Recycling Fridays: what to do about that leftover tomato paste

We all do things in the kitchen as a matter of course that we never think to share with anyone because they’re so simple, until, of course, someone asks you a simple question.  Like, “What do I do with leftover tomato paste?”

Ah.  Good question.  Tomato paste is one of those things that, unless you’re like that hard-case friend of mine who used to go at it with a teaspoon, you only use a bit at a time of.  In between those times, if the time between the times is too long, it goes mouldy.

 The classic way to store a jar of leftover tomato paste is to cover the surface with oil, but this method isn’t foolproof, because every speck and skerrick must be covered with oil.  Any exposed paste goes mouldy, which means you have to scrape all the paste off the sides of the jar with a spatula and push it down before you add the oil.  And when you spoon out tomato paste, you have to do it all over again.  And what if you don’t want oil with your tomato paste?

Tomato paste in a tube is absolutely brilliant, and possibly the best thing to happen to tomato paste, but again, this massive 500g. jar cost me the same as three of those tubes. 

What to do?

Enter the freezer, which is the friend of every cook running through the kitchen shouting, “Can’t cook now!  Cook later!” on their way somewhere else.  Times like these, with goopy, liquidy leftovers like these that you use in small amounts, people will usually tell you to press your ice cube trays into service.  If you’ve got enough of them.  And aren’t using them for ice cubes.  And can actually be bothered unmoulding the tomatoey cubes afterwards.

I don’t, and I can’t, so I use baking trays and my trusty silicon baking paper (which I buy in industrial quantities).  Dollop tablespoonfuls onto the trays, freeze…

and when frozen…

transfer them to baggies.

They are dropped, still frozen, into simmering sauces, soups and stews, and if there’s nothing simmering, they will thaw out on their own in a few minutes, or 15 seconds in the mikey.

If you’re feeling fanceh, you can press a fresh basil or oregano leaf into each dollop before freezing.  Cool.  And simple.

Recycling Fridays: Schmaltz and Grieben OR Choose Your Guilt – How to Render Chicken Fat

My Birthday Lunch for One, featuring potato pancake cooked in chicken fat, garlic Portobello mushrooms,  and my daughter's pickled red onions.
Yumbo McGillicutty!

If you’re inclined to guilt, you can’t win with chicken skin and trimmed fat.  You’re either going to feel guilty about throwing it away, or guilty about eating it.  But if you’re both adult-minded and care about food, common sense will tell you that you can include it in a balanced diet without fear of heart attacks or exploding gall bladders, and also make absolutely delicious, lip-smacking dishes with a flavour that, let’s face it, vegetable oil can’t replicate.

Despite the first title of the blog, it’s not just the Jewish that prize chicken fat.  The cuisines that use chicken fat are many, particularly in cultures where every bit of the animal is used.  Chinese cooks, for example, skim the fat off chicken stock to use later on in stir-fries.  The French appear not to have cottoned on to chicken fat, but that’s because they’ve had geese and ducks to fall back on, so to speak.  Same principle.  But while many of us will rhapsodise over potatoes roasted in goose fat, we’ve forgotten that the humble chicken can provide us with similar results, and at a fraction of the price, without horrible additives.

Rendering your own chicken fat is dead easy and will give you two things to use:  the fat (schmaltz) and the cracklings (grieben).  The grieben, as the late Laurie Colwin said in one of my favourite books, Home Cooking, “must be terrible for you because they are so extremely delicious”.  Grieben are a true delicacy, and any that you don’t swipe straight out of the pan elevate sautéed green vegetables into the very stratosphere of yumminess.

And then there’s the fat.  Yes, it’s saturated.  But my adult mind assumes that you’re not going to eat this stuff every day.  Furthermore, Laurie Colwin’s trick is a beauty: 

“… if you clutch your breast at the thought of all that saturation, a combination of chicken fat and vegetable oil works perfectly.  You can also kid yourself that while the chicken fat is coating your arteries, the polyunsaturates in the vegetable oil are cleaning them out.”

It’s what I did for My Birthday Lunch, above.  Chicken fat for flavour and crunch, and vegetable oil to reduce the damage.

