Leftovers

I love leftovers.  They're pretty great, and you can find ways to make what was the entirety of one meal into a completely different thing by using them in another.  Leftovers are wonderful.  Leftovers are creative.  Leftovers are, most importantly, cheap.

R. left for a week for a conference that he's been working on for the past few months, and I found myself terribly bored, and lonely without him (and it's only the first day).  I also found that the routine we have established of having dinner together, planning meals and grocery shopping, completely blown out of the water by his absence. However, I knew we had leftovers from last week - a little bit of chicken chili, some bacon, lettuce, etc., in his kitchen.  I stole took the leftovers from his house (they needed to be used) and began to plot... I mean, plan, my leftovers adventure.

Occasionally I go on healthy eating kicks, powered by habits from having spent two years on Weight Watchers a while back.  I like the feeling of eating healthy, and it is admittedly easier when I am only cooking for myself.  A week without the loving bottomless pit of my boyfriend seems like the perfect opportunity to have one of those healthy kicks, and use up some leftovers while I was at it. (We'll see how it's going on Friday, shall we?)

That healthy kick starts tomorrow.  Because today, I remembered that there was bacon.  I love bacon in my tummy as much as my arteries hate it.  I have learned how to cook it healthily (thanks, WW!) without having to substitute silly things like Turkey-Bacon or some faux-bacon for the good kind.  Here's my favorite way:

• Line a baking sheet with aluminum foil for easy clean up.  Fold another piece of foil in an accordion shape, and stretch out enough that there are ridges. This creates valleys for the grease of the bacon to accumulate so that it's not frying in it in the oven (kind of defeats the purpose of the whole baking thing, then.)
• Place bacon on the accordion foil.  Put the baking sheet into a cold oven (I don't know why it works better this way, it just does.) and then turn the oven up to about 375-400 degrees.  Depending on crispness, you want to take the bacon out at about 20-30 minutes.  Watching it in the last few minutes is advisable, as it can go from slightly tender to charcoal very quickly (Trust me, I know).

I also have a great whole-wheat, multi-grain, lots-of-seeds-and-tasty-things loaf of bread from my local organic market that I splurged on.  I toasted two slices, put some leftover shredded cheese on deli meat Turkey and nuked it until the cheese was melted, topped with the cooked bacon and a nice crunchy leaf of iceberg lettuce and munched away.  A wonderful leftover Turkey-cheese-bacon-and-lettuce sandwich.  If I had only had a good beefsteak tomato and some super-spicy mustard, it would have been perfect.  But alas, leftover eaters can't be choosers.

Leftovers were common in my childhood.  At my grandma's house, you could bet good money that if it wasn't eaten one night, it would show up again and again until it was all eaten, in various forms.  My mom loves casseroles, and they make amazing leftovers as well.  My dad has the knack for turning anything into a day-after sandwich, even my mom's casseroles (broccoli casserole and turkey sandwich? Win!), which I seem to have inherited.  I don't think I ever met a well-thought-out sandwich that I didn't like (wait, no. One involved sauerkraut.  That one I didn't like).

Now I have a mug of cinnamon tea with honey and a Netflix queue and some delightfully trashy novels to catch up with.

Leftovers are a way of prolonging a meal we didn't want to end. Or torturing us with ones we wished we never had.
-A