Weekend using up leftovers

Returning to Nigel's "the right food at the right time" idea of seasonal eating, I think I strive for that too, but spend even more time thinking about using up leftovers, like walking to work plotting how to come up with a dish that will use all the things in the fridge (and the kids will eat it). Tho even Nigel - I am starting to find references in Kitchen Diaries about using up stuff that had been around for too long.

Case in point: Friday, I was trying to think of how to use a jelly jar of opened canned chicken broth, an opened bottle of spicy V-8, about half a cup of canned diced tomatoes, and there's some bacon, too, and a red pepper, and a plastic container of tiny red, orange & yellow sweet peppers, plus some thawed, roasted-last-summer green peppers ... and of course those greens going slimy in the vegetable drawer, which at that point had been reduced to half a bunch of spinach and a giant head of escarole (that I bought last Tuesday thinking to make a winter time soup, but that's another train of thought).

What I ended up with was a plan to make Spanish rice to use up the tomato products and bacon and broth & peppers (tho it meant buying some cilantro and maybe hot peppers), and make Spicey Beef with Peppers on Saturday night, and make a mess of ginger/garlic Asian spiced greens to go with.

In the end everyone ate leftovers passing through on Friday, Saturday I made the Spicey Beef (with a nice little winter fruit salad of 2 Asian pears, 1 apple, 2 oranges, raisins, and a banana sliced on top per serving), but not the greens. I washed the spinach, tho, so that made it easy to make a spinach frittata Sunday for the teenage boys crashed on the couch. So now I have the head of escarole and Spanish rice plans. And upcoming schedule considerations that have an impact on dinner like symphony tickets tonight, a meeting on Monday, yoga class on Tuesday, and going to a friend's cabin up North on Thursday; we are responsible for Friday supper (I am thinking Nigel's chicken stew and mash, a salad, and cookies for dessert ...)

So I'll let you know how I do.

Oh, besides going back to the seasonal eating idea, I remembered that the original idea behind 'blogging is Web-logging; that's where the apostrophe comes from - originally 'blogs were where you posted cool new things you found out there on the web, for anyone interested, with or without your sage editorial comments - the fact that another person had investigated and recommended the site could be enough.