29 November 2010

Thanksgiving: The Leftovers

The leftovers have lasted us for three meals so far, with very little sign of running out in the near future. Last night we sliced and fried the roast potatoes and ate them with cold meat; for lunch today I made a leftovers soup; for mid-work-snack there are sandwiches and wraps - and still we have half a tupperware of meat, another one of sweet potato mash, and a couple of the biscuits left.

As I write this I am eating my second portion of leftovers soup - it gets better with age. This soup is actually brilliant, as my usual problem with soup is its thinness. Last week's sweet potato soup was delicious, and I had two servings of it for lunch at 1.30, but by 4.30 I was faint and dizzy with hunger. This soup is much chunkier and feels like you're actually eating something - I was full for hours.

I'm considering using the rest of the sweet potato to make a version of butternut squash macaroni cheese. I've seen about a hundred recipes for that over the last couple of weeks, but this is the only example I can pull up now. So that will make a fourth leftovers meal!

Oh: also, I can now report that persimmon chutney does taste great with poultry.

Thick, Tasty Leftovers Soup
Makes 4 small servings

Note: everything starred (*) was already cooked in my version.

1 onion
2 handfuls broccoli*
2 handfuls chard with garlic chips*
2 cups mashed sweet potato*
1 1/2 cups of Thai chicken soup (from a 'cup a soup' sachet like last time)
1 cup cream
1 glug red wine (I would have used white but the red was open)
1 teaspoon garlic sauce
1 handful of shredded chicken or duck*
Seasoning

If you are not using leftovers, you will have to do this following: boil the broccoli, sauté the chard with garlic chips, boil and roughly mash the sweet potato with some cream, butter and seasoning, and fry, bake or roast some kind of poultry before pulling it to pieces. It'll be worth it.

I chopped the onion and threw it into an oiled pot with the broccoli, chard and garlic to fry for a while. Added the sweet potato and stirred for a minute before adding the stock. Added some cream, wine and garlic sauce and allowed the sauce to simmer for about ten minutes, using the spoon to break up larger clumps of broccoli and sweet potato. Turned off the heat for a minute and then ladled about half of the soup into the blender, in batches, to purée before replacing back in the pan - you could do more or less depending on how chunky you like soup to be. Mine had no large lumps as I'd focused on getting all the broccoli and chard into the blender, so I still had small bites of, for example, garlic and onion. I reheated the soup and added a handful of small pieces of meat from the chicken and duck. Served with buttered bread but was just as brilliant without.