The Magic of Leftover Vegetables (and Other Stuff)

You would have thought that I would have learned from Summer Solstice 2017 to not even attempt grilled vegetables at Summer Solstice 2018. But I didn’t. I failed to check my party book before Summer Solstice 2018, so I had no clue that I had so many vegetables leftover after Summer Solstice 2017.

Fortunately, I checked my party book and other notes shortly after Summer Solstice 2018 went down into the record books. Last year I had several peppers, onions, and baby eggplants left over from the party. However, I had acted quickly enough that I was easily able to convert the leftover vegetables into eggplant camponata with a few minor grocery purchases and about an hour’s work.

That lesson learned inspired me to take stock of the leftover vegetables and partially used containers from Summer Solstice 2018, and to think creatively about what they could be used for. My stock included:

- Four portobello mushroom caps
- Two green bell peppers
- One red bell pepper
- Two smallish eggplants
- Three lemons
- Fourteen ounces of kumquats
- Three-quarters of a fennel bulb
- An unopened pint of heavy cream
- An opened quart of chicken stock
- An opened jar of decent tomato sauce
- Two unopened packages of shredded mozzarella
- An unopened container of pesto sauce
- An opened container of plain whole milk yogurt
- Two unopened pizza doughs
- One loaf of bakery bread

The Plan

First I assessed what could be frozen immediately - the pesto, the pizza dough, the loaf of bread - and took care of that. My freezer officially has no room left in it! I also wasn’t too worried about the yogurt, as I could eat that for breakfast and/or make gluten free cupcakes with it. The rest of the items required a little more thought. With the purchase of a can of black olives and an onion, I could turn the peppers, eggplant, and some mushroom into a lovely camponata like I did last year. I wasn’t going to be able to bring the camponata anywhere, but it also froze well. With the purchase of some decent pasta - or some effort into making homemade pasta - I could use the remaining portobellos, the heavy cream, and some of the chicken stock to make the Tagliatelle with Champignon Sauce from the Kristen Kish cookbook that I got from Blogging for Books earlier in the year. I’d just need to also pick up some creme fraiche at the grocery store to finish off the sauce. Of course, fourteen ounces of kumquats is about ten ounces shy of the pound and a half required to make kumquat preserves. But kumquats were plentiful and fairly cheap at my grocery store, so another eight ounce bag would bring the total close enough for me to feel comfortable carrying on with the recipe. The fennel bulb leftover from the Rhubarb Fennel Cocktail could be used to make a lovely fennel minestrone. I’d need an onion, a large can of diced tomatoes, two cans of white beans, and perhaps some additional chicken broth. The only things left on my list to use up were the opened jar of tomato sauce and the two bags of shredded mozzarella. Again, if I just bought a box of pasta, I’d have everything I needed for a tray of baked ziti. But that could wait until I had finished all the leftover beef in the glass casserole dish. Then again, my CSA for the week looked like it was destined for a vegetable stir fry: strawberries, lettuce, bok choy, broccoli, sugar snap peas, kohlrabi. It probably wouldn’t hurt to throw a little beef in there, if it lasted until CSA Pick Up Day.

So after all that thinking and planning, a fairly short grocery list was required to complete my plan:

- Two onions
- Eight ounce bag of kumquats
- Jar of dried oregano
- Can of black olives
- Large can of diced tomato
- Two cans of white beans
- Tagliatelle pasta
- Box of ziti
- Creme fraiche

Eggplant Camponata

Naturally, when I parked at the grocery store, I realized that I had left my list at home. I did my best to remember everything; however, when I got home and checked what I had bought against my real grocery list, I realized that I forgot to buy the olives for the camponata. Oh well, I don’t really like the canned black olives anyway. At least I remembered the onion. And then I realized that I completely forgot about the requisite can of tomato paste! It wasn’t even on the list! Fortunately, with some digging through the Horde Cabinet, I found an unexpired can of tomato paste. So I was good to go with the ingredients for the camponata - whenever I found the energy to make it.

Unfortunately, waiting until I had the energy to cook was not the right course of action. Some of the vegetables and a handful of kumquats spoiled. And I finished all the leftover beef before I even picked up my CSA share for the week. So no vegetable stir fry with beef! However, the CSA share had a beautiful head of fancy lettuce. When taking a second inventory of all my leftover food, I discovered that I had an open package of bacon and some buttermilk. Which meant that, with a two extra ingredients, I could make homemade buttermilk blue cheese dressing for a wedge salad. That lettuce would disappear in no time!

