Leftovers!

Call it intuitive cooking. Call it stop wasting food. The point is, I love leftovers. The parts of a meal you already made can provide the components for brand new dishes.

I’ve also found that this is how most food people cook. We look at languishing leftovers, check the drawer for neglected produce, pull out a quart container to keep a good rotation going in the freezer, and we make something new. These are the dishes that inspire a moment of pause to reflect on just how talented we really are, how exciting it is that we have learned to do this sort of alchemy. From my Chiles en Nogada recipe, I made three really exciting plates – an easy breakfast spread, a show stopping weeknight pasta dish, and a simple, healthy rosti.

I sliced the poblanos into strips and heated them in the walnut sauce to make a sort of rajas con crema. I warmed the picadillo in the microwave, fried a couple eggs, sliced some radishes, dressed them with lime juice and salt, and garnished with green onion and salsa roja. Here’s a tip – make your food look pretty! It’s good for social media and more importantly, it’s great practice for you as a cook. 

Now, this pasta surprised me with just how delicious it turned out. I had broccoli to use up, so I just cut it into florets, charred it in a dry, cast-iron pan and cooked off some rigatoni. Another tip – I’m very frugal with most of my food purchases (store brand everything, non-organic produce), but I do spend the extra 75 cents to get Central Market brand organic pasta. A good quality pasta makes a huge difference. While the broccoli and pasta were cooking, I thinly sliced some garlic and heated it over low in about ¼ cup of olive oil along with salt, pepper, and red pepper flakes. My intention was to make garlic oil, but then in process I decided no, crispy garlic oil. I cut the heat just as the garlic was starting to brown around the edges. I drained the rigatoni about 2 minutes shy of al dente, reserving some pasta water. I added the rigatoni back to the pot, turned the heat to low, added a good amount of the walnut sauce, some pasta water, and a lot of grated romano cheese. I cooked it until the sauce was velvety and coating the pasta. I hit that broccoli with a squeeze of lemon juice, piled it on top of that creamy pasta and finished with the crispy garlic oil. Y’all, it’s one of the best pastas I’ve made in a long time. 

I have never actually made a rosti before, but I’m definitely going to be making these more often! I stabbed a whole sweet potato a few times with a fork and microwaved it for 2 minutes. While it was cooling off enough to touch, I made a simple salad with grated carrot, green onion, leftover pomegranate seeds, olive oil, red wine vinegar, salt, and pepper. I grated the sweet potato on the large holes of a box grater and mixed in romano cheese, dried oregano, salt and pepper. In a nonstick pan, I melted some butter, pressed the sweet potato in with a rubber spatula and let it crisp up over medium heat for about 8 minutes. I put a dinner plate over the top of the pan, confidently flipped it out, slid the rosti back into the pan over some melted butter and cooked for another 8 minutes or so. I served this rosti cut into wedges topped with the last of the walnut sauce and the pomegranate salad. So. Tasty. 

Whether you’ve got a lot or a little, I hope this inspires you to make something really stunning with your Christmas leftovers!