Recipe: Fridge delight
I started off with a couple of baby aubergines which I started to fry gently in a small amount of oil. Once they were starting to cook off, I added a handful of chopped bacon. We’ve been buying the ‘cooking bacon’ packs from the supermarket – if you look through them you can usually find a pack which has plenty of sliced bacon in it. Yeah, it might not all be the same shape, but it tastes just as good and is about a quarter of the price of a ‘proper’ pack. If you like your bacon smokey look for the stuff with a brown tinge to the rind. This stuff was great, really good quality and smokey in flavour.
After that little lot had browned off well, I added a sprinkling of chopped chorizo and some garlic to the mix. You already know this is going to be good, right?
The next stage was the torn up meet from a couple of cooked chicken legs. It was clearly meat week in our house this week and we had lots of odds and ends to finish up. No sense in throwing it away when it can be combined into something delicious!
For extra flavour I added cumin, paprika, cayenne pepper and some chilli flakes and let them meld into the gently frying mushy meat mix. By this point, the pan was in serious need of some deglazing, so I added a slosh of red wine and let that bubble away, taking up all the caramalised loveliness from the bottom of the pan.
A tin of chopped tomatoes was the one ingredient to bind them all and then I left it gently simmering away until we were ready to eat. To give it a bit of extra time so that the aubergines melted into the sauce I added a slosh of water. I always put a little water in the tomato can and swirl it around so that you can get every last bit of tomato flavour out. Gosh, aren’t I just full of top tips today!
I cooked us up some pasta and mixed it all together, but this mix also worked with wraps and could be served on rice, with a jacket potato or just with a simple salad. When I served it I realised that I had also chopped up the last couple of slightly sad looking spring onions as well but forgot to add them in towards the end, so I sprinkled them over the top instead.
So there’s rarely any need to throw out oddments from the fridge. What food waste busting combinations have you been rocking in your house recently?
Nom, some of the best meals are fridge ends and one of mine is similar with leftover salami, ham, a few curling up peppers, pasta and tomatoe passata then it all gets fried up like this and I pop it into a big dish and pour any oldish milk, eggs and grated cheese rather like a quiche mix, throw it on top and bake it. Great cold the next day as well.