I sometimes feel I have nothing but leftovers to deal with. It's so hard to cook for just two people without having leftovers. I can't imagine the problem with just cooking for one. I suspect that if that awful circumstance should ever happen to me I shall be eating a lot of scrambled eggs on toast and pasta with a little bit of something. Or maybe I shall at last master the art of cooking steak.
Anyway at this point in time I have these savoury scones. I adore savoury scones. So easy to make and they are a bit of a rubbish bin in themselves, in that you can add whatever you like to them along with the cheese. These had some leftover ham and chives and a bit of carrot, and I made them to accompany the carrot soup we had the other day. (I have so many carrots - having bought an extra kilo when I thought I was almost out of carrots - not so - so now I have 2 and a bit kilos of carrots.) So sort of leftovers too.
Scones - well savoury ones anyway - are best eaten warm, and of course you can just reheat them and eat them for lunch - with more cheese, or ham, or tomato ... I just did in fact, which made me think of them. For the problem with scones is that they also go off - go mouldy in fact - pretty quickly.
And of course I could just freeze them, but my freezer is a bit of a trap. I just forget what's in there. Besides reconstituted frozen stuff is never as good as fresh - particularly when it comes to bread things I think. My children refuse to eat frozen baguettes for example. Even though they may have only been in the freezer a week or so. There's always a faint taste of the freezer isn't there? An indefinable but detectable and not attractive, vaguely metallic tang. Meat and fish are OK because they get cooked, but not the bread things.
So what else can I do with leftover savoury scones? Well I guess, like bread, I can turn them into breadcrumbs and do all the wonderful things you can do with breadcrumbs. And I may well do this next time we have pasta - Monday maybe. But surely you can do other things?
So I had a look and, frankly, didn't come up with a lot other than the aforesaid breadcrumb options. Well you can break them into bits, toss in melted butter - or oil - and bake in the oven to make croutons - which is really a bit like toasted breadcrumbs. But what then anyway? Yes you can freeze them. (see the previous paragraph.) Well I guess a salad, to my mind is the best use of croutons. I don't like them with soup much, they just end up soggy and I think scone croutons wouldn't even hold their shape they would just disintegrate into the soup.
I did think about bread and butter pudding kind of things, and yes I did see a couple of versions of this - one from Baking Mad and one from The English Kitchen, but really, when would you eat this? Both of these websites suggested for breakfast, but they are clearly into much larger breakfasts than exist in this house. The first one is potentially a main meal I guess, but not the second one. They are very similar - mix the broken up scones with eggs, milk and cheese and then add other things and bake. Mmm - possible.
I know you can dob scone like mixture on top of casseroles for a dumpling like crusty finish, so I wonder if you could slice stale ones and do the same? We have some leftover stew to finish on Monday, so I could perhaps give that a go, to bulk it out just a bit - because of course - the other annoying thing about leftovers in my house, there is usually somewhat less than half of the original left to eat. Too much for one and not enough for two. I suspect you'd have the same problem as with the croutons in soup though - soggy or disintegrated.
Could you slice them and fry them and top them with egg, or tomato or bacon - if you didn't like egg (my husband). Could you make sort of chips by cutting them into chip shapes tossing in oil and/or butter and baking or frying? If you crunched them up and mixed them some kind of fat could you make a tart base?
Could you feed them to the birds and ants? Will they end up in the compost? Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall where are you? Why haven't you got any ideas?
Or shall I just pig out on reheated scones with butter? Is that why there are no ideas out there? Maybe they just taste too delicious to be left over.
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