Chard Stem Pickles

When I cook chard, I take out the stems and cut across the leaf. I braise the dark greens, but I’m left with naked stems. The other night, I decided to transform chard stems into quick pickles, otherwise known as refrigerator pickles because that’s where you have to store them. I turned to Quick Pickles for inspiration, and though there are photos of chard in the book, that particular item never appears in the index. Odd.

But a bit of leafing through the book gave me enough examples to develop my own recipe: 1 part salt, 2 parts sugar and 4 parts vinegar. Bring to a boil, pour over chopped chard stems, and add dried chile and thin slices of lime. Let cool to room temperature; cover and chill. The chard stems taste mostly of their brine, but they do have a satisfying crunch and a pleasant vegetable flavor.

Chicken Cycle

Photo by Melissa Schneider.

One of the easiest of my “cycles,” the cascades of dinners I make from leftovers, is the one I do with chicken. Roast a chicken at the beginning of the week, or take a raw one apart, and you've got a few meals for two at the ready.

I started on Monday with a roast chicken, purchased at Berkeley’s farmers’ market. I rubbed it down on Sunday night with salt and dried oregano so that it would be flavorful when I cooked it. I pulled the chicken out of the oven and chopped off the rear legs to serve with steamed carrots, mashed potatoes that I had speckled with carrot greens, and a gravy made from chicken broth and beer, the leftover cooking liquid from a nettle soup I had made the night before. I wrapped the rest of the bird and left it in the refrigerator.

Tuesday I carved off one of the breasts, chopped it into pieces, reheated those in a sauté pan, and served them on top of a salad of mixed greens, persimmon slices, carrots, and dried figs. Wednesday I carved the other breast away from the skeleton and added it to pasta with braised kale. Friday — I teach on Thursday nights — I made chicken pot pie with the wing meat and other scraps still on the carcass, store-bought puff pastry (even I use it when I don’t have time to make my own), peas, carrots, corn, and bacon; I served the pie with broccoli and garnished Melissa’s pot pie with a little puff pastry heart that I cut from the leftover dough. Everyone together: Awwww. (If you find yourself with leftover puff pastry dough in general, keep the scraps in the freezer and use them to make palmiers at some later date.)

We’re getting used to eating less meat now that we’re “house poor.” We’re not going vegetarian, but the kind of meat we support tends to be more expensive: We can’t afford a $12 roast chicken every night.

But a thrifty cook can use meat as an accent to add texture and flavor to a dish without using a big blob of protein as a crutch for delivering good food. Add a bit of meat at a time, and you can stretch expensive ingredients longer. That $12 chicken cost us, on average, $3 a night. And I haven’t even made stock with it yet. Some meats work better than others for this — you don’t need much ham or bacon to flavor a dish — but I think a little thought can stretch just about anything.

The Rice And Beans Cycle

It’s been a while since I’ve had to think about a tight cooking budget. Five years ago, my company shut down and I hadn’t yet been hired by another one. I saved up money as I saw the gleaming axe hanging over my old company, but I didn’t know how long my savings would need to last (only two months in the collapsed economy of the time, it turned out). As the family cook, I spent my days figuring out ways to cut culinary costs.

I had whole systems that I called “cycles,” though “waterfalls” might be a better term. I wouldn’t just pop leftovers into a microwave; I’d use them as ingredients for new dishes. A chicken cycle might start with a roast chicken. I’d shred the meat we didn’t eat and put it in pasta or in a pot pie. Then the bones would become stock. I’d use the stock for risotto. If we had leftover risotto, I’d shape it into cakes and pan fry those. And on and on.

Last week, I tried to step back into that mindset. What better place to start, I thought, then the dish we’ll come to know and love so well: rice and beans. Boo hoo for us, right? Don’t worry: the beans were from Rancho Gordo and the rice was from Massa. We’re not so impoverished that I can’t afford good ingredients.

The Dishes
On Tuesday, I cooked the rice and beans separately and combined a portion of each for dinner, adding in rehydrated dried cherry tomatoes to make a single, colorful dish but keeping the leftovers separate. When I tried this cycle before, I spent a long time picking beans out of the rice; I’ll pass on that task, thank you.

The next night I made rice cakes. I’ve perfected this dish with risotto, where the starch that leaches into the cooking liquid glues the grains together. With less starchy rice, I had to find an alternate method. I puréed about a cup of leftover rice with 1/3 cup half-and-half — breaking up the whole grains and releasing the starch within — and shaped the mix into patties. (If you use a cookie cutter to shape them, you can pack in the rice and it will stick better.) I left them in the refrigerator for two hours and then fried them in a stick of butter, flipping them to crisp each side. To go with these healthy snacks, I tossed mixed greens with a red wine vinaigrette and added chopped dried figs and a poached egg. Never underestimate the value of a poached egg in a salad.

On the third day, I transformed the leftover beans into a cold salad by adding feta, red onion, and lime juice.

If I were all the way back in my cheap eating game, I’d have saved the bean cooking liquid and the hot water I used to rehydrate the tomatoes. Both are flavorful broths that I could add to braising liquid or a pan sauce. But the rice and bean cycle was a good step back into that old life. With leftovers like this, who needs new food?