Bruschetta is a lovely way to use up leftovers. Consisting of sliced bread rubbed with garlic and brushed with olive oil then topped with any number of toppings and grilled or toasted, bruschetta is usually served as an appetizer or snack, but I think it can make a nice light lunch, especially if served beside a crisp green salad.

A perfect way to use up day old bread, bruschetta is an already frugal dish; but when you use leftovers as toppings, it is doubly frugal.

What sort of leftovers do I have in mind?

Well, I had made a batch of Melanzane con Noci–a Sicilian pasta sauce made with roasted eggplant, garlic and toasted walnuts which is traditionally served over spaghetti–but had more sauce than two people could eat. While I could have simply frozen the leftover sauce, I wanted to figure out another way to use this delectable puree.

In putting together the bruschetta, which I made for Brittney and I for lunch, I decided to forgo rubbing the bread with garlic as the sauce is already quite sufficiently imbued with garlic; instead, I simply brushed 1/2 inch thick slices of multi-grain baguette (cut on the diagonal) on both sides with extra-virgin olive oil. Then, I spread about a tablespoon and a half of the cold pasta sauce on top of the bread. This was topped with a sprinkling of fresh basil leaves cut in a chiffonade, then on top of that, thinly sliced tomatoes and a generous, heaping teaspoon of freshly shredded Parmesan cheese.

Then all that is left to do was to place the slices on a tray and pop them under the broiler for a few minutes–until Parmesan is bubbly and melted and the bread is toasted and crisped.

That is all there is to it–and frankly, as much as I love Melanzane con Noci as a pasta sauce–I liked it even better as a bruschetta topping. The rich sauce –a thick puree, garlicky and filled with the flavor of roasted eggplant and nuggets of toasted walnuts–tasted amazing on the crisped bread, and combined with the fragrant basil, tangy fresh tomatoes and salty cheese–it was a delicious contrast of flavors and textures. And I cannot imagine anyone not liking it–even folks who swear they dislike eggplant. It is also the sort of vegetarian dish that could convert the most ardent of meat-eaters!

Which made me think that there must be plenty of other pasta sauces that could be used to top bruschetta.

Have any of you used your leftover pasta sauces in such a way? Or have you done something else with them?

So, what do you do when you have leftover roasted asparagus?

Well, you could put it in an omelet the next morning for breakfast or brunch.

Or, you could add it to pasta with a creamy mushroom sauce.

Or, you could bake it into a casserole, puree it into a soup or mix it into a cheese sauce and use it to top baked potatoe.

Or, you could toss it to a salad made of other sweet spring vegetables and fresh goat cheese then dress it with a simple vinaigrette, which is what I did for dinner last night.

It was probably the most simple way of using up the roasted asparagus I could have come up with–and I have to say it was amazingly tasty,

The salad was a combination of mixed young leaf lettuces, tender baby spinach, julienne strips of sweet red onion, blanched baby sweet peas (you could just use thawed frozen peas if you cannot get young fresh peas), a chiffonade of ramp leaves and tangy, super fresh chevre, all from the farmer’s market. The dressing was a perfectly simple vinaigrette of balsamic vinegar, olive oil, dijon mustard, local honey, sea salt and Aleppo pepper flakes. (Freshly ground black pepper would be great, too.)

It went deliciously with the rest of our dinner–and I think that with the addition of some chopped up boiled egg and toasted black walnuts, it would make a great light lunch.

If only I had some leftover roasted beets to add to the salad–then it would have been perfect! (Not only because the beets would taste great with the asparagus, peas, red onions and greens, but because the color would have looked amazing in the salad. The red onions brought out the reddish violet highlights in the tips of the asparagus spears, and I can only imagine that the rubine translucence of beets would have brought them out even more.

One thing about using leftover roasted asparagus–if you used a solid fat like ghee or butter to roast the vegetable, be certain to warm your asparagus slightly in the microwave in order to melt the fat that is clinging to the spears just before you add it to the salad and toss it with the dressing. Otherwise, you risk having globs of cold ghee or butter in your salad which is just not very appealing.

