Lusting for Leftovers
Lusting for Leftovers
3 ways to repurpose all that Christmas grub ...
Hello you gorgeous people, and welcome to this festive-fuelled edition of Taking the Hell out of Healthy. And by golly it’s a good one!
Go ahead and save this post for the interregnum of Christmas - that fuzzy space between Dec 25th and Jan 1. If your fridge is anything like ours, it will be heaving with half-eaten dishes and misunderstood purchases.
First up? A melt-in-the-mouth pastry pie using that surfeit of cheese, Christmas ham and/or roasted veg. I’m buying my frozen pastry block tomorrow so that I know I’m sorted for the holiday season.
Making my own pastry is a thundering pain in the arsicle, but allows me to use good quality fat like butter instead of highly processed oils with no nutritional value (fairly commonplace). But I’ve discovered Irish butter pastry in the frozen section of my local grocer. Finding it felt similar to an update being installed into my over-booked festive schedule. This is my kind of fast food!
I've since tarted around with all sorts of frozen ready-made pastry sheets, healthy or otherwise, and have concluded that they are all an excellent catalyst for using leftovers and fighting food waste, while simultaneously sneaking industrial amounts of veg n’vitamins into your family. You're looking for a sheet of pastry weighing around 300g so work with what you have, whether home-made or store-bought. Leftovers have never been so sexy!
Next up, my frittata recipe using whatever cheese you have loitering in your fridge. We buy a massive Cashel Blue wheel every Christmas, and cannot recommend it enough! The frittata honours my wholefood kitchen, using chickpea flour for extra nutritional whistle with its boastful stash of isoflavones (hello hormones!), magical magnesium and body-building protein. Magnesium is a mineral that can help relieve cramps by encouraging our blood vessels to take some R&R. Good news for headaches, PMT and marriages this season. No surprise then that magnesium is also skillful at seducing sleep. According to Dr Christopher Winter, author of The Sleep Solution, magnesium is partly responsible for maintaining healthy levels of GABA, a neurotransmitter charged with turning off “wakefulness." (On a side note, my latest Health Geek section has a jaw-droppingly good episode on sleep as The Number One ingredient for our immune system weaponry. I made this section public, so everyone can access it, but if you are enjoying my work and are in a position to support my research, let me send you telepathic highfives for pressing the button below. You don’t have to choose an annual subscription (although it works out cheapest, at €1 a week), there are monthly options too, or Christmas gift subscriptions for loved ones. Thank you for helping me to continue this veggie-fueled, nourishing, darkgreenleafy-mongering space!
And if your kitchen is filled with an alarming number of half opened bottles of wine at any stage this season, know that I have your back. Proper red wine prunes (like the ones served at Etto, that Nigella Lawson even pines for) are one of my favourite festive dishes. I’ve included the full recipe below, which has survived many years of visitors and pilgrims! Feel free to use Kinsale red mead instead, which is like a medieval Irish wine, or pop in some leftover port if you have it. Both the prunes and the leftover wine are drastically improved by bubbling, as is the traffic control in our very own waste disposal unit. It's as good as giving any backed-up vehicle a sat nav. Yup.
Wishing you a peacefilled holiday season, and joyfilled New Year. Here’s hoping 2024 will bring a rodeo of wild abundance to you all! May it be your happiest and healthiest year yet.
Namastasty,
Susan Jane
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// Zero Waste Pastry Pie//
Serves 4-5
1 x ready-made frozen shortcrust pastry sheet
3 handfuls of cooked veg (mash does not work)
2 handfuls leftover cheese from your big Christmas cheese board
Step 1
Defrost one frozen pastry sheet in the fridge for 6 hours, and not at room temperature. Even if the manufacturer's guideline says it's okay to do so, I find defrosting in the fridge gives a much better result.
Step 2
In a large bowl, tumble the cooked veg with your grated or crumbled cheese. Feel free to add snippets of Christmas ham too.
Step 3
Preheat your oven to 210C, and pop your largest roasting tray inside to heat up.
Step 4
Unfurl the chilled pastry sheet, and leave on its convenient baking paper. Lay your cheese and veg / ham mix across one half of your cold pastry. Fold the empty part of the pastry over, and pinch at the seams to close. I don’t bother with the traditional "egg wash" as I find pastry darkens too quickly and I end up taking the pastry pie out before it is fully cooked. But if you fancy a nice shiny shell, go ahead! (Vegans can use Jus Roll shortcrust pastry sheets, with aqua faba ‘egg’ wash).
Step 5
Hold the baking paper taut with both hands, and carefully transfer your pastry treasure to your preheated roasting tin. Pop the tray back into the oven and cook for 25 minutes until golden brown. Remove from the oven and carefully lift the parchment paper and pastry to cool on a wire rack before cutting into slices.
Tips:
I like to heat my roasting tray in the oven before popping the pastry pie on it. I feel it delivers a better result.
Work quickly with cold pastry, to prevent sogginess.
Check your local health food store’s frozen section for wholefood pastry sheets, or a snazzy grocers like Fallon & Byrne. They are such a super thing to have in the freezer over Christmas. SuperValu are stocking an Irish, hand-made, gluten free, all-butter, shortcrust pastry line this Christmas. It’s harder to roll out than the ubiquitous Jus Rol which also happens to be vegan friendly and very affordable. But it’s good to have choice!
// Cheese & Potato Frittata//
Serves 6