A hearty soup from leftovers
Why waste anything in your kitchen when you can use them in such delicious ways?
The American food writer, Calvin Trillin, must have grown up in a household very like mine. He once said: “The most remarkable thing about my mother is that for 30 years she served the family nothing but leftovers. The original meal has never been found."
Not one crumb ever went to waste in my mother’s kitchen either but, unlike Trillin, I think I know what the original meal was: roast chicken. Our regular Sunday lunch would become Monday’s dinner of chicken fricassee (leftover roast chicken cooked in a sauce with vegetables and served with rice), then a hearty soup (made with stock from the chicken carcass) saw us through Tuesday.
As a single parent with three children to support, my mother knew everything there was to know about making a little go a long way. The cupboard (and fridge) were often bare and yet we always ate well thanks to my mother’s ingenuity and inventiveness with leftovers. Conversely, in my kitchen, it seems that the more I stuff into my fridge and freezer, the more trouble I have getting dinner on the table. This tends to happen when I’ve been to the supermarket and shopped randomly, without a clear idea of meals in mind.
When we first came back to Scotland last summer, the novelty of the hundreds of “buy one get one free" offers was a temptation which usually simply meant buying more food than you could possibly use before it perished. This would inevitably result in a regular end of the week clear-out and much unforgivable waste.
I’ve been thinking a lot about food waste recently as I’ve been helping out at an Edinburgh charity called Cyrenians, an organization which puts food at the centre of its work with homeless and socially excluded people. One of the things the Cyrenians are doing is redistributing food that would otherwise be dumped, much of it from the big supermarket chains. In 2014-15, its FareShare project delivered 273,000 tonnes of surplus food—food that would otherwise have been junked.
Indian cooks have traditionally been good at making sure no food goes to waste. They traditionally had large households to cater for and many ingenious ways of using up leftovers. But even in India, as household demographics are changing, the culture of waste is creeping in. In Mumbai, I believe, there’s a scheme run by the city’s dabbawallahs to collect the mountains of food left over from weddings and take it to the city’s homeless and slum dwellers.
All this has made me determined to be a bit more like my mother (and Calvin Trillin’s) and the many thrifty Indian cooks I’ve met over the years—buy less and make it go further. Apart from saving money and helping to reduce the UK’s waste food mountain, relearning the art of cooking more cannily and creatively is surprisingly satisfying. It’s extraordinary how much joy can be had from finding a use for half an onion and some stale bread.
Now, if only I could think of something to make with the slightly floppy kohlrabi, celeriac, beetroots and Brussels sprouts still hanging around from Christmas.
Chicken Soup
Serves 6
Ingredients
For the chicken stock
1 roasted chicken carcass (remove all the meat from the bones first), plus any chicken skin and juices from the roasting tin
1 onion, peeled and cut in half
2 carrots, peeled and roughly chopped into four pieces
2 celery stalks, roughly chopped
2 bay leaves
6 peppercorns
Method
Put the chicken bones, skin and juices, onion, carrots, celery stalks, bay leaves and peppercorns in a large saucepan and cover with water. Bring to the boil, cover, then lower the heat and let the stock bubble away for about 2 hours—more won’t hurt. Put a colander over a large bowl and tip the stock in. Throw away the bones, etc. At this point, the stock can be cooled and frozen for later use or used straight away to make risotto, sauces and a range of soups, including this one.
Ingredients
For the soup
The key with my mother’s soup is to let the vegetables cook until they collapse and to take the macaroni way beyond “al dente". You just have to trust me on this—some things you don’t mess around with and Mum’s soup is one.
1.5 litres chicken stock
2 onions, peeled and chopped
2 medium potatoes, peeled and diced
A handful of macaroni
Leftover cooked chicken
Salt and pepper, to taste
Chopped parsley to serve
Method
Put the stock, onions, potatoes and macaroni into a large pan. Bring to a boil and simmer for about 15 minutes, or until everything is very soft. Add salt and pepper to taste and any pieces of leftover cooked chicken and cook for a few more minutes. Serve with chopped parsley.
Serve with soft buttered bread rolls.
The Way We Eat Now is a fortnightly column on new ways of cooking seasonal fruits, vegetables and grains. Pamela Timms tweets at @eatanddust and posts on Instagram as Eatanddust.
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