If you used olive oil or canola oil–any oil that is liquid at room temperature, really–to roast your asparagus, you don’t need to worry about heat it up a bit before serving. Straight out of the fridge will work, though I think it tastes better if you bring it to room temperature before making the salad.

Spring Green Salad With Roasted Asparagus
Ingredients:

2 cups mixed leaf lettuces, washed, dried and torn into bite sized pieces
3 cups baby spinach leaves, washed and dried with any large stems removed
1 cup baby peas, shelled blanched, drained and chilled (or use thawed frozen peas)
1 1/2 cups roasted asparagus spears cut into 1″ lengths and brought to room temperature
1/2 cup red onion, cut into julienne
1/2 cup crumbled fresh goat cheese
1/4 cup chiffonade cut ramp leaves (or use green garlic leaves)
1/4 cup balsamic vinegar
3/4 cup olive oil
1 tablespoon dijon mustard
2 tablespoons honey
1/8 teaspoon salt
Aleppo pepper flakes or freshly grond black pepper to taste

Method

Toss the lettuces, spinach, peas, asparagus spears, onion, cheese and ramps in a large bowl.

Whisk together the remaining ingredients until an emulsion is formed. Drizzle as much dressing as you like over your salad and toss to combine.

Serve immediately.

Leftover stir-fried dishes in my house usually don’t last long enough to be turned into anything else. Usually they go home with people–Morganna takes some back to her dorm room for lunch the next day, or I send some home with Dan or Amy for meals the next day. Or, if it is a chicken dish that Kat particularly likes, I leave some to go with rice for her lunch the next day or for dinner, or what have you.

But sometimes, I seriously mess up and make too much of something or another.

And then it is time to make Leftover Fried Rice.

Which is just what it sounds like it is–it is a vehicle to use not only leftover rice–which is what the Chinese invented the stuff to do–you make too much rice, which is the staff of life and is thus not to be wasted, so you let it get cold and dried out a bit and you fry it the next day with some aromatics, some vegetables and bits of tofu or meat or seafood and eggs and wham! You have a quick lunch or snack, and your rice goes to a far better place than the compost pile or the slop bucket for the pigs.

At my house, when I have too much stir-fry leftovers to use up within a few days, I plan on making fried rice. I save up rice in the fridge, and in the past, I have saved up tidbits from two and sometimes three different stir-fries. I always have eggs around, and there are always a sad handful of carrots, some dried or fresh mushrooms, maybe a half a bunch of broccoli or asparagus or a tiny handful of snow peas and one or two scallions, and these get cut up to go into the fried rice as well.

In the case of this batch of Leftover Fried Rice, henceforth to be known as LFR, I had about 2/3 of a quart container of Chicken with Bacon and Bok Choy, as well as the handful of carrots, some chopped cilantro that didn’t get used to garnish tacos earlier this week and some sliced scallion tops that didn’t make it into the quesadillas from Monday. I also had some frozen peas thawed out for Kat to eat and she didn’t eat many of them, so I used those, and a half a bunch of asparagus that didn’t get stir-fried on Saturday. With the four fresh shiitakes leftover from a pasta dish on Sunday and the last couple of eggs in the fridge, I had plenty of goodness to go into the fried rice.

Making LFR is ridiculously simple.

All you need to do is to cut up some aromatics–scallions or onions, some fresh ginger and garlic and maybe add some fermented black beans, and have them ready. Then, whatever vegetables you have, cut them up in about the same size and shape as the ones in the stir-fry that you are using up in the LFR. This keeps it all pretty.

Then, you gather the condiments you are going to use in your fried rice.

If you want your rice to be brown, you need to use either thick soy sauce or dark soy sauce mixed with a little bit of ground bean sauce. I am beginning to prefer doing the latter because it has more flavor–the thick soy sauce that comes in a jar is really sweet because of the molasses in it. The combination of dark soy sauce and ground bean sauce is much more tasty, I think, in large part because of the natural glutamates in both condiments, which gives that savory umami taste that everyone likes so well.

