The Thrifty Cookbook: 476 Ways to Eat Well With Leftovers (34 page)

Bobotie comes from South Africa. With its eggy, milky heart, it’s a mildly curried relative of moussaka, but without the aubergines. I love to serve it with a mixture of finely chopped tomato and onion as a relish, and yellow turmeric rice dotted with a handful of raisins.

Serves 4

1 large slice of bread

250ml milk

25g butter

1 dessert apple, peeled, cored and chopped

1 large onion, finely chopped

2 garlic cloves, chopped

½ teaspoon curry powder

4 teacups (about 400g) leftover cooked lamb, minced or finely chopped

3 tablespoons mango chutney (or any other chutney
)

1 tablespoon chopped or flaked almonds

1 tablespoon raisins

a good grating of nutmeg

2 bay leaves

1 tablespoon lemon juice

3 eggs

salt and pepper

Preheat the oven to 180°C/Gas Mark 4. Soak the bread in the milk. Squeeze it out and reserve both, separately. Melt the butter in a frying pan, add the apple, onion and garlic and cook gently until soft. Stir in the curry powder and cook for 1 minute.

Put the meat in a bowl with the squeezed-out bread, chutney, almonds, raisins, nutmeg, bay leaves and lemon juice, then add the curried onion mixture. Mix the whole lot together and season with salt and pepper. Put the mixture into a buttered ovenproof dish and press down. Then mix the eggs with the milk from the soaked bread and pour them over the meat. Bake for about 30 minutes, until the topping is set and lightly golden.

Pies have long been part of the rhythm of using up cooked meat and heaps of ripening fruit, but nowadays we tend to think of them as difficult to make. It’s just not true, especially if you use bought pastry. This is leftovers, after all, the kind of cooking that is meant to be as relaxed and effortless as possible. Keep a packet of good frozen pastry in the freezer – one of the kinds that use real butter rather than transfats and hydrogenated oils – and you just have to remember to defrost it a few hours before you actually need it. The rest is a satisfying doddle: decide on the shape you want, make a filling with a little juicy sauce and close it all up. Once a pie is brushed with egg yolk and baked, it
always
looks beautiful, resonating with domestic competence.

Somewhere between pastry and bread, pizza dough is simple stuff to make too. There’s no reason to be frightened of yeast, which comes in packets and just gets on with the job once activated with liquid and warmth. If you have one, use a bread-making machine, or you could buy pizza bases (but they tend to be chemical-rich) or use a baguette as your base. Whichever you go for, pizzas are the ultimate convenience food, and very hands-on. Let everyone choose what they want on theirs from an array of leftovers or vegetables that have to be used up fast.

If you decide to make your own shortcrust pastry, which you can also freeze for later, this recipe can be used for virtually all the sweet and savoury pies and tarts that follow. It has a light, crumbly texture and is not complicated to make.

Bear in mind that pastry is one of those things that require precision and light-handedness, so don’t be inventive with the quantities, and don’t over handle it. Work briskly and try to keep everything as cool as possible, using only the tips of your fingers (the coldest part of your hands). If your hands are hot, run them under the cold tap and then dry them before making the pastry. If the oven is on, work as far away from it as you can.

There’s no great magic to rolling pastry, save for the caveat that you should handle it as little as possible. Work fairly swiftly, with an even, gentle pressure on the rolling pin, having dusted both the clean work surface and your rolling pin with a bit of plain flour to prevent the pastry sticking to them – and you will need to re-dust them as you go. You don’t need to turn the pastry over as you roll it; a quarter turn between each rolling will keep it in a roughly even shape.

You’ll find the basic shortcrust pastry recipe overleaf, with ideas for all the things that you can make with it (and blind baking instructions) on
pages 112
-
13
.

If you have lard, you can substitute it for half the butter when making savoury pies, but always use butter for sweet ones. And don’t throw out your pastry trimmings – re-shape them into a ball and roll out to make jam tarts, mince pies or cheese straws (see
pages 112
-
13
).

220g plain flour

a pinch of salt

110g unsalted butter, at room temperature but not too soft

about 2½-3 tablespoons chilled water

Sift the flour into a bowl with the salt.