Earlier this year, I decided to make that move to the next chapter in life, namely I retired. Though I’m eligible to make withdrawals to my retirement savings accounts, I made the decision to hold off until Ms. S also makes the same decision, i.e., until she also decides to retire as most of our retirement savings are in standard retirement accounts that are fully taxable once they’re withdrawn. Therefore, until then, I’m trying to live the spartan lifestyle which includes mindful grocery shopping stretching those dollars as far as possible and limiting our food wastes as much as possible.
Not Just for Cocktail Ice
We both were raised by parents who endured the plantation era where many nisei left school during the formative years to simply work to assist the family with the basic needs of food and shelter so wasting food was literally a mortal sin. We both still try to follow these basic tenets of life but I’ll admit that I would still find produce or fruit hidden at the back of the produce bin either shriveled beyond any salvageable use or growing various colors of facial hair. There would also be various cheeses wrapped in foil that eventually morphed into variations of blue cheese… even if they started life as cheddar. And sometimes it was simply that large pot of chili that we both ate morning, noon and night for the past week and a half but still didn’t seem to be getting any smaller.
So one of the first changes I made was to freeze any leftover green onions in our produce bins. When I make my ginger and green onion sauce, I usually use full bunches of green onions so waste isn’t an issue. But for other dishes that call for just a ¼ cup or so of sliced or chopped green onions, the leftover can go one of two ways. If the bunch is very fresh, it’ll continue to grow in your produce drawer though the emerging shoots resemble a woman with humidity hair growing every which way and definitely not easy to slice or chop. Or if they aren’t as fresh, they quickly brown and start decomposing right in your produce bin. Therefore, I now slice the leftovers for both sukiyaki and chopped for fried rice and immediately freeze them for future use. I also do the same for celery and round onions either freezing a large chop for stews and curries or smaller dice for the standard mirepoix.
(photos are from dishes created by pantry/refrigerator items that may have been discarded prior to retirement)
One fruit that often found its way to the garbage bin was apples as I often took an apple for my workday, brown-bagged lunches and Ms. S consumes apples on a regular basis. But sometimes I would purchase my apples over the weekend for the upcoming workweek and Ms. S would do the same so we would end up with an abundance of apples. And invariably, an apple would roll out of the produce bag to the back of the produce bin just to eventually be found weeks later just slightly moister than a dried apple. And because I normally might check the produce bin just the day before our weekly garbage pick-up, would often miss produce on the decline. But now that every day is a weekend, I check the produce bin often and will peel those older apples to grate for applesauce that I use in oatmeal muffins (using the same recipe on the Quaker Oats label) or for use in Japanese style curries – if you’ve wondered why Japanese style curries are sweeter than Indian style, they often use fruits like apples, bananas and even mangoes in their curry sauces. The grated apples are then frozen as ½ cup portions in zip-top bags.
Not Just for Sandwiches
Because of the humid environment in the 50th, bread tends to turn south rather quickly. We normally would play Russian roulette with our fresh loaves leaving them out as long as possible before refrigerating them to keep them as fresh as possible for as long as possible. The downside is that they may appear soft and fresh one night but sprout “beards” in various colors overnight. So for starters, we never reach into the bread bag but rather push the slices out of the bag. This way, any mold spores on our hands aren’t introduced into the bread bag. We’ve also determined just how long each type of bread can last at room temperature before refrigeration is needed. The supermarket baked ciabatta and sandwich rolls usually just last 3 to 4 days before refrigeration is required whereas the commercial breads can easily last up to 10 days before they sprout colorful “beards”. It does make me wonder what type of preservatives are baked into each loaf to keep them fresh and mold free for so long…
Because I routinely make strata or savory bread pudding, once the bread loaf is a candidate for refrigeration where it will invariably stale quicker, I often slice the loaves into cubes to facilitate the drying process as bread pudding works better with stale versus fresh bread. If the cubes totally lose their moisture, I then pulverize them into breadcrumbs which I use to thicken soups and stews or as a filler for meatloaf. The totally dried bread also gives the breadcrumbs a longer shelf life as partially dried bread can still develop mold even if stored in the refrigerator.
Goulash Anyone?
Though true goulash is a Hungarian stew made from various meats and vegetables primarily spiced with their indigenous paprika, it now often refers to any stew that often uses leftover fresh and pantry items in the home kitchen. Mom’s favored goulash used cubed Spam, canned corn and other diced vegetables along with cubed potatoes in a tomato sauce broth. Since the targeted audience of the Nichi Bei Weekly is the Asian American population, I’ll call my creations jjigae after the popular post-war Korean stew, budae-jjigae or Army base stew. What was originally created out of necessity during the post Korean war impoverishment, it now remains a very popular dish in Korea.
Curry-jjigae
The sauce for this waste-not, want-not, clean-out-the-leftovers curry is:
4 cups liquid – can be leftover canned stock, wine or simply water
1 small apple or any leftover apple, peeled, cored and grated
1 small banana, mashed
3 tbsp curry powder
3 tbsp tonkatsu sauce
3 tbsp ketchup
1 tbsp mirin
½ tsp onion powder
½ tsp garlic powder
4 tsp shoyu
Salt and black pepper to taste
2 tbsp cornstarch mixed with sake to form a slurry
Additions can be any leftover root vegetables – potatoes, carrots, sweet potatoes. Almost any refrigerated vegetables can be added – onions, celery, squash as well as most greens that you might cook – kale, chard, celery leaves, any type of cabbage. Most leftover starches can also be added directly to the curry sauce including noodles, rice, barley/farro, quinoa. Leftover animal proteins like chicken, pork or seafood can also be added.
I would add the cornstarch/sake slurry last after all of the ingredients have simmered for about 30 minutes just to make sure the harder root vegetables have softened.
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