You can add some chili garlic sauce or paste or some sesame oil if you want for extra flavor.

Once everything is cut up, you need to put everything into the order it is going into the wok in your workspace. Aromatics go first, with onions or scallions first, then fermented black beans if you use them or ginger and garlic. Then, if you have any raw meats, they go in next, or mushrooms can go in here, or tofu. Then, your cold leftover stir fries go in, with uncooked vegetables next, going in the order of which one takes longer to cook. Carrots always win this contest, with green beans next, then broccoli, and so on. Then, the rice goes in, and the condiments, then the eggs and the garnishes and that is it.

There are a few tricks to it.

One–always start with cold, fairly dry rice, and always break it out of its clumps before you cook it. If you start with it hot, you will end up with mushy rice that sticks to your wok, and no one likes that, least of all your wok. If you don’t break up the clumps before it goes in the wok, you have to do it after it goes in the wok and that can get messy, what with rice flying out of the wok in all directions as you chop at it madly with your wok shovel. So, take my advice and just lightly oil your hands and squish up any clumps you have by hand, getting as many grains of rice separated as possible from each other.

Two–beat your eggs well. You want them to be a nice uniform yellow in color and lightly thickened.

Three–you have to use more oil in the cooking of fried rice than you do in any of my regular stir-fry recipes, but you don’t have to use as much as they do in restaurants–I usually use no more than a third of a cup of oil and usually, I can get by with four tablespoons. Use as little as you can at first, and later, when the rice goes into the wok, if it sticks, you can add a bit more.

Four–if you can, bring your leftover stir fried bits to room temperature before cooking them. It keeps you from over cooking them the second time around and it keeps you from cooking down the wok overmuch. Bring your rice to room temperature, too, if you can.

That is about it.

Oh, and you can use any kind of stir-fried stuff in here you want. I’ve used leftover stir-fried Thai dry curries before in LFR, and I have also used leftover Ma Po Tofu which isn’t even stir-fried–it is braised. I have also used leftover Red-Cooked Beef–which is also braised, and leftover Dry-Fried String Beans and Steamed Chinese Sausages–and they all went fine in :LFR.

And the truth is–I have sneaked leftover andouille sausage and ham and bits of vegetables from non-Asian dishes in LFR, and it all turned out pretty darned tasty.

So, go for it–be wild, be free, and use up the little bits of this and that you have in your fridge. Food is too precious and expensive to waste.

Oh–and one more thing. LFR is great cold, but you can also use it to stuff in vegetables before roasting them. If you do that, just be sure and roast the stuffing veggies halfway before you stuff them, and then drizzle the stuffing after it is inside the veggies with some broth to keep it moist. Cover them tightly with foil so there is no drying out and then serve when the vegetables are tender and steamy.

Very tasty way to serve larger zucchini, for example.

Leftover Fried Rice–A General Guideline
Ingredients–Everything Except the Rice, the Leftovers, Some Aromatics and the Eggs is Optional:

4 tablespoons to 1/3 cup canola or peanut oil
1 1/2 cups thinly sliced onions or 2 bunches of scallions, white and light green parts sliced thinly on the diagonal
2 tablespoons fermented black beans, optional
1/4 cup minced fresh ginger
5-8 cloves garlic, minced
2-4 cups leftover stir-fried stuff–or braised meats or tofu or whatever you think will taste good together with the rice and other stuff you have gleaned from your fridge
1-2 cups fresh, uncooked vegetables cut up so they are in pieces similar to your leftover stir fry bits, optional
4-6 cups cooked cold long-grain rice–clumps broken up
1 1/2 tablespoons thick soy sauce or 2 tablespoons dark soy sauce and 1 1/2 tablespoons ground bean sauce
2 eggs very well beaten
1 cup thinly sliced scallion tops, and/or chopped cilantro leaves, and/or thawed frozen peas–all are optional
1/2 teaspoon toasted sesame oil–you guessed it–optional
salt to taste–yes, this is optional, too–I bet you are surprised

