leftover pumpkin soup, thinned with veggie stock and a little water. Keep stirring over a low heat, until the liquid is absorbed by the rice, and the rice feels completely cooked. Top with crumbled feta and pine nuts to serve.
Yum : )
I cook risotto quite a lot. If you're inspired, check out my Beetroot Risotto, or my Chicken and Pumpkin Risotto recipe.

Hot Cross Bun Pudding

If you scroll down a bit, you might see some lovely, fresh, freshly glazed Hot Cross Buns. Aren't they beautiful? I'm not bragging, because Ryan made the buns AND took the picture. I just ate one. And was terribly supportive, of course. I was making the yoghurt cake.

Anyway, there's only so many sticky buns you can eat, before they start getting stale. I contemplated my options for a while, thinking about french toast, and bread and butter pudding. But in the end, PossumChops beat me too it. She blogged her pudding recipe here, without a photo.

I have followed her recipe, and it was good, but next time I need more buns or less custard. But I'm offering up a picture.

Fajita's for cheats

I love Mexican food. I love beans, I love hot chilli flavours cut with cheese and sour cream, and I'll eat just about anything on a tortilla.
To make good fajitas, you take a big chunk of good steak and marinate it overnight. You fry it up, let it rest, and slice it as thin as you can. Then you wrap it up in a tortilla with fried up onions and capsicums and serve with all those other mexican goodies (guacamole, bean dip, grated cheese, fresh chillis).
Unfortunately, it was 7pm, and all I had was a half defrosted piece of stewing beef, some left over kidney beans and half an avocado. So here is a fajita recipe for when you don't have time to do it properly.
Cheats Fajita's
Slice up your beef as thin as you can, across the grain. Leave it to marinate (for as long as you can) in lemon juice, crushed garlic and finely chopped chilli. I used 2 cloves of garlic and one mild chilli.
Search your fridge for any non-root vegetables. I found a red capsicum and a bunch of silverbeet. Slice an onion, throw in a frying pan with all the vegetables (except the silverbeet). Add some ground cumin, ground coriander and some more garlic - fry til aromatic and the vegetables are beginning to soften.
Acquire some tortillas. Mine were in the freezer, but Hillbilly Housewife has some great recipes if you've got more time.
Cook the beef in a really hot frying pan for about 2 minutes - you really don't want to overdo it! Throw the silverbeet in with the other vegetables, and put the lid on - you only want it in there long enough to wilt.
Serve with the tortilla's, grated cheese, and an odd salsa made from kidney beans, onion, capsicum, avocado, cracked pepper and lime juice. Then everybody can roll their own tortillas.

Layered Shepherds Pie

I am one of those odd people that plans to have leftovers. Most of our leftovers go straight into lunch-size containers and into the freezer, so we never have to buy our lunch at work. Sometimes though, I plan leftovers to be eaten in another meal. Lamb roast becomes lamb fritters or Greek souvlaki wraps. Roast chicken becomes chicken risotto, which becomes arancini. (yum!)

For this Leftover Tuesday, it's a bit different. We bought a whole side of lamb a month ago. I made stock with the bits I couldn't identify, but I rescued all the meat that got boiled up. Sounds appetising, I know. But this meat is so tender, it deserved to be rescued. And Leftover Tuesday was a good excuse to use it. This recipe would work equally well with any leftover roast meat, or chicken, I think. I'm sorry it's such a loose recipe, but it doesn't really need a lot of measuring. Trust yourself!

Layered Shepherds Pie

Dried shittake mushrooms

An onion and a clove of garlic, diced

Left over meat, chopped as finely as you can

Tomato paste, soy sauce, vegetable stock powder (whatever seasonings you like, really)

Assorted root vegetables (I chose 4 small potatoes and a renegade beetroot. The beetroot had somehow escaped from being roasted earlier in the week)

Two big leaves of silverbeet (leftover from Ryan's spinach and ricotta

Milk and butter for the mash

Grated cheese

Boil the kettle and soak the mushrooms. Meanwhile, chop the potatoes (and beetroot) and put them on to boil. Heat some oil in a pan and add the onion and garlic, stirring until the onion is soft. Add the lamb, just to heat through. If you have any other vegetables to add, now is the time. Capsicum or tomato (finely diced) would be good.

When the stuff in the pan is all heated through, throw in the mushrooms with their soaking liquid. This is the base for the gravy, so add a tablespoon or so of tomato paste, a dash of soy sauce, and any other herbs or flavourings. Let it simmer for 10 minutes, then take it off the heat.

When the potatoes are soft, drain them and mash. Adding the beetroot made for a funky pink version, and added some depth of flavour. Chop the silverbeet finely and then steam it briefly (just until it darkens in colour slightly).

Finally put it all together - the meat at the bottom of a casserole dish, topped with the silverbeet, topped with the mash and then cheese on top. Heat in a medium oven until the cheese is melted. Enjoy!

Thanks for hosting this Pam!

Lamb Fritters - another way with left overs

I've been putting off writing this post, because I couldn't figure out the recipe. I know I must have used one, I'm just not sure which.

Anyway, fritters as the title suggests, are a great way to use up leftovers. Just chop it small, add to batter, and fry.

First you need the batter. It doesn't really matter what's in it, as long as it's a bit thicker than pancake batter.

Donna Hay's basic fritter batter:

1 cup SR Flour

2 eggs

20g butter

1/3 cup milk

salt and pepper

I've made them with plain flour before, and with chickpea flour. Once the batter is whisked and de-lumped, add your chopped things. Corn kernels and spring onion are traditional. We chose left over roast lamb, green capsicum and some mushroom. Any vegetables would work, provided they aren't too runny.

Heat some oil in a frying pan, and then fry the batter, a quarter cup at a time. The fritter is ready to turn when bubbles appear on the surface.

Make sure you eat them warm!

Pancake Day - a traditional Leftover Tuesday

Last Tuesday was Shrove Tuesday - otherwise known as Pancake Day or Fat Tuesday'. It has long been a great day for left overs - people made pancakes to use up all the rich ingredients they couldn't eat during Lent. Lent is the period between Ash Wednesday and Easter, where in many Christian traditions some form of fasting takes place. Any excuse for pancakes, I say.

In our house, it was a great excuse to use up some left overs in the freezer, and a good excuse to join Leftover Tuesday, hosted by Rachel at Rachel's Bite. The leftovers in question were some cooked chicken (from my last batch of stock) and some homemade cream of mushroom soup. I thought we were the only weirdo's in the world who would make such a thing. I don't think I'd ever eaten mushroom by itself before, though it featured often in my first cooking adventures (things like tuna casserole). And it only ever arrived in a can. But Ryan saw a recipe in Donna Hay one day, so we made it. And I've recently discovered we aren't the only ones - tiger fish at Teczcape has a great recipe too.

But back to Tuesday. I made up a generic crepe recipe (there's a couple on www.taste.com.au if you don't have one), and while it was sitting I threw an onion and some garlic in a pan. When it was all nicely translucent, I added the mushroom soup and the chicken, and let it simmer until it looked like dinner. I took it off the heat and stirred through some baby spinach.

Looked appetizing, didn't it? It smelt much better. Ryan made the crepes - he's much better at flipping things than me. I rolled the chicken mix up in the crepes, then heated them through in the oven, with some grated cheese on top. The final product looked pretty good.

Crepes are great like that, you can wrap up just about anything, and they make it so much more interesting. And they don't taste too bad either...