Whipitupitude

One of my favorite pastimes (apart from beers down the pub) is cooking. I especially like cooking because it allows me to indulge several of my favorite pastimes all at once: shopping, cooking and drinking wine.

One of the problems anyone who cooks with any regularity faces, however, is leftovers. I hate leftovers. Despise 'em. But of course, you can't just throw them out because you paid good money for them, and it's wasteful. So they sit in the fridge, eating up space (and in our fridge, space is at a premium - I've bought shoes that come in larger boxes) until they're hairy and unidentifiable, and then they get thrown away.

But I've developed a new way to deal with leftovers: turn them into something completely new and different. This is what I call 'whipitupitude' - neither art nor science (or maybe a bit of both), but the act of combining otherwise unappealing leftovers in new and interesting ways.

Tonight, for instance, we had some leftover gammon steak (a salty, somewhat fatty ham), some leftover Dad's Famous Butter Chicken (see below), some asparagus, part of a week old leek, a few sorry cloves of garlic. These I turned into a really quite good meal by combining them in a cream sauce and serving them over pasta.

There's no point putting the recipie here, since it's unlikely that you'd have this particular combination of ingredients just lying around, and the whole point of this is to make use of the stuff you have in your own fridge, so it's probably not a commercially viable idea (though maybe we could make a game show where people bring in the contents of their refrigerators and we make something out of them).

I will, however, share with you a recepie that's one of our children's favorites - the aforementioned Dad's Famous Butter Chicken. When I make this, they eat it all without complaint and often ask for more. It has its roots in a desperate night back in Pennsylvania when all we had was chicken and I had to feed the kids. I've modified the recipie a bit over the years, but the basic principle remains the same.

One thing I'll point out here is that there are two things I always make sure I have in the house: unsalted butter and a bottle of vermouth. The butter is good for cooking, and, well, you never know when you'll need to make a martini at short notice.

Dad's Famous Butter Chicken
Chicken breast, washed and trimmed (use as many as you like)
Unsalted butter (it's OK to use salted if you don't have unsalted)
Dry Vermouth (Noilly Prat's the best. It's like 8 bucks a bottle. Just buy it.)
Salt and Pepper
Place the chicken breasts skin side down on a baking dish. Lay 1-2 tablespoons of butter on top of each. Sprinkle with salt and pepper to taste (the kids don't like pepper, so I leave that out). Splash on a little vermouth and bake at 350 for about 25 minutes.

Some fresh sage laid on top of the breasts gives the chicken a nice flavor, but the kids wouldn't eat that, so I only put it on the ones I'm making for Michele and me.

There you have it. Couldn't be easier. Enjoy. Let me know what you have in your fridge and I'll see if I can come up with an interesting dish for it...