The Thrifty Cookbook: 476 Ways to Eat Well With Leftovers (51 page)

If you are using leftover sliced chicken, pork, beef or lamb, you have to invert the cooking process, adding it at the end and giving it just enough time to heat really thoroughly – a minute or so – or it will become dry and tough. As with vegetable stir-fries, use simple garlic, chilli and ginger flavour combinations or experiment with bottled Chinese sauces.

This recipe describes the basic process for a leftover meat stir-fry but you can refine and alter it endlessly, depending on your own taste. In general, try to choose the rarest pieces of meat and slice them into strips around 3 x 1cm.

Serves 2

1 tablespoon sesame or vegetable oil

1 garlic clove, finely chopped

2.5cm piece of fresh ginger, grated

a handful of mangetout (optional
)

1 tablespoon soy sauce

2-4 teaspoons oyster sauce (check the instructions on the bottle, as strengths differ
)

1-2 handfuls of bean sprouts (optional
)

a small bunch of pak choi (or any Chinese greens), roughly shredded

1-2 teacups (about 200g) leftover meat, sliced into smallish pieces

sesame seeds, toasted in a small frying pan without oil until just browning, to serve

Heat a wok over a fairly high heat, then add the oil and heat until shimmering. Add the garlic and ginger and stir well. If you have mangetout, throw them in now, and keep turning the whole lot around in the hot oil for a minute or so. Add the soy sauce and oyster sauce and cook for another 2-3 minutes. Add the bean sprouts, if using, and the pak choi or Chinese greens, and stir briskly for a scant minute, until the greens have wilted. Finally, add the meat, moving the whole lot around for a minute until thoroughly heated through.

Serve sprinkled with toasted sesame seeds and accompanied by rice or noodles.

Beef and black bean sauce
Fry chunks of white onion and green pepper in oil until just becoming tender (the peppers should still have a little bite left at the end, so don’t overcook them). Add the black bean sauce and cook according to the instructions on the bottle, then add strips of beef just to warm through.

Leftover meat and coconut
Flash-fry some chopped red chillies and a piece of bruised chopped lemongrass. Add a couple of lime leaves, a tablespoon of Thai fish sauce, a teacup of coconut cream and a teaspoon of brown sugar and cook for 2 minutes. Add the meat and heat through, then serve with rice and with basil scattered on top.

Pork and yellow bean sauce
Start with onions and carrots, cut into fine strips, followed, if you like, by strips of red or yellow pepper. Add the sauce according to the instructions on the bottle, then toss in the meat and heat through. Add a handful of cashew nuts right at the end for crunch.

Lamb and chilli
Follow the main recipe but omit the oyster sauce and, if you like, replace the mangetout with green beans. Fry ½ deseeded and finely chopped red chilli with the garlic and ginger, and add an eggcup of sherry at the same time as the soy sauce.

Pork or chicken with basil and pepper
Flash-fry finely chopped garlic, a rounded teaspoon of ground black pepper and ½ chopped red chilli for a minute. Add 2 lime leaves, some torn basil and 2 tablespoons of soy sauce and cook for 3 minutes. Add the meat and heat through. Asparagus tips are good with this, too – add them at the same time as the soy sauce.

I know the general rule for uncooked rice is to use about 80g per adult but I still nearly always cook too much of it and I’m pretty sure I’m not alone. Despite the fact that its price has rocketed recently and its scarcity has brought down governments, the latest statistics suggest that we throw away around 85,000 tonnes of it a year in the UK. Like pasta, it provides an almost instant meal in itself but – unlike pasta – it’s endlessly versatile: there are even dishes that
have
to be cooked with cold leftover rice (fried rice is a case in point). The recipes that follow don’t use only leftover rice, though: there are also several quick and tasty ways of using both short and long grain rice cooked from scratch as vehicles for the usual array of leftovers or tired vegetables.

I have to warn you to be careful with rice.
Bacillus cereus
is a very common cause of food poisoning, and one of its favourite haunts is cooked rice left in a warm place, or even at room temperature, for several hours. The spores are heat resistant and brief reheating such as stir-frying doesn’t break down their toxins, so it’s not entirely surprising that the bacteria is commonly associated with Chinese restaurants and particularly with re-cooked rice. This kind of food poisoning is usually relatively mild – but who needs it? The best precaution is not to leave leftover rice (or, in fact, potatoes or pasta either) lying around. Put it into an airtight box once tepid and refrigerate immediately.

To start at the very beginning, great fluffy rice is not hard to achieve even without an electric rice cooker. The problem with drowning the rice in a great pot of water and then straining it is that it will never achieve that soft dryness that sucks up sauces so well. For that, you need to use the ‘absorption method’, which is much more straightforward than it sounds.

My friend Vineeta’s method goes like this:

1 measure of long grain rice