Happy Friday. One of my favorite things to do with leftover tomato based pasta or spaghetti is to make a baked pasta casserole out of it. Pretty simple, just take your leftovers and warm them up slightly. You can add stuff to it if you want, like mushrooms, onions, carrots, meats etc… but it works best if those items are already cooked. The reason is so you don’t have to bake it as long. You could bake it longer, but since the pasta is already cooked it can get a bit mushy.

Then you just dump the whole thing into an ovenproof casserole, layer some type of cheese on top (I used mozzarella here). Pop it in the oven at like 350 degrees. I like to cover it w/ aluminum foil, until you’re almost ready to take it out. That way the cheese browns nicely but doesn’t completely burn. You can also put it under the broiler to get the cheese nice and bubbly very quickly.

I’m not sure how long I baked this one. It can’t be longer than 20-25 minutes though. Yummy, cheesey goodness.

I’m going to cheat a bit this week. Instead of posting my own leftovers, here’s a picture of my wife’s baking exploits last month. Occasionally, we get in the mood for something like these homemade cupcakes and in these cases I have to look to her to provide the expertise since I’m really no baker. I know you are saying I’m lucky and it’s very true.

I believe that these were loosely based on a Cook’s Illustrated recipe. So do they qualify as Cheap Eats? Probably, even though you can buy easily buy fresh cupcakes in the prepared food sections of supermarkets for fairly cheap. Nothing beats homemade, though.

Apparently, it is mucho important to use “Cake Flour” instead of regular flour in order to get the correct texture which is pretty delicate. The icing was actually supposed to be Coffee Buttercream but there was no instant coffee so some leftover Chocolate Hazelnut hot cocoa mix from Ghirardelli’s was pressed into service. Delicious!

And yes, I did eat some as leftovers - for breakfast the next day.

Apologies, the past two weeks have been Crazy Furniture Moving and Room Renovation Time at my house, so I haven’t had much chance to devote to Cheap Eats. So, I’m just going to have to leave you with this one pic of my attempt to make a bowl of chicken stock based (as opposed to the beef bone stock variety) Pho the other day. Pho (pronounced “fuh”, but I often say “foe”) is a Vietnamese culinary staple of rice noodles and broth, and is one of our favorite things to get when we eat at Vietnamese restaurants.

I’d recently gone to the Chinese market and stocked up on a few odds and ends, including some of the fresh rice noodles used to make pho. We have the dried variety in the pantry, but I think the fresh one tastes a lot better. Broth in this case was chicken stock, ginger, star anise, cinnamon, rice wine, fish sauce, brown onion (I know: this isn’t an authentic recipe). Usually, I throw on cilantro, mint, basil, green onions, etc right at the last minute. Add some leftover cooked shrimp, vegetables and pork meatballs to the noodles and broth and you’ve got a nice lunch!

Hi. Welcome back from Thanksgiving, one of the biggest holidays at Cheap Eats. It’s so big, in fact, that I neglected to post any pictures or happenings about the crazy amounts of food that were plowed through last Thursday. That goes for the leftovers as well.

I attempted the turkey this year, Alton Brown style again. It came out all right, not as undercooked as last year’s. Unfortunately, in the rush to get it cooked on time, I didn’t get to document it correctly. Maybe it’s just as well, because we accidentally bought a pre-brined turkey! Oops, so much for the gallons of brine we had mixed up.

So, instead, here’s a picture of some leftovers from a few months back. It’s Pulled Pork and there was a lot of it. I guess if you’re going to talk about cheap meat, pork shoulder probably isn’t the cheapest thing around. But if you buy it in bulk, it can be decently priced.

We picked up an enormous 22 lb pork shoulder at CostCo for about $1.15 a pound (? can’t remember the exact amount). We could only fit 1/2 of it in our standard glass casserole dish, so we cut the rest into 1 inch wide spears of meat and froze it.

Anyhow, I’m no expert on the BBQ Circuit by any means but it’s a lot of fun to slow cook meat. For this one I used a combination of Cook’s Illustrated’s recipe for pulled pork. They advocate cooking 1/2 the time on the grill outside and finishing it up in the oven. That way you don’t have to leave the grill on for 7 hours (or 12 hours, or whatever time those guys do it for). I also tried using a foil packet of real hickory chips on the grill for this one.

Continue reading “Leftovers: Pulled Pork” …

Happy Halloween to all you Cheap Eaters. Here’s a quickie leftover post, before we head off to scare all the little ghoulies running amuck. This is some leftover fried fish I’d made the night before along with some standard Zatarain’s Jambalaya Rice. Yes, I know fried food is scary bad for your arteries… but it’s Halloween. Boo!

Anyhow, a great way to resuscitate breaded and fried things like chicken cutlets, shrimp, fish, and koroke (japanese croquettes) is to pop them in your toaster oven and set it to around 300-350 degrees. You have to keep an eye on it, but this kicks the pants off microwaving them. It brings back the crunch in the fried food pretty well.

The Zatarain’s… well, yeah it’s cheaper to make your own. I used standard kielbasa as the meat for mine. But for me, the rice makes at least 2 meals so the box can be worth it.

Oh, here is a slightly blurry closeup of the jambalaya. Because we like closeups…

I can’t remember if I’ve already had a Udon Noodle leftovers post. But in any case it’s worth revisiting again because it’s one of my favorite type of leftovers. The basic idea is to use up any sort of “meat-ish” leftovers from the day before, including but not limited to fried and roast chicken, fish cutlets, roast pork, hardboiled eggs, lunchmeat, sliced up steak, mixed veggies. You boil up some udon (or soba, ramen, chinese white noodles or even spaghettini) and make some sort of clear stock consisting mainly of water, sweet mirin wine, soy sauce and instant hon-dashi (fish broth powder - a subsitute for the more authentic way which involves dried kelp and katsuo fish flakes).

You plop the noodles in a bowl pour the sauce over it and arrange the cut-up leftovers on the top. In this case, I actually didn’t have the meaty leftovers, so I used turkey lunchmeat and fried up some mushrooms. I also usually make an egg pancake (an “empty” omlette) and chop that up and add some green onion. Sometimes I put some pickled red ginger on the top for color too.

Funny, there turned out to be so much topping that you can’t even see the udon noodles underneath! Another favorite thing to do is use leftover pork or chicken curry from the night before as the broth. You can thin out the curry with a bit of chicken stock or water. Add the cooked noodles and you’ve got curry udon.

This is another Leftovers picture from a few months ago. I think this is called various names (I won’t be calling it Ghetto Shrimp due to popular un-demand), but it basically involves shrimp in the shell and the magic of ketchup. Yep, Ketchup Shrimp. I know there are a bunch of different recipes out there involving shrimp in the shell and butter / chicken stock / tomato paste, and a lot of them are cajun recipes or from the South. But this one just relies on ketchup for the base.

I’ve spruced it up a bit with a mixture of garlic, ginger and green onions. It’s basically just shrimp in the shell that’s been cleaned, de-veined and soaked in a bit of salt, water and rice wine for 15 minutes. Rinse the shrimp before cooking. You fry up the aromatics, add the shrimp and cook till barely done, then add the ketchup, a bit of chicken stock and maybe some soy sauce or hot sauce. Tasty.

I’ve found this is surprisingly forgiving when warmed up in the microwave the next day. The key is not do overdo it. Oh, and of course, don’t microwave this at work/school or you may be getting a lot of dirty looks. Seafood and microwaves - they don’t play well together for a lot of people…