Chicken fat can be used like any fat:  to shorten a dough or pastry (which will make it rather fine), and of course, to sauté and fry.  Like all animal fats, it adds loads of flavour, and that’s a bonus, because it means that you don’t need to use much to get the benefits.

So here is how to render your own chicken fat and also get that great by-product, grieben.

You can render fat either from chicken skin or from other parts of the chook; the area around the bum usually has a substantial fat deposit.  Sigh... ain't that the truth!  I have here the skin from nine chicken breasts.  Now - it's not worth embarking on this process without a goodly amount of trimmings, but you may not have the opportunity to work with chickens in bulk, so I would suggest that you drop all your skins and trimmed fat into a ziploc baggie in the freezer, and just keep adding to it until you have enough.

Place the chopped or julienned chook bits and a finely chopped onion in a frying pan with just enough water to cover.  I'm using this small cast iron pan which I cannot throw away despite it long ago having lost its handle.  I've had it 25 years and it's just the thing for this kind of thing.  Put the lid on, and cook over medium heat for about ten minutes.  This will make the fat begin to render out gently, which will give you the greatest volume.

Remove the lid, and allow to simmer.  You'll be wanting this liquid to evaporate.  How long?  It takes as long as it takes.

Now is the time to listen.  As soon as you begin to hear sizzling, your first batch of fat is ready.  Strain solids in a fine mesh sieve over a bowl.  This fat is, according to cooks who know their schmaltz, the finest and most delicate, and good enough to eat on bread if you're bent that way.  You can  keep this fat separate from the subsequent batch, but I didn't.  I didn't think my palate or the palates of the people I cook for would be able to tell the difference.

   

Return the solids to the pan and increase the heat a bit.  Cook steadily, stirring often, until the solids are golden and crunchy.  Now is the time to practice self restraint, because you'll begin to have fantasies of salting them and taking them to the living room to munch on while you watch TV.

Once again, strain solids in a fine mesh sieve over a bowl.  Refrigerate both chicken fat and cracklings, tightly covered.  The cracklings will keep for a few days, and the fat will keep for 3-4 weeks in the 'fridge.  You can also, of course, freeze both.

Grieben are brilliant added to just about any vegetable you care to sauté or roast.  This broccoli was scarfed down, and I had to fight to have leftovers for my lunch the next day.

Chicken fat works like any fat, but my favourite use, hands down, is for frying potatoes.  They crunch up and have incomparable flavour.  I made this very immoderate potato pancake for my Birthday Lunch for One.  To make it, I used chicken fat and vegetable oil, half and half, and silently blessed Laurie Colwin as I ate.  She did, after all, say:

"It is silly to pretend that potato pancakes are dietetic or that they are good for you.  If you are going to enjoy them, approach them as a rare delicacy, throw caution to the wind and have a good time."

Recycling Fridays: Chiffonade

It’s probably the most guilt-inducing vegetable to find at the bottom of the crisper:  wangy lettuce.

Why guilt-inducing?  Because it’s wangy, and can’t be used for salad, that’s why, and if you believe that salad and other raw treatments is all lettuce is good for, you’ll feel guilt.  You’ll throw it away, its limp, lifeless form an accusation, because in your heart you know it should be good for something, dammit.  It was not its time to go.

No, it wasn’t.  Because yes, you can add it to just about any recipe that asks for a cooked leafy green, and you can still turn it into a dish you’ll be happy to eat, such as petits pois à la Française, or lettuce blanched in chicken stock and sesame oil and drizzled with oyster sauce.  Or chiffonade.

Chiffonade is a French soup, which probably means it hasn’t made an appearance in a cookbook for the last ten years, which is a pity.  It is delicious, and the perfect way to use up your wangy lettuce.  It also has a pretty, poetic name that describes how your lettuce looks after cutting.  Can you see the whirls, frills, and ribbons of chiffon?

I make chiffonade not just out of wangy lettuce, but the outer leaves of lettuce that some people find too robust for a salad, such as cos [romaine], and I’ve found that the darker the leaves, the better the soup.   And because we always have lettuce in the house, I can make it when the cupboard is otherwise bare, in under 30 minutes, to everyone's delight.  Other greens, such as silverbeet [chard] are also delicious in chiffonade, but if you use cabbage you won’t have chiffonade.  You’ll just have cabbage soup.