When I finally felt some extra peppiness, it was no problem to make another run to the grocery store to pick up the five or six items that I needed to complete my planned recipes and round out my household stock. Unfortunately, the space in the produce section where the kumquats had been was now filled with kiwi fruit. I asked one of the friendlier produce folks where they were, and he informed me that they are a seasonal fruit and most likely no longer available. So I decided to attempt the kumquat recipe with the scant amount that I had in the house.

Once I was finally motivated to start cooking, the eggplant camponata came together very easily. The challenge was in preparing all the vegetables for the recipe. There were onions to dice, eggplant to peel and dice, and bell peppers to dice. I bought sliced baby bella mushrooms, so I thought I didn’t have anything to prepare there. All said and done, eggplant camponata takes about forty minutes of active stovetop time. The first ten minutes are to sauté the onions and garlic together; however, I found a note in my cookbook that recommended adding the eggplant with the onion and garlic, so I did that too. The next ten minutes are to sauté the diced bell peppers and the sliced mushrooms. Of course, as soon as the mushrooms got dumped into the pan, I noticed how big they were relative to all the other vegetables. So I used my stirring spoon to hack down the larger pieces as they came up.

The final twenty minutes were for the mixture to simmer after adding the remaining ingredients - tomato paste, white wine, salt, and oregano. I actually had to add one extra can of white wine because the mixture had gotten so dry due to the high heat that I was cooking at. It also helped that I turned down the heat a few notches for the twenty minute simmer.

Because there was really nothing left to do aside from occasionally monitor and stir, I took the opportunity to start on the kumquat preserves. When the timer finally barked, the camponata was a beautiful mush of vegetables, just like it was supposed to be. Almost immediately, I packaged up the hot camponata into a plastic container and wedged it into the refrigerator to cool. That would be lunch at work for the next few days, and possibly dinner too!

Baked Ziti

When I went off on my solo adventure on Saturday, the plan was to explore one distillery and one cider works, which would lead into dinner downtown. Unfortunately, that plan was a bust. I never found the distillery, so I left the cider works before my favorite downtown dinner places opened. So it is small wonder that when I returned home, I had a serious craving for baked ziti.

The family recipe for baked ziti is so easy that even a computer programmer can do it. There are basically three steps: cook the pasta; mix the pasta, sauce, and cheese in a casserole dish; bake the casserole until the cheese melts. Of course, in my kitchen, it is a little more complicated. I have to find the right pot to cook the pasta in. Then I have to figure out how well I want the pasta cooked; that will determine how long I have to cook the pasta. I have to decide whether I want to use the whole jar of sauce or whether I want to have some left over in the refrigerator. I have to judge how much cheese gets mixed in with the pasta and how much cheese gets saved for topping. And so on…

Of course, the whole thing came together in about an hour, which put me at a normal dinner time. I chose my red Dansk pot because I wasn’t going to multitask with jam making. I opted for a 15 minute cook on the pasta so it would be somewhere between al dente and tender. Since my refrigerator is packed, I used up the entire jar of sauce, which didn’t really seem all that excessive. I had two eight ounce packages of mozzarella leftover from Summer Solstice, so I mixed one in with the ziti and used the other for the top. Then I baked it for 25 minutes, which might have been a touch excessive, and let it rest for another 15 minutes. I figured it best to let it rest before eating so that the cheese inside the casserole would continue to melt and so that I wouldn’t burn my mouth when it came time to eat.

The baked ziti definitely hit the spot! It was cheesy and saucy and everything else that I had hoped from it. The pasta was a touch too tender, as it started to break up when I served it, so next time I’ll cook it closer to the 12-14 minute mark. Of course, the next challenges were to fit it into the refrigerator and to finish the casserole before it too spoiled.

Kumquat Preserves

Kumquats were always a mythical fruit to me. I had read about them, but had never actually seen or tasted one until Little Z insisted that we track them down for my Holiday Dessert party last year. She was so excited about my finding them, and even more excited when I let her take home all the kumquats that were leftover from that party.

