Leftover dinners better than the original.
I was looking around through my draft posts, the ones that I never published here, and found this:
Recently, I made a delicious dinner: bay scallops in red pepper butter, cooked in ramekins and served up with dry-seared asparagus. I had half of the recipe left over: 4 ramekins full of scallops and shallots, butter and hot pepper and bread crumbs.
In my fridge, I had fresh egg lasagne noodles, twice as wide as the dried versions.
I carefully picked out the large chunks of butter, leaving behind the peppers and shallots, and wrapped the leftovers gently in cooked noodles (2 ramekins to a noodle), topped it all with vodka sauce, and slid it into the oven for about 10 minutes.
The leftovers, thus transformed, passed through delicious into sublime: melting on the tongue, the shallots tender, the scallops sweet and delicate against the noodle in a way they had not been standing alone.
Dry-seared asparagus, almost impossible to improve on, again provided the accompaniment. What better?
I had another experience like this just this past week. We’d grilled a white-wine-and-herb marinated half-chicken, and had the tender, smoky leftovers in the fridge, along with leftover grilled cherry tomatoes (three varieties - grape tomatoes from our farm box, and Red Currants and Yellow Pears from our garden). We shredded the chicken from the bone, and reheated it and the tomatoes in our trusty microwave. On the stove, I made penne and heated cream with some salt and pepper.
When the penne was ready, I drained it and put it back in the pot, tossed in the chicken, tomatoes, and cream, and stirred it all about before plating it and topping with some freshly grated Parm. Marvelous! (And enough left over for two lunches, making three meals out of that half-chicken.)