Something from Nothing: Using Scraps and Leftovers
© Leda Meredith
A heel of bread, a rind of cheese, the water you cooked your potatoes in last night...These scraps and leftovers may sound more like trash than treasure, but they are ingredients in some of my favorite recipes.
Most of the ideas for recipes that follow come from times and places where people came home hungry from working in the fields and used whatever they had available to create filling meals. These "peasant foods" are still inexpensive and simple to make. They are also delicious in ways we are in danger of forgetting in this age when shelf-life dictates what we can find in the supermarket.
A brief story before I get on with the recipe suggestions: As a child I remember visiting relatives in a small village in Greece. The bread was served in thick chunks rather than sandwich slices, the soup simmered in a pot hung in the wood oven all day, and for breakfast there was goat milk sweetened with sugar.
When I went back as an adult, my relatives made a special shopping trip to another town to get me white, pre-sliced bread and canned milk, which they were sure I would prefer to their homespun versions. Soup was served out of a can and heated on the electric stove. They looked embarrassed when I asked if I could have some of the homemade foods I remembered. And because they had spent more money and time than they could afford getting the store bought products, it would have been rude to refuse them.
Ever since I was a kid I've been fascinated by self-sufficiency. Books like My Side of the Mountain inspired dreams of running away to the woods and living off the land. I started collecting reference books on edible wild plants, food preservation, homemade herbal medicines. I'm more practical than purist about this: the food processor gets used whenever it will save me time, etc. But I do tend to turn up my nose at recipes that require specialized, hard to find ingredients and rely instead on ones that use what I have on hand (ideally straight out of the community garden). I save money and my cooking is yummier. Which brings me back to those scraps and leftovers.
Leftover Bread thickens soups, becomes croutons and bread crumbs, or at the very least gets saved for bird food. My mom and I used to collect scraps of bread in paper bags and take them to feed the ducks in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park.
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