Leftovers!

Tonight we had leftovers. Leftovers don't have to be dull! The best advice that I have ever heard about leftovers is don't simply reheat them, use them as ingredients in a new dish.

I got this recipe from Jacques Pépin's Encore with Claudine, which probably the best book of his to buy if you don't have any at all. (It is currently available for <$1 used on Amazon.) The leftovers featured here are the leftover baguette and lamb from two nights ago, but you can use any leftover meat that you have. I hollowed out some tomatoes, made a stuffing out of the meat, the leftover bread, green onions, white onion, garlic, and mushrooms. I used the insides of the tomatoes as a sauce.

For 4 tomatoes which weight about 1.5lbs total, use 4 oz leftover meat and chop it up, 3 oz dried bread chopped into 1/2" pieces, 4 green onions coarsely chopped, 1/3 C chopped white onion, 1/3 C chopped mushrooms, and 2 cloves of garlic, chopped. Combine these ingredients in a bowl along with some salt and pepper, 1/3 C water, and 1 egg. Mix it all together. Cut of the tops off the tomato, and hollow out the insides, reserving the insides for the sauce. Coarsely chop the insides and place them in your baking dish, along with some salt. Fill the tomatoes with the meat-mixture, place the caps on, place them on the sauce in the baking dish and cook them for 45 minutes at 400F, or until the tomatoes are nicely browned.

An important lesson here is that you don't need to use precisely this list of ingredients. You could use chopped leek instead of the onions, or put a T of capers or a few anchovy fillets in there. If I did it again I might use bulgar wheat instead of bread, although Elyse liked the bread. I think that I would also add some olive oil to the tomato innards.

Serve one per person as an appetizer, or two each along with another dish for a light dinner. We began the meal with a turnip, sweet potato, white potato and leek soup, from the same book. It helped that I had some stock on hand for a tasty, hearty soup base! The soup, along with 2 stuffed tomatoes each made for a nice, light, nearly vegetarian dinner.

(Of course, if you really are a vegetarian the chopped lamb in the tomatoes and beef stock in the soup would disqualify this meal as truly vegetarian, but for the rest of us, its a little peak into the world of vegetarianism, sort of like how you can watch a movie about war, without actually having to risk your life.)