The creativity of dinner

This one’s for everyone, including me, who cooks dinner most nights. And if you’re like me, I’m sure you sometimes wonder why you do it, but most of the time it’s just so ingrained that doubt hardly enters. Your internal monologue, like mine, is largely pondering what’s in the fridge, what can you make with it, what you might have to buy, how to keep from wasting food. I have a curbside compost pick up so that’s a savior for me at times.

Since the cookie party, I’ve been using up party leftovers, with some experiments more successful then others.

I roasted cubed butternut squash and made parsley pesto and grated pepperjack and bought two packages of tortillas for quesadillas that I never served at the party. I had a bowl & a container of leftover squash cubes, and I made the bowl into enchiladas with a container of small pink beans I found in the freezer. I sauteed onions for the filling and put a big blob of the parsley pesto in, and rolled them up with grated cheese for us and without for John and Megan, and I took them with us when we went to spend Christmas Eve with them. No pics but here’s the enchiladas recipe. I made the container of squash cubes into squash hummus as one of our apps for NYE. It tasted good when I first made it but it turned into a solid lump by NYE. I softened it in the microwave, and ate a little of it, but Mark didn’t touch it and I composted some and ran the rest down the disposal.

And oh yeah, I have an idea to make the rest of the parsley pesto into a pasta dish with some gnocchi I have in the pantry and a sweet potato I bought. The pesto is from a Cafe Flora recipe for a roasted sweet potato sandwich, anyways, I just morphed it into quesadillas.

I made leftover tomato jam and goat cheese into a tart that we had for brunch, I think last Sunday.

Another successful one was cream of vegetable soup made with carrots and cauliflower and celery and potatoes. Using my end of the CSA soup recipe. And not party leftovers, precisely, but freezer clearing to make room for extra baking nuts, leek and corncob broth, that used up corncobs and leek tops that had been in the freezer since summer and making leek confit for the cookie party, respectively. As an aside, I did pretty well at checking my pantry before I bought cookie ingredients and only overbought on figs. Although there still is this big pot of soup in the fridge.

I made leftover peanut dip into a stirfry with leftover dip veggies. This was one of the less-successful, probably because I decided to dump in the last of a getting-out-of-date giant Costco jar of kimchi. It’s a little too goopy and a little too sour. I used the last of the peanut dip to make a Cafe Lula Tineka sandwich with the peanut dip, cucumbers, tomato, lettuce, onions, and sprouts. It was good, and reminded me of Diane’s Dad’s Summer Sandwich that also features peanut butter and cucumbers and tomato and onion with the ingredients layered in a specific order. But I had a half Tineka sandwich leftover, plus a half of the grilled ham and cheese and tomato that I made for Mark, that I stuck in the fridge, but because of the tomato, they got too soggy for us to eat and into compost they went.

 

The Sunday night after the party, I had leftover ham and biscuits, and I made some of the ham into ham salad. There were three hunks of focaccia left, and Mark didn’t get any of the focaccia at the party so he was happy to make ham and ham salad sandwiches on that. I think I made some fresh Ranch dressing – I buy Penzey’s Ranch base that I assume has less preservatives and crap in it then the packets – and we had veggies and dip and I’m not sure what all else, a few cookies I assume.

For NYE I figured I’d make ham salad sandwiches and thought maybe I’d buy thin sliced white and cut the bread into small rounds with a cookie cutter. But I remembered I had half a giant challah in the freezer since Rosh Hashanah, and decided to use that, and just use two giant slices and cut the sandwich into strips. Which I did and we ate most of them.

We also had deviled eggs and crackers and cheese and leek quichettes made from leftover leek confit. At the party, I put out the tomato jam and the leek confit next to a log of goat cheese, so it’d be red & green and it was one of the more popular dishes. I sliced up some of the tomato tart and heated that up with the quichettes, and they were some of the better things in our spread. I have half a dozen of the quichettes in the freezer, now, too, next to the cranberry Brie bites I saved.

 

The worst disaster of the NYE app spread was the hot crab dip. When I worked at Ovens of Brittany a zillion years ago, we used to make a crab dip that I liked so much I made it for my wedding, for the rock & roll party part at what was the Eagles Club and is now Willy Street Co-op East. We used fake crab, tilapia or other white fish flavored like crab, in the dip. 

Remembering that I decided to make a hot crab dip, using this Sally’s Baking Addiction recipe. I used refrigerated but canned crab because I didn’t find any fresh lump crab at any of the seafood counters where I checked. It was awful, too fishy even for Mark. Down the disposal. Shoulda used the fake stuff.

All the cookie plates I’ve made from leftovers have come out good, except the pics aren’t as good because the cookies have been eaten in the evening and photographed in terrible light.

For New Year’s Day, I made Hoppin’ John, cubed up the last of the ham, and a couple of strips of bacon, and cooked it all up with Rancho Gordo’s Blue Goose Field Peas, a cousin of black eyed peas, and rice.

We’re finishing New Year’s Day with cookie crumb trifle. I think it’ll be OK. I made a dacquoise (leftover egg whites) that turned out more meringue-y than cake-y so I expect it’s melting into the other ingredients in the trifle: custard, rhubarb applesauce, and the cookie crumbs. And perhaps a cookie plate will appear.

And of course, more leftovers being created all the time – half the Hoppin’ John is in the freezer now. I have enough ginger cookie crumbs to make a cheesecake, which I might do to take to a potluck next week. We’re going to have to have an all-leftovers-outta-the-fridge dinner tomorrow. Trash panda or fridge grazing or whatever.

I’m not sure that everything but that’s all I can remember right now, so I’m going to have George close things by wishing you a Happy 2026.