A tasty nourishing soup made from leftovers...

[oursin]

After making delicious pheasant and apricot pilaff yesterday, I have been thinking about leftovers and the various dishes that one can make with them which are delicious but which one would not, normally, make unless one had the leftover wherewith to make it. Though I think somewhere in one of Elizabeth David's books she gives a recipe that some

Comments

[curtana]

I certainly think it applies to fanfic. Spinning out the bits of plotline that never got resolved, developing the characters who weren't fleshed-out, even the holes and gaps can be viewed as handy spaces to play in...

[jonquil]

Yeah. violetisblue have something like six or seven fics lying around in various states of progress, and we often wind up basing a fic on a throwaway line put in for local color.

I take fic less seriously than fiction, and perhaps I should apply that frivolity and willingness to mess up move widely. No perhaps about it.

[jonquil]

Another good example is cassoulet. The original Julia Child recipe I used had you make lamb stew, sausage patties, conserved duck, and beans (of course) from scratch, then combine them all and rebake. It took several days.

Lacking decent ingredients, this is what you had to do in the late 1960s, but it completely misses the point that cassoulet is a leftovers dish. Ever since the late 1980s, we've made cassoulet with leftover lamb roast, bought sausage, real beans (of course), and, yes, duck, but we keep duck in the fridge for months. The dish comes out just fine.

Gardening can be about leftovers; the plant that didn't work in position A may reseed itself and be gloriously happy in position B. Or you can move it.