CHIFFONADE

Ingredients:

2 tbsp. butter

1 onion, finely chopped

lettuce

chicken stock

rice

salt and pepper to taste

What you do:

1.  Melt butter over medium-low heat and add onion.  Sweat, stirring often, until translucent.

2.  While onion is sweating, cut the lettuce into chiffonade.  To cut into chiffonade, stack a few lettuce leaves together and roll tightly.  Cut into very fine shreds.  Don’t hurry.  The onion is sweating and you have heaps of time.  (If you have a tight-headed lettuce, such as iceberg, there’s no need to roll leaves.  Just halve or quarter lettuce, place cut side down on board, and shred finely.)

3.  Add lettuce to onion, and stir until it wilts.  Add enough chicken stock to cover lettuce twice, and bring to the boil.  Boil as long as you like, but 10-15 min is enough.  Add a couple of handfuls of rice, and boil for another 15 minutes.  Taste for salt and pepper, and serve.

I dropped a few cubes of muzza - mozzarella - into the bowl because it was my lunch, and after I took the picture I dropped a few more in.

C’est bon!

Recycling Fridays: Omurice

I started Recycling Fridays more for me than anyone else, because while in a commercial kitchen I have used every scrap of food that may otherwise have been thrown away, from leftover eggwash (make into an omelette and put into a sushi roll) to stale bread (bread pudding), I tend to have my moments of terrible wastefulness at home.  It’s a combination of busy-ness and fluctuating numbers of people in the house.  (Matter of fact, after my two older children moved out and I was just cooking for two for the first time in twenty years, I overcatered for the first six months or so.  Even though I know how to correctly estimate how much people will eat, the psychology of cooking for your own family is something else again and my hands would insist on throwing in more handfuls.)


But another combination of two things has given me a new resolution halfway through the year.  The first was the discovery of the Love Food Hate Waste site, which, along with its handy advice, has some scary stats that will make you think, such as the fact that 8.3 million tons of food are thrown away every year in the UK alone.  The second is a project I am planning for my students.  The project begins with the photo essay, What the World Eats, continues with an activity on eating like most of the world eats (try spending 90 cents on each meal), and finishes on Oxfam’s can-do advice with its 4-a-Week campaign.  It’s stuff anyone can do:  buy one more Fair Trade product a week, buy one food product from a developing country a week, go veggie once a week, and throw one less thing away.  Easy.


So we’re back to Fridays and recycling what’s left in the ‘fridge.  And again, it’s rice.  Well - not exactly.  It’s something rather more exotic:  a beautifully spiced poha, with potatoes and chickpeas (more on this next post).  I didn’t want to mess around with it too much because it’s delicious as is, so I decided to serve it up as omurice for brunch for me and my son.


Omurice is an Anglicised compound Japanese noun for a dish of eggs and rice.  To paraphrase the monorail episode of the Simpsons, “Omu means omelette, and rice means rice!”  At its most basic, you fry up some cooked rice and season it with ketchup.  Yes, ketchup.  Then you make a very gooey omelette, roll it, sit it on top, split it to allow the runny egg to flow over the rice, and top with a little more ketchup.  Yes, more ketchup.  And it is absolutely delicious, whether you have leftover plain rice, or something more tarted up.  More elaborate versions of omurice feature a drier omelette wrapped around a rice filling that can include chicken and other yummy things, but I really love how the rice combines with the runny egg, and the ritual of splitting the omelette open.  It’s marvellous. 


Now... I’m not going to give you detailed instructions nor provide a recipe, just because it’s so much fun watching people - samurai cooks who can handle a frying pan like a sword - make omurice on film.  In fact, the first time I ever saw omurice being made was the omurice scene from Tampopo, a Japanese film that is pretty much just a series of vignettes on food and sex.  Omurice is a popular dish in restaurants as well as at home, so you’ll often have chefs cooking omurice at restaurant windows to show off their skill and entice people in.  At home, your doggy sous-chef can help make a wrapped omurice that is wrapped around something that is suspiciously like arroz con pollo.

