Leftovers Recipes

Lindsey Bareham finds delicious things to do with seasonal leftovers

With Christmas looming, the canny cook is laying in a festive support system to ease the shopping burden later on. Items on my list include potatoes, smoked salmon, anchovies, mayonnaise, blue cheese and citrus fruit. Sliced smoked salmon freezes perfectly and defrosts quickly, while opened jars of anchovies and mayo keep safely in the fridge for weeks.

Oranges, lemons, limes and other citrus fruit are abundant at this time of year and keep well in a cool place. My selection of recipes is all about leftovers, my favourite way of cooking.

Swedish Lox Pudding
Smoked salmon layered with very thinly sliced potato, dill and spring onions, and a crisp crumb topping. Soft and creamy, smoked salmon transformed. Yum.

Serves 6
Prep: 30 min
Cook: 60 min
25g butter
125g spring/salad onions
20g bunch dill
200g smoked salmon trimmings
4 large King Edward, Desiree or similar potatoes, about 900g
400ml crème fraîche or 200ml crème fraîche and 200ml double cream or 400ml whipping cream
4tbsp fresh breadcrumbs

Use half the butter to smear a 2½ litre dish, about 5cm deep. Keeping separate piles, trim and finely slice the spring onions. Strip the dill off the stalks and chop. Slice the salmon into chunky strips. Peel and rinse the potatoes. Slice thinly as if making crisps – a mandoline makes short work of this – but don’t rinse. Spread a third of the potatoes in the buttered dish. Season lightly with salt and pepper. Cover with half the onion, dill and smoked salmon. Repeat the layer and finish with potato.

Heat the cream until pourable then pour it over the pudding. Encourage it to sink through the layers, shaking the dish a couple of times. Settle the surface flat. Cover with a thin layer of breadcrumbs and dot with the last of the butter.

Heat the oven to 190°C/gas mark 7 and bake for 45-60 minutes until the cream is bubbling round the edge, the crumbs golden and a sharp knife gets no resistance when driven through the potatoes. Serve alone, follow with green beans or a crisp salad.

Turkey Tonnato
A thick, creamy tuna sauce hides leftover sliced turkey, providing a canvas to decorate with strips of anchovy, sliced green olives and capers. A real showstopper. I often make this with leftover chicken, and I recently saw a recipe for mushroom tonnato, so anything goes.

Serves 6
Prep: 15 min
400-600g leftover turkey, preferably white meat
50g can anchovies in olive oil
200g (approximately) can tuna in oil
175ml mayonnaise
2tsp Grey Poupon or Maille Dijon mustard
1tbsp lemon juice
1-2tbsp water
6 pitted green olives
2tbsp capers

Slice the turkey and spread out in overlapping slices on a platter. Take 3 anchovies from the tin and 1tbsp of its oil. Place in the bowl of a food processor along with the drained tuna, mayo, mustard, lemon juice and water. Blitz smooth. Add extra lemon juice to taste and/or water to achieve a pouring consistency similar to custard.

Spoon and spread the sauce over the turkey to completely cover. Slice the remaining anchovy in long, thin strips, finely slice down the olives into 6-8 thin half moons. Give the capers a squeeze to get rid of excess liquid. Decorate the tuna “canvas” with swirls of anchovy, olives and capers.

Lettuce Hearts with Stilton Sauce
So easy, it hardly needs a recipe. It looks pretty on a platter and goes with everything – perfect for a buffet. A recipe that even those wary of blue cheeses will enjoy, and a lovely way of using up excess Stilton.

Serves 6
Prep: 15 min
Cook: 5 min
150g Stilton
4tbsp crème fraîche or double cream
2tbsp milk
6 Little Gem lettuce, the smaller the better

Break the cheese into pieces, placing them in a small saucepan. Add the cream and milk and gently cook together over a low heat, stirring occasionally until melted. Remove from the heat and leave to cool. It will thicken.

Wash the whole lettuce hearts and shake dry. Trim the stalk and remove damaged outer leaves. Halve small lettuce hearts lengthways, and quarter larger ones, ensuring to cut through the stalk-cum-core so most of the leaves stay attached. Arrange, cut-side uppermost, on a serving platter, nudging the pieces close together. Pour over the cooled sauce, making sure it dribbles through the layers.

Citrus Fruit Salad with Lemon Grass Syrup
Citrus fruit keeps well but here’s an intriguing way of using some of it. The ratio of oranges to other citrus fruit depends on what you have available but the idea is to arrive at a pretty contrast of size, colour and taste. This is also good made with pineapple – quarter it lengthways, cut off the woody core, skin and all the hairy “eyes” and slice very thinly across the width – either on its own, or with oranges, say, or a mix of citrus. Pineapple creates lots of liquid as it steeps, so bear that in mind. Save leftover juices for vodka cocktails.

Serves 6-8
Prep: 45 min
Cook: 15 min
1 bird’s eye red chilli
4 kaffir lime leaves (fresh, frozen or Bart Spices)
2 lemon grass stalks
100g white sugar
400ml water
5 large navel oranges
2 large lemons
3 limes
3 red grapefruit
1 pomelo

Split the chilli, scrape out the seeds, slice into skinny batons and then into tiny dice. Bruise the lemongrass. Place both in a pan with the lime leaves, sugar and 400ml cold water. Swirl the pan to melt the sugar as it comes to the boil, reduce the heat and simmer for 15 minutes. Leave to cool.

Slice the skin off the citrus fruit, removing all white pith. Rotate each piece of fruit as you slice between the membrane to remove the skinless segments. Split any fat segments; you want it to be thin and dainty. Transfer to a glass serving bowl with all the juices. Discard the lemongrass and lime leaves then pour the cooled syrup over the fruit salad. Mix, cover with clingfilm and chill before serving.

You’ll find more of Lindsey’s recipes at lindseybareham.com and in her latest paperback One Pot Wonders (Penguin/Michael Joseph).

This piece is from the November/December issue of the Idler, out now.

Our November/December issue is available in bookshops as well as Waitrose, WHSmiths, Booth’s and Easons.