Caitríona Redmond: Reinvent leafy leftovers with my stunning stuffed cabbage rolls
Stuffed cabbage rolls.
At this point in the Christmas season, you’ve spent a fortune on beautiful food; please don’t throw out your leftovers.
Whatever you throw into the compost or general waste is effectively throwing your money away. Make your leftovers work for you and the entire family will eat very well for days, and even weeks to come.
Leftovers are the workhorse of Christmas eating for me. I love that I have a wide variety of ingredients to hand that I can whip into a speedy meal without loads of effort.
Bubble and Squeak is a wonderfully onomatopoeic description for a meal that bubbles and squeaks on a frying pan. Traditionally made with leftover mashed potato and cabbage, don’t be limited by just those two ingredients; combine mash or roast potatoes with any leftover vegetables and some shredded turkey or ham. In my opinion, it’s made all the better for an additional knob of butter and sometimes a fried egg on top. Whatever your choices, it’s a simple way to cook up leftover dinner the following day.
If you have oodles of dinner leftover, take a large baking dish and combine sliced meats with gravy and cooked vegetables, top with mashed potatoes and crumble stuffing over the top. Bake in the oven until piping hot and serve.
Most of us will have cooked turkey and ham on the bone. Don’t throw out your bones! Take a large pot and place the bones inside. Cover with water and simmer with the lid on for an hour to ninety minutes. Allow the pot to cool a little bit before straining the liquid into jars or using it to make a wonderfully fragrant broth or soup with leftover vegetables. Use a stick blender to combine the broth with cooked vegetables into a smooth soup which will appeal to all ages. Now you can discard the bones to the compost bin as you will have extracted liquid gold.
Slices or loaves of bread can be shredded and milled in a food processor to make breadcrumbs. The breadcrumbs can be frozen for use in another recipe in the future. Cake crumbs and leftover Christmas pudding can be stirred into a gur cake, or even mixed into chocolate to make seasonal truffles.
If you are still lucky enough to have a toastie-maker in your kitchen kit, then rejoice. Fill your toasties with sliced meats, stuffing, and relish before cooking until crispy on the outside. Toasties are a fantastic vehicle for all kinds of savoury and sweet fillings. A real highlight of Christmas eating as far as I’m concerned.
If you don’t intend to reinvent your leftovers, that’s okay too. I have some preservation tips below. Remember, wasted food is money lost that you could have spent elsewhere, and this is the yardstick by which I measure my Christmas food success.
When Christmas dinner is over, I wait for everything to cool to room temperature before packing up and refrigerating or freezing what I want to hold onto.
SafeFood recommends that cooked foods that have cooled and been left on the countertop for longer than 2 hours should be thrown out.
This is an important thing to note as I know many people leave the ham and turkey out of the fridge; this could be a fast track to food poisoning.
If you have just a small amount of vegetables or meat leftover, maybe enough for one portion, then fill a lunchbox with the food, seal, and then freeze it. You never know when a single dinner portion can come in handy.
Once you refrigerate your cooked food, you have 2 days to eat what you’ve filled the shelves with before you need to decide the next steps.
After 2 days, you can either freeze whatever is left, cook it for another meal, or put the leftovers into the compost bin.
My preference is to cook or repurpose what I can, slice meats into portions for lunches, and then freeze the lot. I’ll be thanking myself at some point in the future for the break from cooking.
Freeze a whole head of cabbage rather than parboiling or steaming to make these cabbage rolls. It eliminates an awful lot of effort and reduces the preparation time. Servings Preparation Time Cooking Time Total Time Course Ingredients 1 head of firm white cabbage, frozen! 200g cooked turkey, chopped 200g cooked ham, chopped 4 tbsp stuffing 1-200g cooked vegetables 1tbsp olive oil 3 cloves garlic, minced 400g passata 1 tsp oregano Salt & Pepper Method Follow my tip above to make the cabbage leaves pliable and easy to remove from the head of cabbage. Remove 8-10 leaves from the cabbage and return it to the freezer if you have plenty left over for another day. Combine the turkey, ham, stuffing, and cooked vegetables in a large bowl to make the filling. Lay a cabbage leaf flat and place 2-3 tbsp of filling in the centre then roll into a cigar shaped roll. Repeat until all the filling is gone. Take a large casserole dish and heat it to medium on the hob. Add the olive oil and garlic to the dish and stir for 30 seconds so that the garlic begins to cook. Pour in the passata carefully so that it doesn’t splash, stir. Nestle the cabbage rolls into the casserole dish and toss so that they are coated in the passata mixture. Place a lid on the dish or cover with foil and bake in the oven at 170 degrees for 40 minutes or simmer on low for 1 hour before serving with crusty bread.Stuffed-cabbage rolls