Here is the poha.  See the mustard seeds?  Yumbo McGillicutty!  When you fry your rice, don't crowd the pan, and keep the heat high, otherwise your rice will go mushy.  Besides - this is supposed to be a fast dish.  You want to spend five minutes on the entire thing, tops.

Add a little tomato ketchup, just to season.  Toss over high heat to coat.   Pile onto a warmed plate in a kind of oblong mound.  Your omu will only take a minute or two to cook, so the rice will stay plenty hot.

Sit your omu - hopefully yours won't look as mutant as mine - on top of the rice.  This is a three-egg omelette.

Split the omu with a sharp knife and open it up so that the egg flows over the rice.  Top with the sauce of your choice, although ketchup is traditional.  And I don't know how or why ketchup is traditional, but it is.

Oishi!

Recycling Fridays: Arancini

You see them in menus all over the place these days: arancini ("little oranges").  Made meatier and a little spicier and hailing from Sicily rather than Rome, they are known as supplì al telefono, or "telephone wires", so called because of the strands of cheese that form when you pull them apart.  But they are basically the same thing:  fried risotto balls with melty cheese in the middle.


They are very, very good, but barring some kind of desperate hormonal craving for arancini, it bugs me to see recipes for arancini specifying the risotto made from scratch.  Why not just say, "Got any leftover risotto?  Well, this is what you do!"  I mean, you're going to have to cool the risotto down anyway, meaning that not only do you have a two-stage cooking process (and the first one, if the risotto is properly made, is fairly laborious in terms of stirring-until-you-scream) ahead of you, but also the cooling process (at least an hour) in the middle, and ufa!  Enough already!  I'll buy one from the café next door to work on Monday!


But if you have any leftover risotto, then guess what?  This is what you do.  And you can even plan it ahead this way (Google "planned-over": the planned alternative to leftovers), because when you're not cooking industrial quantities, cooking a little extra is exactly as much hassle as cooking the amount you were going to cook in the first place.  Risotto is best when freshly made, and, as I remind the family when I call them to table, waits for no man, so no matter how nice the leftovers are for lunch the next day, they cannot approximate the perfection of the creamy plateful you had the night before.  Arancini, however, are beasties unto themselves and will transform whatever risotto you had in the 'fridge into something Very Special Indeed.


Our arancini today were as good as the risotto they were made from, and seeing as it was Bettsy Boy's risotto, it was pretty good, full of his standards:  bacon, chicken, and whatever vegies were in the crisper on Monday.




You will need:

• Leftover risotto of any persuasion
• Mozzarella cheese, or some other delicious melty cheese
• Egg
• Breadcrumbs (no, the egg and breadcrumbs are not a crumbing set, so relax)
• Vegetable oil, for frying

What you do:


Leftover risotto will be crumbly; you need to make it into a cohesive mass.  This is what the egg is for.  How much egg?  My daughter could tell you, through gritted teeth:  enough.  Break down the risotto in a bowl, and add beaten egg while mixing with your hands, until it's a consistency that will hold together when pressed.


Take a portion of risotto in your hand and press it into a flattish patty.  Place a cube of cheese on the patty, and fold your hand over to enclose it.  Pat with your hands to form a ball.  (Needless to say, you can make these whichever size you like.  Bite size, snack size... MAN SIZE!  Just make sure the size of your cheese cubes corresponds.) 


Roll balls in breadcrumbs.

Heat enough oil in a frying pan to deep-fry.  If you have a thermometer, you're after 180oC, and if you don't, you want a cube of bread dropped in the oil to be golden in 10-20 seconds.  Add arancini, but do not crowd the pan (this would make the temperature drop, making them absorb oil).  Cook for a few minutes each side, until golden.

Drain on paper towels, and allow to sit for a couple of minutes before serving.  This will allow the temperature to equalise and let the cheese melt further, prevent mouth blisters (I know whereof I speak), and yes, they'll still be satisfyingly crunchy on the outside.


Enjoy with a sauce, or on their own with salad.  Or just enjoy.  You know.