Well, That Was Delicious

I’m in an Eating Down the Fridge moment, and also have been taking semi-regular deliveries from my friend’s expired/about-to-expire food distribution, which has resulted in a flurry of new-to-me food combinations.

Most of the food distribution goes straight to the freezer without my thinking much about it (the about-to-go-bad nature of it means you can’t dilly-dally with that stuff or you will lose it) which eventually results in freezer randomness overload — my freezer ends up chock full of things that I may or may not have ever chosen to buy but that I have nonetheless ended up with and that now needs to be dealt with. So I’m trying to work through all of that, aiming for a fresh start for spring.

Here are a few of the winners:

Waffle & Ham Sandwich
Ham slice from the freezer (friend’s distribution, VERY SALTY) heated on stovetop and sandwiched between pieces of hot-off-the-press sweet-potato waffles (Everyday Waffle recipe with half of a leftover baked sweet potato mixed in.) [The sweet potato ended up in the freezer after I didn’t finish it at dinner one night then didn’t do anything with it after a few days in the fridge; my plan was to use it a batch of muffins or something. Waffles seemed like as good of an “or something” as I was likely to get.]

I dialed back the salt in the waffles, because the ham was so salty it was hard for me to eat, and putting too-salty ham between otherwise not-salty-enough waffles turned out to be just the ticket.

I used my hack version of pancake syrup (a 2:1 sugar syrup plus a little bit of molasses and a little bit of honey) as a dipping sauce.

SO GOOD. Omg. Sweet, salty, bready, porky.

That one had it all.

Ham and Spinach Casserole
Cubed ham from freezer (friend’s distribution, different ham, not as salty), frozen spinach, elbow macaroni. Held together with white sauce made with chicken fat (skimmed from broth after stewing a hen), sprinkled with grated cheese and topped with buttered bread crumbs (from freezer, rescued from a bag of Martin’s potato rolls that were on the verge of being lost to mold).

This was a combination Tightwad Gazette universal casserole plus techniques gleaned from James Villa’s My Mother’s Southern Kitchen, which has some classic old-school Southern church potluck dishes.

[If you’re interested in the how-to, here it is: I sauteed onion in chicken fat, then added flour (equal parts flour and fat — two tablespoons of each) to make a roux, then added one cup of liquid which was mostly chicken broth (from the freezer — every few months I poach a chicken that I freeze in three-ounce packets, and I also freeze the stock …. this is something that is basically always in my freezer) plus a tablespoon of heavy cream (which I had bought for … something … around this time I made I made a birthday cake for some friends, which involved ganache, and it might have been left from that) topped off with whole milk. Plus some spices, to taste — maybe salt (though not too much … needed to adjust for the ham), pepper, half-sharp paprika, dry mustard. Maybe some Penzey’s jerk seasoning, which I started adding to pretty much everything last year after I put it in a grits bowl and fell in love with it.

Add the liquid to the roux and stir and cook until it is thick and bubbly, then pour into a casserole dish with cooked pasta, cubed ham, frozen spinach. Stir everything together to mix it all up then add shredded cheese — whatever kind you like, as much or as little as you like. I used sharp cheddar, and I was making a small version with about two servings (six ounces) of cubed ham and two ounces of pasta, so I added about an ounce of shredded cheese. Then topped with buttered bread crumbs. Cooked in a 350 degree oven until the bread crumbs were brown and toasty.]

This was really super delicious. Possibly because of the cream. I don’t usually have that around so I think this recipe had some extra deliciousness from that.

Frothy Chocolate Drink
Silk brand unsweetened coconut almond milk (friend’s distribution, three days until expiration date) + evaporated milk (friend’s distribution, dented can but indefinite lifespan) + cocoa powder sugar mixture (recovered from the back of the pantry when I cleaned the top shelf off a few weeks ago). Frothed using hand immersion blender which I got from my mom after she cleaned out her kitchen and decided she was never going to use it, and then it sat in a pile in my living room for … a while … before I cleaned things up a few months ago and now I use it all the  time, it is my new favorite kitchen appliance.

I made this because I thought it would be good mixed with coffee, but it was so good I drank a glass of it by itself, and then made a second batch to mix with the coffee. Both were delicious. Maybe even BETTER THAN STARBUCKS, as my nieces might say.

Coconut Almond Smoothie
Silk brand unsweetened coconut almond milk (friend’s distribution), frozen banana (friend’s distribution), honey, dark cocoa powder, whirled in blender. Like a chocolate coconut milkshake. Good!

Chewy Ginger Snap Cookies
I made Marion Cunningham’s basic gingersnap cookies substituting fat skimmed off a batch of slow-cooker pork barbecue that I made in December, and they are very tasty but not at all snappy, so I dubbed them Chewy Ginger Snaps, since that seemed like the best way to describe them even though that name technically makes no sense. (Which is it now missy chewy or snappy? Huh???)

I made these the day after the Capitol Insurrection, possibly in a bout subconscious stress baking. Many were eaten the night they were baked, because they were extremely good hot and fresh, and the rest went into the freezer. I’m now working on finishing them off, because it’s time for some new cookies.

Pork Barbecue Pilaf
In addition to the leftover fat from the slow-cooker pork, I also ended up with cooked onions saturated with spicy porky fat. In the past I have pulled these out and saved them, because they seemed too good to waste, but I had never figured out what to do with them.

This time, armed with my new immersion blender, I bzzzzz blendered them up and combined them with a small amount of leftover barbecue [a.k.a. pork … in North Carolina “barbecue” means pulled pork, something I learned the first week I arrived in the state and was told that the lunch menu for the day was barbecue and I asked “barbecued what?” — that was the first and last time I ever asked that question] and sauce that remained after I had eaten most of a batch I had frozen. (I freeze this in approximately one-cup/six ounce batches, then thaw and eat as a sandwich or in a grits bowl or whatever.)

I then used this as the base of a pilaf.

I dumped everything (onions plus pork bits plus sauce) in a large skillet and heated it up, then added a cup of uncooked rice, stirred to coat the rice in the fat, then added two cups of chicken stock, brought to a boil then added half a cup or so of frozen peas, returned to a boil then simmered, covered, until all of the liquid was absorbed. (This is the basic Tightwad Gazette universal pilaf recipe but with less protein and using barbecue pork sauce and blendered porky barbecue onions as the fat and aromatic base.)

This was really tasty, and was a great way to get three or four meals from some rice and peas plus a bunch of stuff that otherwise would have gone to waste. I will definitely be using the onions in a pilaf again the next time I make slow-cooker pork.

Use it up, use it up! That is my mission at the moment.

On a semi-related note, I went into a bit of a rabbithole recently on the Hilaria Baldwin “different kind of Bostonian” thing, which led me to a Today Show interview with Amy Schumer, who I love [my favorite line from the Hilaria Baldwin weirdness is this quote from Amy Schumer: “Look, she’s a mom. She has a million and a half kids, and that’s really hard,” Schumer added. “So I just, I don’t want them to be going through a bad time. But also, you can’t just pretend you’re from Spain.”] and they showed a short clip of her Super Bowl ad for Hellman’s mayonnaise, which I then had to look up and watch, and I just need to say that I love that Hellman’s and Amy Schumer are teaming up to give people tips on how to reduce food waste! Go Hellman’s! Go Amy Schumer! Mayonnaise is the answer.

Anyway that’s it from here.

Waste not, want not.