Method:

First, clean out your refrigerator of anything that is edible and that will taste good in your LFR. Use your judgment here, but don’t be afraid to experiment. Leftover grilled corn on the cob, so long as you remove it from the cob before it goes into the wok -will- taste great in this–even if it isn’t anywhere near traditional. Remember, the point if this dish is not authenticity to any preconceived notion of what you think of as fried rice–the point is to use up leftovers in a tasty, non-wasteful fashion. So clean out your fridge, and cut and prep all of your ingredients. Lay them out in the order in which they will go into the wok, as outlined in the post above and in the ingredient list.

Heat your wok on high heat until a thin ribbon of smoke drifts up from it. Add the oil–add a smaller amount first–you can add the rest later. Heat one minute, until it shimmers and moves with convection currents in the wok.

Add the onions or scallions. Cook, stirring until they brown lightly and soften–this takes longer with the onions. If you are using fermented black beans, add them when the onions or scallions are halfway cooked.

Add the ginger and garlic and cook one more minute.

Add the leftover stir fry or cooked whatevers. Stir and cook for about a minute before you start adding raw vegetables, remembering to add the ones that take longer to cook, such as carrots or mushrooms, first. Use your common sense here. Big broccoli stalks will take longer to cook than skinny green beans or asparagus, though big stalks of asparagus will take longer, unless you cut them in thin diagonal slices or blanch them first. So, after the leftover bits cook for a minute to warm up, start adding the raw vegetables.

Cook until the raw veggies are just starting to look sort of done.

Add the rice. Stir, chop, stir, scrape, stir, chop, stir, scrape. Make sure you don’t need more oil. If you do, clear a spot in the center of the wok and add it there. Stir, scrape, chop. Add the thick soy sauce or the dark soy sauce and ground bean sauce. Stir, scrape, stir, toss–this requires strong forearms. Cook and stir until everything is mixed nicely together, everything smells nice, everything is brownish and there are no clumps of rice stuck together.

Scrape a bare spot in the center of the wok and pour in the egg. Stir until the egg is as done as you like it–I do mine until they are half way done, but most people cook them all the way, then scrape them into eggy bits and stir them in then. I do mine until they are half-cooked and then stir them in and let the heat of the rice finish cooking them–this way they dissolve into the rice and make it lightly sticky so that it is easier to eat with chopsticks and it gives it a rich, delicious flavor. The more traditional way of cooking them all the way and then stirring them in is good, too.

Remove wok from heat. Stir in whatever garnishes you have, if you have any.

Add sesame oil if you want, and stir well.

Serve it forth, eat heartily and happily and be of glad heart for your refrigerator is clean and you have wasted no food this day.

I know I just wrote about soup.

Actually, I wrote about a specific soup, and gave a recipe.

Now, I am just writing about soup in general, because in one of the comments about the Broccoli-Cheese and Kale Soup, a reader told me about something a cookbook author said that just got me all riled up and gave me the twitches.I could feel the indignant Depression-era farm wife who was my Grandma rising up from the grave and urging me to write a harangue worthy of Gram, my city-dwelling other grandmother, whose razor-edged tongue was known to often wither any damned fool ignoramus who dared utter a silly idea in her presence.

In other words, my grandmothers, if they were alive to hear such a thing would be set off on a tizzy of combined laughter and scorn such that I feel moved to speak for them, and stand up for the ideals which I was taught in childhood, ideals which could serve many people well in this desperate economy. Ideals that have made me loathe to throw any morsel of edible food away, because I was raised by people who lived through the Great Depression, and who worked with their hands to grow and produce the food they ate. Such folk do not look too kindly upon the waste of food. Rather, these folk tend to see it as sacrilege, and I most heartily agree.

So, what got me all het up?

