Daily Plate: Leftovers, Reimagined

I hate to waste food. As a kid, I saw my dad dump huge dishes of just-cooked food into the garbage faster than my mom could stop him. When she did manage to hang on to what didn’t get eaten at that meal, he’d refuse to eat it the second time around. Moving into my first apartment—with my own kitchen—was so exciting because I could hang on to buy and cook and hang on to exactly what I wanted. I guess that makes me weird, but after a year of dorm life, little things make you excited.

True, I did sometimes eat the same thing for three meals, but more often than not, I would use leftover food as components in a whole new creation, combining it with whatever else was on hand. As I’ve moved cities and been exposed to new flavors and nutritional concepts, it’s brought my kitchen mad scientist practices to a whole new level.

After our trip to Jackson Heights for Indian food the other day, Chris and I still had lots of leftovers to look forward to. I was thinking I’d just polish off the tadka daal and throw in some rice, but it turned out there was only a tiny bit left, and I knew I was a little low on veggies and protein for the day. What to do?

First, I put a sweet potato in the microwave to cook and threw some spinach in a pot to steam. Once the spinach had wilted a bit, I added the previous evening’s steamed broccoli and the daal, along with a little bit of leftover brown rice. Once the potato was done, I chopped it up after removing the skin and let it cook in with the daal and veggies. After pouring the mess into a bowl, I sprinkled some nutritional yeast on top. It sounds strange, I know, but it’s one of my favorite experiments thus far.