Thursday, October 2, 2008

Leftover Lunch Satue!

My husband is a teacher and doesn't leave school for lunch. Since the alternative is school cafeteria food, he takes a lunch every day. He is NOT a sandwich eater so I don't buy cold cuts at all. Usually he just makes sure that he cooks enough dinner so that there are leftovers the next day. My Mother-in-law, bless her, also makes extra on nights when we eat over and packs us a "to go" container.

Today my mother-in-law told me that we were ordering Japanese food tonight. Yeah Japanese! Boo that now I have to make a lunch. And I haven't been shopping since a small trip on Sunday. And I'm not going today either. What to do. Our fridge is BARE.

So I looked in the freezer.

3 Frozen sausage patties and a bag of frozen tomatoes.

Back to the Fridge.

1/2 an onion
1 hot pepper
1 small homegrown eggplant
1/4 of an uncooked zucchini from dinner last night
A handful of leftover assorted olives from my parents 40th Anniversary party this past weekend.
1/2 cup roasted turnips from dinner the other night.
1 container with about 1 TBSP of Pesto in it
Butter-we are out of Olive oil.

Saute it all together. Add the pesto and tomatoes near the end. The trick with this one is browning the onion a bit before adding the rest. Then cook until all the liquid is gone. Make sure it gets kind of caramelized. Top with grated cheese if you have it. Served with a side salad this will make a yummy lunch!

Mind you, you don't need all of the above to make something good. Use what you have!

This particular one may work the best if you have a husband from Brooklyn who grew up eating sausage and pepper sandwiches. (This is certainly not what I ate growing up!) However, you could do this a number of ways-Chinese if you had some left over chicken and veggies. Mexican with some leftover beef and cheese. The point is that even when you don't think you have a lot of food in the house, you can probably whip up something!!!

I made sure that I used enough veggies so that this made 2 rather large lunch servings. One is in the fridge and one is in the freezer for the next time my MIL orders Japanese food!

3 comments:

Karley Ziegler Mott said...

Yum! Sounds good! I am jealous--your husband cooks? Mine makes scrambled eggs, and that is it :)

Teamcarbone said...

That sounds like how I've come up with a few dinner's I've made in the past two weeks!

Thanks for the tip!

Christine said...

We've had a few of those! The worst is when you make something REALLY GOOD and can never make it again because you can't remember everything that went into it!