Laura said, “I am glad to hear you say all that about older veggies and aromatics. One of my cookbooks, which I like otherwise, makes this big deal about how it is passe or some such nonsense to make soup out of anything less than perfect onions, etc, and every time I throw an older onion into a soup (there’s one in the chicken stock simmering away for the soup I am cooking right now with the older sweet potato) I think well good lord if I listened to that book I’d be throwing away a perfectly edible onion. After all before mass transit those onions would be looking pretty sad by now in the north but people still used them!”

I hear you, sister! Preach on, can I get an amen?

Amen.

Passe?

Since when is frugality passe? I mean, really. That is just such utter nonsense, I am half-tempted to just guffaw and walk away, but no, I think that opinions like this need to be confronted and answered because they are so wrong it isn’t even funny.

I mean, I once had a commenter on one of my recipes where I had used dried thyme leaves say, and I am not making this up, “No one uses dried herbs anymore–it is just so passe.”

Well pardon me, Mr. Passepants. That is what I wanted to say, but I refrained, since it was a cheap shot, and I didn’t feel like being a twitchy twit that day. But now, I will say it, not just to that guy, but to the unknown cookbook author and to the one chef in culinary school who saw me use a rubbery carrot to flavor and color a court bouillon for poaching salmon and said, “Garbage in, garbage out.”

(What is it about American’s quest for “the perfect—-fill in the blank with the name of a fruit or vegetable?” This quest for perfect produce is what has led us to beautiful but tasteless Red Delicious apples, huge, perfectly smooth skinned pumpkins with watery, tasteless flesh and giant, sweet-smelling strawberries that taste like styrofoam. It is all a passel of aberrant behavior on the part of food marketers and people who eat with their eyes, not their mouths–in other words, they want food that is pretty rather than food that tastes good.)

So, here I am, saying it, loud and proud–Pardon me, all you passepants-wearing elitist food snobs in the world, but when you go on about how using less than perfectly fresh vegetables and herbs in food is passe, you are making asses of yourselves and are just showing the rest of us how out of touch you are with the fact that food is not just art–it is meant to satisfy and sustain the souls and bodies of human beings.

And lots of those human beings whose souls and bodies need sustenance just as much as the passeposse cannot afford to just use the freshest and best of every little thing in every little dish they cook.

But that doesn’t mean that their food is less able to incite gustatory delight as the food made by the “food is art” nose-in-the-air crowd.

Oh, no, no, no.

In fact, I will tell you that I -know- for a fact that food made with less than perfect vegetables and dried herbs can knock the socks off of any diner, and contains just as much soul-stirring goodness as the rarefied tidbits eaten by the trend-setting wealthy folks. In fact, I might have to say that the food of the proletariat, made from humble ingredients, prepared in a frugal manner might just have a bit more soul in them than the finest dishes from the most fancified restaurants in the world.

And frankly, having dined on both, I have to admit that I prefer the foods of the peasantry to the foods of kings.

So, now you know where I stand on the issue.

Now that we have the rant out of the way, I can take a breath and talk about what this post is really about–avoiding food waste, and making something amazingly delicious out of truly humble ingredients–meaning lesser cuts of meat, dried beans and herbs and vegetables that are a bit past their prime.

And this is a great time of year to talk about it, because we are at the end of winter and the beginning of spring, which is prime soup making season, not just because we have warm days with still cool to cold nights, but because all of the vegetables that have been in storage all winter are starting to show their age a bit. Even the ones from the grocery stores, which have been in climate-controlled facilities for months, where ethylene gas is vented away, and the humidity and temperature are controlled perfectly, are starting to succumb to the hand of time and are losing their crisp nature.

The cabbages are starting to wilt.

The carrots, parsnips and turnips are turning a bit rubbery.

And the potatoes, once crisp and snappy, all know ’tis the season to sprout, so they are getting soft as they start sending forth long-tentacle-like shoots which make me think of B-movie science fiction monsters from the outer darkness of the space-time continuum.

