Storr Cupboard: how to turn your Christmas leftovers into something amazing

You'll be surprised what you can whip up with half a bowl of bread sauce and brandy butter residue 
Ann Storr
By Victoria Stewart26 December 2018

Let’s imagine you have some leftover bread sauce and half a packet of herbs in your fridge. Do you chuck them or cook up a fridge hash for dinner?

With the tagline: ‘never a leftover, leftover,’ Storr Cupboard is a new blog that wants us to start being more creative with our leftovers. Designed to help people save money, cut food waste and have the confidence to be inventive in the kitchen, every week its creator Ann Storr offers three simple ideas or recipes - from turning leftover herbs into a salad or dressing pasta with leftover sun-dried tomato oil - for using up the things many of us have got used to throwing out.

Got Christmas leftovers? Keep reading.

“This blog came about from a dual desire to tackle things from both environmental and financial perspectives,” says Storr, who works part-time to run marketing events and cookery classes for veg box company Riverford Organic.

“Having worked in the food industry for a while, I know food waste is a huge problem that isn’t going away. So what I am trying to do is give people the confidence to cook with soft potatoes, or milk that is still fine even though it’s two days past its best-before date, because that will empower people to make better decisions,” she adds.

The blog is aimed at “anyone”, but she insists it isn’t about creating “an Ottolenghi-type experience - it’s about getting dinner on the table, saving money and not contributing to waste. It’s up to the individual as to how adventurous they want to be.”

While she remembers growing up making cakes in the kitchen as a child, Storr only began to cook with what she calls the Relay Race cooking principles (using leftovers as a starting point, and passing the baton on) when she had children 10 years ago.

“My then partner and I had two kids, admin jobs, childcare bills and not very much money. I couldn’t afford to waste anything at all - not even the few remaining bits of pasta on the children’s plates,” she remembers.

Through clever budgeting and cooking, she saved enough money to sign up to a veg box scheme: "Even though we were very skint, people used to think we were very profligate... In fact, I knew I could buy quality vegetables only because I didn’t waste a penny of food during cooking. It encouraged me to get creative - swapping things like potatoes with parsnips, or parsnips with swede.

"It also helped me to see that recipes are just guides and not just things you have to adhere to, which gave me the confidence to just shove things in a pan. There have been inedible disasters, and the dishes aren’t always exciting, but it’s not always the same thing every day anymore!”

In the near future Storr is planning to add video content to the site to spread her message, but right now her focus has been thinking up all the ways to re-use Christmas leftovers, starting with red wine.

“Let’s say I have some left from a roast lunch and I don’t want to start cooking a bolognaise just yet. So I freeze that, then the following week I get it out and use it to make red wine risotto. I end up having two spoonfuls of risotto left, so I’ll pop those in a Tupperware and the next day I’ll chuck a bit of chicken stock into it, and turn it into a soup. So from that one bit of red wine you’ve got this amazing kind of continuity.”

So as you're waking up to a fridge heaving with Christmas leftovers, here are a few easy tips and tricks for reusing every single morsel.

ANN’S STORR CUPBOARD TIPS

1. Save your leftover red wine

Just finished a long Christmas lunch, you have red wine left over but you don't want to cook again. Pour whatever you have left into ice cube trays or a small pot, and put it in the freezer – that way you don’t have you use it here and now. It’s your inspiration for a skint New Year’s risotto, ragu or a French onion soup.

2. Save your bread sauce

Swap your Boxing Day Bubble and Squeak for a bread sauce fritter. Take all those little scraps of turkey, ham and even gravy and Brussels sprouts and fold into a quick bread sauce based batter (see recipe below).

3. Re-use your brandy butter

You can make a very simple, no-churn ice cream and top it up with salted nuts (bash up before serving). This is a great pudding on its own but would also work well melted over any leftover Christmas pudding you’ve heated up.

Leftover bread sauce fritters

Serves 4

Ingredients

Around 100g leftover bread sauce

Enough milk to top what you have to 300ml ml (see recipe)

2 eggs

Around 150 grams of leftover sprouts, carrots, ham, turkey and so on

225g plain flour

2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder

1 teaspoon sugar

Pinch of salt

Butter for frying

Tools

Scales

Mixing bowls

Measuring jug

Fork

Balloon whisk

Frying pan

Teaspoon

Oven-proof dish

Time

10mins prep

20mins cooking

Prep

Turn oven to 100C

Mix flour, baking powder, salt and sugar together in a bowl

Shred/finely chop the meat and veg leftovers

Method

Add leftover bread sauce to jug and loosen with a little milk so there's no lumps

Top with milk until you have 300ml

Whisk together

Crack the eggs in and whisk until fully mixed

If you’re using a big jug, add the flour mixture straight in and beat until smooth

If you don’t have a massive measuring jug, pour the liquid into the bowl and beat until there are no lumps remaining

Stir through your leftover veg and/or meat

Put frying pan on the hob with a medium heat and add a pinch of butter -around 2 pea sized pieces

When the butter sizzles, pick up the pan and swirl it around so the butter is all over the bottom

Pour the batter into the pan so that the fritter will be 6-7cm across (I can only cook 3 at once, for example)

Turn down the heat a little

[TIP: I loosen the fritters away from the surface of the pan as they cook, which makes them much easier to turn and less likely to catch]

When little bubbles appear on the surface, flip over your fritters using your spatula

Don’t worry if they aren’t perfect circles, - mine rarely are

Continue cooking your fritters for about 1 minute or until they are golden on the bottom

Remove the fritters from the pan by placing them in an oven-proof dish in the oven (cold is fine - it will protect the heat)

Continue adding batter to the pan and making fritters until you have used all of your mixture

Serve with a little pat of butter on top and, if you like, an egg on top.

Leftovers?

Store these in a lidded container in the fridge.

Eat them as soon as possible for the best flavour - but they will stay okay for up to 3 days

Regarding reheating: fine if it’s veggies, I wouldn't if there’s meat .

For more ideas, visit https://storrcupboard.com or follow @Storrcupboard on Instagram

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