Because kumquats were plentiful at my local grocery store (at the time!), and because Little Z’s excitement remained so vividly in my mind, I bought more for the Summer Solstice party. But I had a lot leftover because none of my guests were all that enamored of them. So I checked my canning book to see if there was anything creative that I could do with so many leftover kumquats. Sure enough, I could make kumquat preserves!

Of course, there was a lot of prep work involved in making the kumquat preserves. Before the recipe even started, the little guys needed to be individually scrubbed and dried. Each one needed to have two slits cut into it. I think that was to prevent them from exploding, but I couldn’t be sure. Then there were three rounds of blanching, with the last round followed by shocking in cold water. And then the seeds needed to be picked out of each one with a toothpick. Only after all that could the process of making the preserves and water process canning begin.

Fortunately, the initial scrub and dry of the kumquats went fairly quickly; honestly, I didn’t put too much effort into it because I knew that they were going to be blanched three times and then soaked in a cold water bath. Unfortunately, I discovered several more soft kumquats in the process of cutting slits into the fruit; I didn’t think kumquats were supposed to be soft, so I tossed those. That brought me down to a fairly low number of kumquats to be preserved. However, I still prepared eight four-ounce jars, just in case the kumquats that I did have needed some extra space.

As soon as the kumquats were in their cold water bath, I turned on the heat beneath my makeshift water process canner. (It’s a spaghetti pot with the noodle drainer insert still in it.) Then I started the syrup for the preserves, which was almost a 1:1 simple syrup. As soon as the syrup was clear and bubbling, I added the prepared kumquats and set the timer for the recommended 30 minutes. Actually, the requirement was for the kumquats to be glossy and translucent, and for the syrup to just barely coat the kumquats. At about the fifteen minute mark, I heard some splashing coming from the stove. Despite the gigantic pot and the low heat, the mixture had managed to boil over. So I had to stay in the kitchen for the remaining fifteen minutes stirring the pot in order to prevent another boil over. It was so hot that I think I got a first degree burn on my stirring hand from the steam! Since I couldn’t tell the status of the kumquats through all the bubbles, I had to give it the full 30 minutes. When the timer finally barked, I turned off the heat and stirred the bubbles down. Most of the kumquats were translucent, but there were still a few that weren’t. I debated turning the heat back on for a few minutes, but then I realized that the carry over cooking would probably take care of them if I left them alone for a few minutes. So I busied myself with getting the jars, lids, and rings ready before I started ladling the fruit and syrup out of the pot.

As luck would have it, the canning process went very smoothly. I got four full four-ounce jars of fruit and syrup, and a fifth jar that was mostly syrup. Since there seemed to still be a lot of syrup left in the bottom of the pot after all the fruit had been ladled out, I decided to drain that off into an eight-ounce jar and stick it in the refrigerator. I’d come up with something to do with kumquat simple syrup later - although adding it to prosecco seemed pretty genius.

Strawberry and Lavender Jam

While I was in the canning book, I just had to check to see if there were any good strawberry recipes that I could take advantage of before strawberry season closed. I was so bored with the Strawberry Basil Jam recipe that I had used last year (and the year before) that I’d rather skip canning strawberry jam than use that recipe again. Not that it was a bad recipe, I just wanted to do something different.

Much to my delight, I found that there were seven different strawberry jam recipes, including variations with lemon, lavender, Thai herbs, and rhubarb. The only one that didn’t appeal to me was the recipe with Thai herbs because I learned from the Strawberry Basil Jam recipe that it is difficult to chop the fresh herbs finely enough to blend well with the jam. The Rhubarb Strawberry Jam was also out because I didn’t feel like going back to the grocery store yet again. However, I did have three lemons leftover from Summer Solstice and about a third of a bottle of dried lavender left over from another project. Since I could probably use the lemons for a cherry lemonade project, I decided to attempt the Strawberry and Lavender Jam to use up the remaining dried lavender.

Much like the Kumquat Preserves, the devil of this project was in the prep work: three pounds of strawberries had to be washed, hulled, and diced. That took forever! Especially since the batch from the CSA needed to be assessed for soft spots and dispositioned appropriately. At the end of it all, three pounds of diced strawberries was quite a sight to behold!

