Second Drink

Today I'm still cooking with leftovers.

I often like to freeze the bones and knobby cartilage from braising meat to make another round of less gelatinous stock, which I will always think of affectionately as second drink. The ice melts off the stash in my freezer and it’s like, second drink! That’s the base for not one, but two dinners: turkey bits, a leftover carrot, sad leeks and celery from the garden, bay leaves, black peppercorns, and spiced apple cider I froze in a deli container to keep ice cream cold on the 1.5 hour trip to Monteagle.

Last night I simmered the turkey stock with golden onions, the last carrot, a single potato that wouldn’t fit in the pot during last week’s event prep, the end pieces of green cabbage I shredded for salad, and pieces of baked tofu. Before serving over rice with scallions, I added a Japanese curry cube and a couple teaspoons cornstarch to form a salty, luscious sauce.

Tonight I’ll use up the rest of my stock in the new Molly Baz steak fries recipe. I find it particularly fascinating because wow, what a brilliant a twist on the incredibly delicious Greek lemon potatoes I grew up eating. Really though, that’s all the cooking I’ll do. The rest is more leftovers: sugar-pickled cranberry orange relish, vegan apple sage sausages the lone almost-vegan at the retreat didn’t want, buttercrunch lettuce from the yard tossed with green beans from the freezer and sesame maple vinaigrette and crispy shallots. On the side, a lemon Spindrift.