From Xmas leftovers to 7-days of meal preps in one hour….
It’s the holiday season. You’ve bought more food than usual and now there’s lots left over in the fridge. Here’s how we dealt with it, by turning all those leftovers into tasty, nutritious vegetable pies:
Prepare: Using a small mountain of unused veg (in this case there was 2 onions, 2 sticks of celery, 3 baking potatoes, 2 sweet potatoes, 2 carrots, a parsnip, a red bell pepper, a small head of broccoli, a large handful of cavolo nero/black kale, a pack of green beans, a tin of kidney beans and a cup of frozen peas) we chopped everything to 1 cm/0.5″ pieces and cooked over a medium heat.
Cook: After about 10 minutes, we added about a quarter of a bottle of white wine. Once the wine was mostly cooked away, we added two tablespoons of flour to the veg, stirred it in thoroughly and cooked it for a couple of minutes more. Then we added 500ml of vegetable stock, some fresh thyme that was hiding in the bottom of the fridge, a tablespoon of grain mustard, salt and pepper, and a big pinch of mixed dried herbs.
In a separate pan, we cooked about a cup (dry weight) of quinoa, seasoned with a little vegetable bouillon.
Meanwhile, cooking in the oven, there’s now a sheet of ready-made puff pastry that we have pre-cut into 8 rectangles. These will go on top of our individual pies.
Finally, with everything now cooked, it’s time for the assembly process. In the bottom of each meal box there is a layer of quinoa. On top of that, there is a deep, flavourful layer of mixed veg in that lovely wine, thyme and mustard sauce, and then on the top there’s a cute lid of puff pastry.
All told, we made seven large meal portions with this, plus we had two extra portions left over for our own lunch today. Pretty good for an hour’s work!
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