The recipe got a little easier from there. The five basic steps were: simmer the strawberries and sugar; drain off the juice from the simmered strawberries; boil the juice; add back the strawberry mush and boil again; water process can the finished jam. In essence, there was a lot of stirring and setting timers involved.

Everything was going swimmingly until about halfway into the timer for boiling the strawberry juice. According to the recipe, I was waiting for it to be reduced to 1 1/2 cups, which was supposed to take about 20 minutes. Unfortunately, the juice threatened to boil over the pot so I had to stand there stirring it to keep the boiling liquid from escaping. Because I’m not a fan of needlessly transferring molten lava back and forth, I decided to just let it go the 20 minutes rather than periodically measure the volume. I couldn’t judge how much the liquid was getting reduced because it maintained such frenetic boil. Those last ten minutes lasted forever!!!

When the timer barked, I first dumped in the lemon juice and then the scant amount of lavender that the recipe called for. The measurement didn’t seem enough to me, but I didn’t freehand it because the last thing I wanted was a jam reminiscent of soap. Finally I dumped in the strawberry mush and the extra juice that drained off it. That calmed the boil down to a simmer, with the occasional super heated bubbles erupting to splatter the inside of the pot.

Once the mixture had thickened enough to see the bottom of the pot as I stirred, I noticed that the bottom was black. I had a decision to make: stop right then and toss the jam or carry on and hope that the jam was untainted by the charred bottom. From then on, I stirred very gingerly so as not to scrape up any charred bits into the jam.

Fortunately, there wasn’t much left to do. The recipe didn’t provide a target temperature for the mixture, so I pulled it off the heat a few minutes before the timer barked. It took another few minutes to get into jars, to seal the jars, and to get into my makeshift water process canner. At some point, I tasted a bit of spilled jam. I couldn’t tell whether it tasted burnt or not. So I let the water process canner do its thing. I figured I could always break the seal on a jar in the morning and taste with fresh taste buds.

The Verdict

I’m still working on repurposing my leftover mushrooms, fennel bulb, and other items in accordance with my plan; however, this post has gone on long enough. It needs to stop!

Overall, it was really helpful to quickly take inventory of the opened and unopened food from Summer Solstice 2018. That was essential to planning new meals, minimizing food waste, and keeping me happily fed for longer than the just the regular leftovers would have done. It’s also good for me to be cognizant of how much of the food I hadn’t used, as that could prevent me from overplanning and overcommitting in the first place.

The Recipes

Eggplant Camponata
I love this stuff. It is a great appetizer for an Italian meal, and a good side dish for beef.

1 medium eggplant, peeled and cubed
⅓ cup olive oil
1 can pitted black olives, chopped
2 green peppers, chopped
6 cloves garlic, minced
1 tbsp dried oregano
1 tbsp salt
1 onion, coarsely chopped
1 8 oz can tomato paste
1/8 tsp pepper
16 oz white button mushrooms, coarsely chopped
White wine or red wine

1. Sauté onion, garlic and oil in a skillet on medium high heat for 5-6 minutes.
2. Reduce heat to medium low. Add eggplant. Cook for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally.
3. Add pepper and mushroom. Cook for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally
4. Add tomato paste. Rinse can with white wine to dissolve leftover paste. Stir to coat.
5. Add remaining ingredients, mix well and simmer uncovered for 20 minutes
6. Remove from heat, cover and chill

*** For one of the Vigilia “seven fishes,” Dad mixed tuna with the campanata. Italian olive oil packed tuna fish is the first choice, and there is no second choice.

Baked Ziti
For a change, add some unmarinated roasted red pepper strips and ricotta cheese to the casserole.

1 box ziti or rigatoni
1 lb mozzarella, shredded or thinly sliced
1 jar tomato sauce

1. Cook pasta as directed on the box. Drain well.
2. Pour half of pasta into 9"x13"x2" baking pan. Cover generously with sauce and stir to coat. Top with half of the mozzarella.
3. Pour remaining pasta into baking pan. Cover generously with sauce. Top with remaining shredded mozzarella.
4. Bake for 20 minutes at 350F, or until mozzarella is bubbly and slightly browned.

*** Tom’s Baking Method: Bake for 15 minutes at 350F, then bake (or broil) at 500F for the final 5 minutes to crisp the top.