making it up as I go along

This was an impromptu sort of dinner. I had gotten a couple things out of the freezer the day before - a smoked andouille sausage (left over from the cassoulet) and a container of pesto from a long-gone summer. There was a bunch of (very non-local) asparagus in the fridge that I had bought on spec and done nothing with, and half a box of macaroni sitting in the cupboard.

So, making it up as I went along, I put on pasta water to boil and put together a small pan of bechamel sauce. Once the sauce was thickened I stirred a heaping spoonful of pesto into it. I warmed up the andouille and sliced it thinly, and chopped the asparagus into inch-long pieces. When the macaroni was almost cooked, I dropped the asparagus into the water with the pasta to blanch it, then drained it all at once. I mixed the macaroni and asparagus with the pesto bechamel and the sliced sausage in a gratin pan, then grated fresh parmesan over it all and sprinkled breadcrumbs on top. I let it sit in a 450° oven for ten minutes or so until we got hungry and ate it.

Not the sort of dinner I make very often, but strangely comforting. And easy, too.

Pot roast enchiladas

This past weekend we helped out at my father’s twice-yearly gallery show. Our main contributions at these events tend to be opening bottles of wine and cooking dinner for anyone who happens to be around. For this one we had already decided to make a pan of enchiladas, since it feeds lots of people and is flexible for staggered servings (there are generally lots of people coming and going). The original intention was to buy some pork, roast or boil it and shred it for the filling, and cover it with a green mole sauce. However, when we arrived the night before the art show, my father had cooked up a large pot roast (with chanterelles and pasta), and we thought - we have shredded meat! And lots of it! So here’s what we did:

My mother hand shredded the leftover beef (a seven-bone roast simmered for four hours with carrots and onions) into a bowl. J cut up an assortment of mildly hot peppers that came from the local farmer’s market, and sauteed them with some small home-grown onions, then dumped it all into the meat and mixed it up a bit.

Indian soup redux

Remember that Indian meatball soup made from leftover curry broth a couple weeks back? We ate all the meatballs out of it (funny how that happens) and there was plenty of broth left, so I froze it. And remember the delectable pork and dal? I froze the leftovers of those, too. On Monday I grabbed all those containers and dumped them into a pot and heated them up together, then added a diced zucchini from our garden and called it dinner. Fantastic. I’d make it again if I could figure out how.

Indian meatball soup

Leftovers are a wonderful thing, especially when you can use them to create a totally new dish. It tends to lead to exceptionally flavored food that cannot be replicated and can’t be written as any useful sort of recipe, as in: take one container of cumin-seasoned pork broth from the freezer, mix in a container of  cauliflower simmered with ginger and turmeric from last Wednesday and last night’s chicken meat that was roasted with fresh bay. Find some canned beans to throw in there, too.