(The onions and the garlic are in the same boat with the potatoes. They know it is time they got planted, so they are going soft and sending out green shoots in an attempt to propagate themselves right there in your pantry.)

What is a poor, frugal householder to do when faced with a bin full of guishy potatoes, pathetic onions, flubbery carrots, rubbery rutabagas, wizened beets and flaccid cabbages?

You all know what I am going to say, so why not join in?

Make soup!

Make soup with a glad heart, because the truth is this–once you have simmered your vegetables for hours, perhaps with some dried herbs–which by the way, have a more concentrated flavor because the water, which dilutes flavor, is removed–(this is only true if your dried herbs have not been handed down from the time of Moses–if they are that old, please compost them) and some old, tough cuts of meat or maybe some bones left over from a roast–you will neither know or care what condition they were in before they were cooked. Their texture will not suffer, nor will their flavor. You may have lost some nutritive value, but not that much, really.

What you have done, however, by using these unfortunate foundlings of your pantry, however, is saved yourself some money by not throwing them out and buying new stuff all over again. You have saved money, you have helped out the environment by not wasting all of the resources that were used to grow them in the first place, and you made something delicious and nutritious to eat.

How can that be a bad thing?

Now, here are a few pointers on how to determine which vegetables are safe to use because they are just a little bedraggled and which ones are just plain old nasty and need to go very far away from your kitchen.

One: Follow your nose–it always knows.

If it smells bad, throw it out. If it makes you gag after one tentative sniff, then it has gone well beyond past its prime and travelled into the realm of “Oh, dear God, no!” Once it stinks, it is a candidate only for a toss into the compost pile.

Two: Let your fingers do the walking.

Your less than optimal, yet still usable vegetables will be softer than perfect vegetables, but, they should not give way under a nice, firm squeeze. If this happens, and your fingers sink into vegetative flesh that has deliquesced into primordial ooze, then bury the slimy remnants of a once proud foodstuff into the compost heap at the back of your garden. Say a few nice words over it and move along to washing your hands. The texture of a properly useful yet less than fresh vegetable is lightly soft, perhaps somewhat spongy, but the integrity of the skin should hold. You may find some bruised spots, and those can be cut away and composted, while the rest of the vegetable is then a candidate for the soup-pot, but overall, the flesh should be firmish, yet yielding. Trust me–your fingers will know that texture when they feel it.

Three: Seeing is believing.

Your eyes can finish telling you what your nose and fingers cannot. They will tell you if the onion is spotted with powdery black mildew, or if the wizened skin of a moldy potato has cracked and let the rotting agent inside the flesh. Surface mold and mildew can be cut away–in the case of the powdery black stuff on onions, it is usually only skin deep, and can be removed with the papery skin and perhaps one layer of flesh which has started to go slimy. Those bits, just like a moldy bit of potato, go into the compost, while the rest can be saved, rinsed and used. Your eyes will also warn you of potatoes what have been exposed to the light and have gone green–those can be used, but the green parts need to be completely removed and discarded, because they contain a mild alkaloid which will make you sick if you eat it. (The green part also tastes bitter–which is your tongues way of telling you not to eat something.)

Which brings us to–

Four: Taste the difference.

Yes, give your subjects a cautious taste. You will find that sometimes rubbery carrots have gone a bit bitter, or mushy apples taste a little alcoholic. (That would be because they are fermenting in their skins a bit. That won’t hurt you if you cook the apples, the alcohol will be boiled off, but still it is nice to know.) Sometimes the taste is too radically icky to be useful and away the comestible in question goes, but sometimes, you may find that there is just a slight to no discernible flavor difference between the perfectly fresh specimens and the ones you are trying to save from the landfill. Often, the only difference is in texture, not flavor.

So you see that your senses, paired with a bit of common sense from your brain, can combine to tell you which vegetables are safe to eat but less than pretty, and which ones are possibly hazardous to your health and should be discarded. The only sense left out is your sense of hearing, which is because it is pretty worthless in this exercise. So as to keep your ears from feeling left out, how about putting on some nice music while you engage in your pantry-gleaning, vegetable-saving and soup-making?

