LEFTOVER GOURMET - Richard Till

The affable and ever-smiling Richard Till, whom we see every night in those Countdown ads on TV, is back with another cookbook and I pick this one will be a winner with families as it deals in a creative and useful manner with the way to use up the ubiquitous leftovers.

I am sure many of us are guilty of buying, and cooking, more food than we actually eat. It can end up costing plenty but in this book Richard Till has created ways to be imaginative with the food we already have in our fridge and pantry.

Here is his Introduction:

Everyone is faced with leftovers, and we all want to make good use of them in order to achieve economies in the management of our households. This book aims to give the home cook an array of recipes that will transform a wide range of leftovers into an even wider range of entirely new dishes.

While, of necessity, the recipes are written for a specific amount of a particular leftover ingredient, they’re also written as a base recipe that can be scaled to suit different amounts of leftovers, and, where appropriate, there are suggestions for different variations from the base recipe. This way, there might be one particular version that appeals to you and your family more than another, or it might illustrate the way in which the base recipe can be added to or altered so that you take control of the recipe and come up with your own entirely new rendition.

My greatest wish is that the book be useful — that it helps you use up things you’d otherwise have thrown away, and gives you a few new styles of dishes to broaden your repertoire. The book is grouped into recipes based on particular leftovers, and, in the few instances where a dish uses more than one leftover ingredient, I picked one to list it under.

If you find yourself with any leftovers from the dishes made with leftovers, well, I’d recommend getting yourself a hen house and a few chickens. That way, you can turn the final leftovers into eggs to use in some new recipes in this book — dishes made with entirely new ingredients, right at the start of the chain.

Happy cooking.

In Leftover Gourmet Richard Till shares his family recipes for turning almost any kind of leftover into a new and delicious meal. The book is grouped into recipes based on particular foods that need using up including bread, pasta, rice, potatoes, vegetables, meat and eggs. Here for example is what he says about potatoes:

Leftover potatoes are one of the most useful ingredients you can have in the kitchen. I often try to cook too many potatoes for the meal ahead, just so I can have a plate of cold potatoes in the fridge ready to make some of the following recipes. But having teenage boys in the house means there never seems to be any left. No matter how many I cook, they all get eaten. On the odd occasion though, I do manage to cook enough to have leftovers.

He then provides 12 recipes using the leftover potatoes.

And here is one of his eight recipes for leftover rice:

Kedgeree

 7 tbsp butter

1 chilli, de-seeded and finely chopped

small knob ginger, grated

1 clove garlic, chopped

1 onion, finely chopped

2 spring onions, chopped

½ tbsp mustard seeds

1 heaped tbsp mild curry powder

3 cups leftover plain cooked rice

300 g hot-smoked fish, skin and bones removed and broken into bite-sized pieces

2 hard-boiled eggs, peeled and quartered

2 tbsp parsley, chopped

4 tbsp water

salt and pepper

Method

1. Heat the butter in a large frying pan. Add the chilli, ginger, garlic, onion, spring onion and mustard seeds. Cook over a medium heat for about 3 minutes.

2. Add the curry powder and rice and continue cooking, stirring constantly, scraping the rice off the bottom of the pan as it cooks. Cook this way for about 5 minutes, or until the rice is hot and all the flavours are distributed evenly through it.

3. Add the fish and continue cooking, still stirring, but more carefully so as to keep the fish in lumps. Cook for about 1–2 minutes until the fish is heated.

4. Add the eggs, parsley and water. Gently turn over to combine, and season with salt and pepper.

5. Take from heat, let stand for 5 minutes then serve.

Serves 4

A most useful addition to any home cookbook library. I know my copy will get plenty of use because I do tend to over cater! Thank you Richard.

Leftover Gourmet - Richard Till - Harper Collins - $39.99 - Publication date - tomorrow Friday 4 November, 2011