Saturday, February 8, 2014

Creative use of leftovers - a saving grace!

It has taken me years to get to the point in my cooking where I no longer have to have a recipe to make dinner for my family. MANY years. Years of pushing by a dear friend, who insisted I stop following recipes! I still follow recipes once in awhile, but I've really gotten comfortable pulling ingredients together for dinner.

This week was a prime example. Wednesday night I had about 45 minutes to cook and eat dinner between Zumba and Bible study. And I didn't realize until half way through the work day that I hadn't planned anything.

In the fridge I found:
1/3 box of velveeta
leftover chili from our chili dogs
leftover chopped onion (also from the chili dogs)
leftover cooked bacon (that NEVER happens - someone didn't see that in the fridge!)

I have made cheeseburger soup many times with velveeta, so I thought I'd try a spicy bacon cheeseburger soup.

I started with a simple roux - melted a stick of butter with some onion, salt and pepper, and then stirred in flour, cooked it off, and started adding milk. Once the base was a little thinner than I wanted, I added the cubed velveeta, stirring it until it melted and thickened the soup. Tossed in the spicy chili (basically hamburger and onion in a spicy tomato paste) and chopped bacon, and viola - an amazing soup! I had cleaned four partial leftovers out of the fridge, and with the fresh bread from the night before - had created a wonderful quick dinner for the family. Everything happened so fast, that I didn't even get pictures!

The key is to not be afraid.. Not everything works. But sometimes you find a diamond - like I did in this soup. So it's always worth the try!

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