Leftovers are the bane of my existence, or at least share a space with the pitching staff of my beloved New York Yankees. Actually, the Yankee staff is probably a good analogy: Every once in a while I get a good start (every 5 games or so) but the rest of the time the spark just isn't there, and whether it's the starting dish or the backup players that blow it I just don't want anymore. Unfortunately, I am also incapable of cooking small amounts. Oh, I do okay on the weekend, but when it comes to entertaining I follow my family custom (dare I say compulsion?) to cook for at least twice as many people as I expect. Most of the time, this works out. Sometimes people are hungrier than I'd expected. Sometimes there are more people than I expected - this is always a good thing - or some other dish doesn't work. Either way, leftovers are rarely a problem. When they are, though, my heart sinks. I wind up feeling like I've failed in some way. If I couldn't convince people to take some with them, they must not have liked the food! Yes, I know this is irrational, especially when my guests have come from someplace far and can't really bring perishable food with them. It doesn't help make leftovers more palatable, either emotionally or gustatorially.
Easter is a big event in the life of most Greek families, or at least most of the Greek families I know. Big events require lots of food, of course, and I did in fact make a lot of food. Unfortunately, there were only four of us to eat it! To make matters worse, my husband left town on business the next day, leaving me to suffer through the leftovers alone. I decided that I was going to come up with a couple of new uses for the lamb, so that I would at least be able to get it out of my refrigerator.
This one was pretty easy. I had already bought the makings of a green salad. I put them in the bowl, added some of the leftover lamb and the leftover hard boiled eggs, and topped it off with some leftover dressing from when I made the Spicy Calamari Salad from Holy Basil. To accompany it, I cut up some of the lamb and added it to the leftover Vegetarian Harira that I had served the day before. The result was pretty good, if I do say so. The lamb in the salad, despite the strong Mediterranean flavors, worked well with the more South-East Asian flavors in the dressing. I guess that makes it technically Fusion Cuisine, but really it was just leftovers in front of the ball game. I'm not THAT pretentious!
The second was a little wackier. I used some snow peas and some bell peppers to make a stir fry with the remaining
leftover lamb and some of the rice and pomegranate stuffing for the tomatoes. This one didn't work quite as well. The lamb and everything tasted great, and the pomegranate didn't match that badly with the rest of the stir fry flavorings. The only problem was that I had used far, far too much of the rice. I'm not used to eating that much rice anymore, and at the end of the day I wound up having to discard an awful lot of what was in my bowl. Still, it actually tasted pretty good until I couldn't eat anymore!
Anyway, this was just to help get the ball rolling in terms of what to do with leftovers. I think everyone probably winds up with them at some point in their lives, and the thought of letting it all go to waste is just painful. Finding new uses for the leftovers can really help stretch a food budget too!