{"id":3762,"date":"2016-05-24T13:40:10","date_gmt":"2016-05-24T17:40:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/apa.si.edu\/picklesandtea\/?p=3762"},"modified":"2016-05-24T13:40:10","modified_gmt":"2016-05-24T17:40:10","slug":"tips-leftover-makeovers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/apa.si.edu\/picklesandtea\/tips-leftover-makeovers\/","title":{"rendered":"Leftover Makeover Tips"},"content":{"rendered":"

My mom doesn\u2019t waste food. She never has, doesn\u2019t now, and never will. A friend joked that there\u2019s a term for that: CCW\u2014cheap Chinese woman.<\/p>\n

Jokes aside, I was well aware as a little girl that Mom was very conscious of stretching the ingredients she bought to their limits. <\/p>\n

Mom was a proponent of nose-to-tail and root-to-top eating long before it became fashionable. I believe she honed her kitchen skills experimenting with ways to make all cuts of meat and every part of the plant palatable to her husband and three always-hungry kids.<\/p>\n

She was not a stickler for recipes. She always had her staples on hand but if she ran out of an ingredient, she\u2019d always find a substitute in her fridge or pantry.  <\/p>\n

She found ways to make us finish our meals, using guilt: \u201cThink of all the starving children in Africa!\u201d As well as fear: \u201cFinish your rice or your future husband will have pock marks as numerous as the grains left on your plate.\u201d<\/p>\n

One of Mom\u2019s most admirable talents was being able to take yesterday\u2019s leftovers and turn it into something unrecognizable. It\u2019s in this category that her culinary prowess shines. She did so not just because of her zero-waste ethic but also because my dad refused to eat leftovers. If he saw anything on the table that looked remotely familiar, he wouldn\u2019t eat it. My dad\u2019s not a snob at all. I\u2019m sure it has everything to do with living through a war when rationing rendered food scarce and monotonous.<\/p>\n

Mom had (and still has) an uncanny ability to transform parts of one dish into a completely different one. And I\u2019m not talking just about the ubiquitous fried rice.<\/p>\n

Mom turned turmeric fried chicken into a refreshing soup afloat with glass noodles; the chicken and mushroom topping in bakmi ayam<\/a><\/em> went into a Shepard\u2019s pie of sorts (minus the noodles!); peanut sauce evolved as a sweet-tart dressing for a tossed noodle salad; leftover vegetable stir-fry was stuffed into egg foo-young; and the list goes on.<\/p>\n

In this tradition, I\u2019ve conjured some of my own culinary makeovers. Like my mom, I tend to want to use up what\u2019s available in my kitchen. Unlike my mom, I\u2019m a little more reliant on recipes however, I don\u2019t usually follow them to a tee. Bolognese sauce transforms into a casserole with spiral pasta and ricotta cheese (even if the recipe calls for mascarpone); the meat from bbq pulled pork sandwiches does double duty as carnitas tacos or enchiladas (or vice versa!); stir-fried vegetables into mushu pork; cedar plank-grilled salmon fillet becomes salmon cakes. Then, there\u2019s my new favorite: Indonesian White Curry Chicken<\/a> morphs into a curry noodle soup.<\/p>\n

To jump-start ideas, here are some leftover makeover tips to try:<\/strong><\/p>\n