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Leftovers are the engine of invention
By Dave Simon
Watching the news on a regular basis may lead the viewer to the quick conclusion that there is not enough food to go around in the world. On the surface, images of starving children across the globe are beamed into our living rooms.
If you read more in-depth, the problem isn’t so much that the world can’t produce enough food. It’s that we can’t get it to the right place at the right time. Distribution channels are the bottleneck.
Recently, it became clear to me that one of the logjams is the post-party leftovers: All the dishes that are prepared when you have people come over that never get eaten. Once the guests leave, what are we to do with all the good stuff that one household can’t consume before perishables begin to rot, smell bad or go funky?
While I don’t know about you, when I’m faced with massive edibles, my gut instinct is to consume it because there is no way to ship it overseas to those starving children we read and heard about growing up, and still populate countries all over this planet in huge numbers. Guilt kicks in. The food should not be wasted.
When you are confronted with 90 hamburger and hot dog buns from the post-weekend bash, as my wife and I were last weekend, it’s a bit of a different story. You don’t even know where so start. Feed the birds? Grind them all up into one mash of gooey dough and cook it as a big loaf of bread? I don’t know.
The quandary of how to best dispose of the 12-or-so packages of processed flour became my mental activity for the week. First step was to take a shot at using the buns, since that made the most sense.
This forces you to go through every recipe in your cookbooks or dish that you’ve invented, so that a certain type of meat can be inserted into the buns. Having fired up hot dogs and hamburgers on the grill for the party, we did not want to enter that terrain again quickly, so we had to take creative steps in another direction.
Chili dogs, tuna melts and Sloppy Joe’s danced through my head. Those were the simple ones – take some dish or idea you’ve had in the past and wed it with the products on hand.
In this case, we had a batch of chili in the fridge and some leftover hot dogs, so that was easy. Pile that chili on the dog and crank the microwave.
Sloppy Joe’s, on the other hand, harked back to childhood. I thought of my mother taking hamburger meat and frying it up with barbecue sauce (probably straight ketchup back them), some onions, maybe even a little green pepper.
In college, one of the staples was tuna melts, which would be your backup dish anytime the main meal looked like shoe leather, which was most days. I figure those leftover hot dog buns could handle a round of tuna fish with cheese heated on top, no problem.
You can go back in your memory to figure out ways or use the buns, or be creative with the multitude of sauces, meat and veggies available on the market today to build something new (relatively speaking). We got rid of 8 buns, for example, Saturday night.
It wasn’t a big deal, but it did get some kudos. You can buy frozen Steakums for steak sandwiches.
Several weeks earlier, I’d gone for the real deal, purchasing fresh Italian buns, adding diced lettuce and tomatoes to the grilled mushrooms and onions already sautéed. For the rehash, I substituted the hamburger buns for the steak buns. There, rid of one plastic bag and 8 preservative-filled hamburger buns. Combined with the 3-4 chili hot dogs that depleted that set of leftover buns, we were down to having only about 77 or 78 sandwiches we need to invent.
I’ll keep working this. But somehow I believe I’ll fail before the preservative labels wear out. The bread inside will stay soft, probably for weeks, but at some point I’ll have to give up and use them for hockey pucks.
Till then, I’m thinking of new ways to dispose of the extras. Freeze them? Give them to a food pantry? Have another party?
Leftovers are the engine of invention.
If you read more in-depth, the problem isn’t so much that the world can’t produce enough food. It’s that we can’t get it to the right place at the right time. Distribution channels are the bottleneck.
Recently, it became clear to me that one of the logjams is the post-party leftovers: All the dishes that are prepared when you have people come over that never get eaten. Once the guests leave, what are we to do with all the good stuff that one household can’t consume before perishables begin to rot, smell bad or go funky?
While I don’t know about you, when I’m faced with massive edibles, my gut instinct is to consume it because there is no way to ship it overseas to those starving children we read and heard about growing up, and still populate countries all over this planet in huge numbers. Guilt kicks in. The food should not be wasted.
When you are confronted with 90 hamburger and hot dog buns from the post-weekend bash, as my wife and I were last weekend, it’s a bit of a different story. You don’t even know where so start. Feed the birds? Grind them all up into one mash of gooey dough and cook it as a big loaf of bread? I don’t know.
The quandary of how to best dispose of the 12-or-so packages of processed flour became my mental activity for the week. First step was to take a shot at using the buns, since that made the most sense.
This forces you to go through every recipe in your cookbooks or dish that you’ve invented, so that a certain type of meat can be inserted into the buns. Having fired up hot dogs and hamburgers on the grill for the party, we did not want to enter that terrain again quickly, so we had to take creative steps in another direction.
Chili dogs, tuna melts and Sloppy Joe’s danced through my head. Those were the simple ones – take some dish or idea you’ve had in the past and wed it with the products on hand.
In this case, we had a batch of chili in the fridge and some leftover hot dogs, so that was easy. Pile that chili on the dog and crank the microwave.
Sloppy Joe’s, on the other hand, harked back to childhood. I thought of my mother taking hamburger meat and frying it up with barbecue sauce (probably straight ketchup back them), some onions, maybe even a little green pepper.
In college, one of the staples was tuna melts, which would be your backup dish anytime the main meal looked like shoe leather, which was most days. I figure those leftover hot dog buns could handle a round of tuna fish with cheese heated on top, no problem.
You can go back in your memory to figure out ways or use the buns, or be creative with the multitude of sauces, meat and veggies available on the market today to build something new (relatively speaking). We got rid of 8 buns, for example, Saturday night.
It wasn’t a big deal, but it did get some kudos. You can buy frozen Steakums for steak sandwiches.
Several weeks earlier, I’d gone for the real deal, purchasing fresh Italian buns, adding diced lettuce and tomatoes to the grilled mushrooms and onions already sautéed. For the rehash, I substituted the hamburger buns for the steak buns. There, rid of one plastic bag and 8 preservative-filled hamburger buns. Combined with the 3-4 chili hot dogs that depleted that set of leftover buns, we were down to having only about 77 or 78 sandwiches we need to invent.
I’ll keep working this. But somehow I believe I’ll fail before the preservative labels wear out. The bread inside will stay soft, probably for weeks, but at some point I’ll have to give up and use them for hockey pucks.
Till then, I’m thinking of new ways to dispose of the extras. Freeze them? Give them to a food pantry? Have another party?
Leftovers are the engine of invention.
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