A: Loving food; hating waste

In the spirit of R’s and my “waste nothing!” campaign (sparked by our recent wholesale-market obsession), coupled with the inspiring Love Food Hate Waste website, I was entirely in my element when recently faced with an unsavoury amount of leftovers.

It all started with a really simple potato sidedish. One of my favourite ways to eat potatoes- lemon juice and zest, good olive oil, fresh herbs, salt and pepper. Mix in with warm potatoes and voila!

Thyme and parsley from the garden plus free lemons from a colleague makes this a cheap eat!

We had these with a rack of lamb and roasted eggplant, with quite a bit of eggplant leftover.

SO, what now? Leftover cooked potatoes are incrediby versatile. I considered potato fishcakes, goose-fat roast potatoes, a last minute stew addition even, but decided on a classic cottage pie instead. Boring, yes but oh-so-comforting on an unseasonably cold spring night.

Cottage pie

Ingredients:

1carrot, chopped

1 capsicum, chopped

1 onion, chopped

2 cloves garlic, chopped

500g minced beef

1 cup frozen peas

leftover eggplant

1 tin tomatoes

1/2 cup beef stock

Handful chopped parsley

Cold mashed potatoes, well seasoned (I like cheddar cheese in my topping with lots of herbs and butter)

Method:

Fry onions, capsicum, carrot and garlic till soft. Add beef and fry until beef browns. Add tomatoes and beef stock and simmer for 20 minutes uncovered. Add remaining vegetables and herbs and simmer for a further 10 minutes to heat through.

Transfer to a baking dish and top with mashed potato. Fork through the topping to create lots of little ridges that will crisp up in the oven.

Bake for 30 minutes at 200C.

We ended up with dinner for 2 plus 3 meals for the freezer!

With this one meal I managed to use up a bunch of vegetables that had been near-festering in my crisper for a while now.  Which leaves me currently feeling quietly pleased with my contribution (or lack of) to the food wastage crisis!

A: Mary had a lotta lamb

and so she made lasagne!

lambsagne anyone?

A 1.5kg leg of lamb is a rather ambitious per-person portion serve when cooking for 2. So, after packing away 2 lunches of roast lamb with rice and veggies and 600g of leftover meat, I decided it was time for (drum roll please) LAMBSAGNE!!!

Now, my friend Sarah who is as Italian as they come (oh the stories she will tell of sauce-making marathons and don’t even get me started on the virtues of homemade cacciatore sausages!) once made lasagne for me. And I’m not remotely interested in bettering hers, but she did have one addition that really did it for me- hardboiled eggs! Her mother adds chopped up egg to hers, as did her mother’s mother, and it made me feel like the last 28 years of my lasagne-eating life was an entire waste of time. (Not that I’m the melodramatic sort…) Now, where was I? Oh yes, LAMBSAGNE!!!

First, meat sauce:

Fry off 3 garlic cloves in olive oil.

Add 1 jar of passata, 1 400g tin of tomatoes, 1/2 cup of red wine, 2 bay leaves, 2 tsp oregano and simmer covered for 30 minutes.

Add 600-700g leftover roast meat and simmer for a further 30 minutes.

Mmmmm...... lamb......

Second, bechamel:

Melt 80g butter in a pan.

Add 1/3 cup flour and stir for 2 minutes.

Add 1 litre warm milk a little at a time and stir well.

Add 1 bay leaf, pinch of nutmeg and 1/2 tsp peppercorns and simmer until the sauce loses its raw flour taste. Season well.

Lay a piece of baking paper over the white sauce to prevent a skin from forming.

Other important bits:

6 hardboiled eggs, roughly chopped

200g parmasan, grated

Fresh mozzarella (2-3 balls)

Instant lasagne sheets (if you can be bothered to use fresh and do the whole pre-boiling thing, go for it!)

Now the fun bit, layering!

Start with pasta, followed by meat, white sauce, egg, lots of cheese. Repeat until you run out of sauce, making sure you finish with pasta followed by white sauce, more parmasan and shredded mozzerella.

Bake in a 200C oven for 45-60 minutes. The lambsagne should be golden and blistering with cheesy, bechemel-ly goodness at this point. Makes enough for 6-8, which meant more luscious leftovers for us, YAY! If you can wait, this tastes even better the day after! Effectively, $20 for a leg of lamb= (and I counted this one) roast dinner for 2 + roast lunch for 2 + lambsagne dinner for 2 + lamsagne lunch for 2 + emergency lambsagne in freezer for 2!

I’m certain I missed my calling as a farmer’s wife…