For more tips on keeping food waste down in your kitchen, take a look at these posts from Jonathan Bloom’s excellent blog, Wasted Food.

And please, whatever you do, don’t tell him, or me, for that matter, that worrying about wasting food is passe.

Because it bloody well isn’t.

And I suspect that the folks who thought it was passe a few years ago to use less than splendid carrots in a soup may just be changing their tunes in the coming months, and perhaps people will return to an appreciation for the frugal ways of the plebeian kitchen.

As the recession deepens and food prices creep upwards, it behooves everyone to make our best efforts to avoid wasting food. That means either learning how to cook exactly how much you need for a given meal, or saving and -actually eating- any leftovers you produce.

If you are like me, you probably save every bit of leftovers with full intentions to eat them, but then forget about them. Or, we eat them for a couple of days and then get sick of the same thing over and over and over, and then never want to eat whatever it is again.

But the truth is, it doesn’t have to be that way.

With a few spices, some pantry items and some ingenuity, we can transform leftovers into completely new and interesting dishes.

So today, I am unveiling a new series of posts which I will do whenever I come up with new ways with leftovers, entitled, “Leftover Makeover.”

This first post shows how to transform plain roasted baby potatoes into a delicious curried potato, fenugreek and tomato dish, Aloo Methi Tamatar.

All that is required to makeover plain roasted potatoes into a curried delight are canola oil, onions, garlic, fresh ginger, dried fenugreek leaves, turmeric, cumin seeds, mustard seeds, chili flakes, canned tomatoes and salt.

All of these items live in my pantry anyway–and if you don’t have some of them, you will probably be okay changing the recipe to suit what you do have. For example, if you have no turmeric, but you do have curry powder, use that. If you don’t have dried fenugreek greens–though they are inexpensive to buy in Indian grocery stores, and if double wrapped in ziplock bags and kept in the freezer, they will stay fresh for a very long time–you could use fresh cilantro instead. Just take the “methi” out of the name of the dish, since methi means fenugreek. You could use ground cumin and mustard seed if you want, but they taste better as whole seeds.

And, of course, if it is summer, you can use fresh tomatoes and fresh methi or cilantro from your garden or farmer’s market.

This would be great with rice and some kind of dal–rajma dal or butternut squash dal would be great with this– for an inexpensive, delicious, very nutritious vegan meal–one that vegans, vegetarians and omnivores can all enjoy.

And, if you don’t eat all of the potatoes as a curry, take them and use them the next morning with eggs as an Indian Frittata.

Aloo Methi Tamatar
Ingredients:

3 tablespoons canola oil
2 cups thinly sliced yellow onions
4 cups leftover roasted potatoes
5 cloves garlic, minced
1 1/2″ cube fresh ginger, peeled and minced
1 1/2 tablespoons dried methi leaves, soaked in 1/2 cup hot water
2 teaspoons ground turmeric
1 tablespoon cumin seeds
2 teaspoons black mustard seeds
1 14 ounce can diced tomatoes
salt to taste

Method:

Heat the canola oil in a heavy-bottomed large skillet over medium high heat. Spread onions into a thin layer on the bottom of the pan and cook, stirring, until the onions are a deep golden color. Add potatoes, garlic, ginger, and stir well to combine and cook until the garlic and ginger are golden and the onions are a deep reddish brown.

Remove methi leaves from water and squeeze out excess from leaves. Sprinkle into pan with the turmeric, and cumin and mustard seeds. Cook, stirring, until mustard seeds pop. Add the soaking water and stir to combine well.

Turn heat down to low and add tomatoes.

Cook, stirring as needed, until most of the liquid is cooked away (this is a fairly dry curry) away and the flavors have had a chance to combine well–about twenty to thirty minutes. Add salt to taste and stir well.