Feasting on Christmas dinner leftovers
We perfectly know that Christmas is a holy day in which people celebrate the birth of Christ, and we are used to making a lot of types of dishes in this date. On account of the amount of food made, we usually have leftover in the fridge in the following day. The questions are:
1: What do you usually do with the leftover food?
2: Do you take it and make other food or just throw it away?
Please, read the article and see what we can do in order to avoid wasting food.
It’s probably not the done thing to admit it, but while I was in the feverish business of planning the Christmas day menu this year, I was really thinking about what could be done with all the food that would not be eaten on the day. Yes, as inevitable as the fact that there will be several sprouts left on someone’s dinner plate after the meal, is the Word of Mouth discussion about Christmas dinner leftovers.
Did I really need the huge three bird roast – a goose stuffed with a pheasant stuffed with a chicken, all held in place with an apricot farce? Well no, probably not. Did I really need a six kilo ham, which was so large I had to borrow an aluminium baby’s bath from a neighbour to braise it in? Again, perhaps not. But why waste such brilliant eating opportunities when, frankly, it takes no more effort to over-cater? And when the outcomes can be so damn good?
Curiously, this is a phenomenon reserved solely for this time in the calendar. For most of the year, cooking with leftovers is rarely something to be celebrated out of greed. Oh sure, we laud it because it makes sense, but not because the food it produces is really really good. It is either priggish or sordid. It is gross indulgence’s pious cousin. We cook with leftovers because it is wrong to waste; because we must atone for our unnecessary largesse the day before. We fill our fridges with cling-film covered bowls – of stews and cold pasta, unneeded boiled rice and unwanted gnarly bits of roasted chicken – because this is what our mothers taught us to do. And some of it does get eaten, especially by those of us who work from home; we furtively spoon bowls of something cold but edible straight from the fridge. The rest of it lingers for three or four days, far to the back behind the milk in what, for leftovers, has become death’s waiting room, only then to hit the bin.
Ah, but Christmas is a game changer, both because of the volume of the leftovers and, more importantly, because of the quality of the prime ingredients. Don’t get me wrong. I loved slices of my baby pink ham (unsettling colour, given the bath) braised in coke a la Nigella, with its chewy honey Dijon glaze (sans cloves; who really wants a mouthful of those?) on the day itself. But, if I’m honest, the slices I had a couple of days later, fried in olive oil until the hardened fat had gone crisp and translucent and the meat was a burnished bronze, the whole plateful lubricated with a fried egg, was better still. I loved cubing it, sautéing it with a few mushrooms, braising in a little stock and then mixing with a white sauce, flavoured with some of the monolith of cheese we bought ‘just to see us through’, the whole lot to be baked in a pie.
I have fried off slices of the three bird roast, the goose skin crisping nicely, and have to confess it is better that way than when first prepared. I have, of course, made bubble and squeak, with the uneaten roasties and the Savoy cabbage with apples and bacon. And still there is more. In my future there is cheese on toast topped with slices of the ham, and more pies and, at the end, a pearl and barley soup in which even the bone will get a last hurrah. The three bird roast may yet find itself in a Thai green curry; why the hell not, eh? And if I mix all the leftover whipped cream with the leftover Christmas pudding and put it in the freezer won’t I have Christmas pudding ice cream? I doubt it, but hell, it’s worth a try.
Indeed, trying is now an imperative. For we are now a few days post-Christmas and the bitter truth is that time is against us. Just how much longer can those leftovers survive, before they start to take on a personality and culture (in the yoghurt sense of the word) all of their own? How much longer do we have before we open the fridge door, stare into its over-packed innards and worry about the health aspect? Not very long at all, is the answer. So we must crack on. Tell us then what you’ve been doing with your leftovers. Have you made the obligatory turkey curry? Have you a killer recipe for goose risotto? Is there anything served on Christmas day which cannot be eaten, five days later, having been fried off in butter? We need to know.
VOCABULARY:
feverish: excited
sprouts: a shoot of a plant
stuffed: fit to eat when cooked
braise: to cook by sautéeing in fat and then simmering slowlyin very little liquid
priggish: like a prig (a person who obeys the rules of correct behaviour)
gnarly: distasteful
furtive(ly): actions done secretly and often dishonestly
linger: to remain or stay on in a place longer than is usual or expected
chewy: describes food that need to be chewed a lot before it is swallowed
bubble and squeak: a food made by mixing together and heating cooked potato and cabbage
Sources: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2010/dec/29/food-and-drink-christmas
Talking about Grammar: Present Perfect tense
We use the Present perfect to say that a finished action or event is connected with the present in some way. If we say that something has happened, we are thinking about the past and the present at the same time. For instance:
“Have you made the obligatory turkey curry?”
We normally use it to talk about finished events with words that mean ‘at some/any time up to now’ (like ever, before, never, yet, recently, lately, already). For instance:
Have you ever made the obligatory turkey curry?
