In his latest book, River Cottage chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall calls them “planned-overs.” They’re leftovers that you intended to leave over — ingredients that you cooked more of than you needed at the moment, knowing that you’d be able to make great use of them later.
“The creation of ‘planned-overs’ doesn’t even have to be linked to the meal you’re making,” he writes in “Love Your Leftovers,” published in Britain this year but not yet in the States. “If I’m in the kitchen anyway, roasting vegetables or stirring a soup, I’ll often throw half a box of Puy lentils into a pan with a bay leaf, half an onion and a kettleful of water, and get them cooked. It’s almost no work, and while I might not have a specific plan for their use, I know that tub of pulses legumes in the fridge will see me right for some mouth-watering, substantial salads over the next few days, with crumbled cheese, crisp leaves — and perhaps some of those roasted roots.”
Hear, hear. I can’t imagine cooking any other way, which is why books like Fearnley-Whittingstall’s and Tamar Adler’s “The Everlasting Meal” have spoken to me so strongly. Thankfully, there has been a mini-trend in such books, the ones that encourage us to see our cooking not in terms of stand-alone, buy-all-the-ingredients-and-make-this recipes but in terms of a what-do-I-have-and-how-can-I-use-it sensibility. Eugenia Bone’s “The Kitchen Ecosystem” laid out the philosophy beautifully.
I beat this same drum regularly; I can’t help it. Ever since I started cooking this way, I’ve found a rhythm in the kitchen that I’ve never wanted to let go, for good reason: It has helped me get satisfying meals on the table in a fraction of the time it used to take. And my food waste has diminished remarkably.