Secrets of Great Second Meals: Flexible Modern Recipes That Value Time and Limit Waste

By Sara Dickerman

A James Beard award winner offers ‘‘an invitation to ‘start riffing with the contents of your refrigerator’ and encourage a new perspective on leftovers’’ (Publishers Weekly).

When it comes to leftovers, Sara Dickerman believes that there is nothing better than figuring out the right way to reframe a good meal into another, potentially great meal. Second meals aren’t just reheating last night’s dinner. At Sara’s house, re-invention might mean pureeing roasted vegetables into a quick soup, crafting a beautiful salad with some second-day salmon, or stuffing cooked rice into roasted poblano peppers. But unlike other cookbooks that emphasize thrift, Secrets of Great Second Meals focuses on creating inviting, sophisticated, and healthy recipes that are flexible enough to adapt to what you have on hand.

Sara shows how to make the most of your food the way chefs do. With a little planning, you can look at extra food from one dinner as components to another meal that has already been prepped. Sara provides a list of the top ten most versatile dishes for multiple meals, offers advice on food storage, and includes tips on adding freshness and flavor using salt, acids, herbs, and texture. Most importantly, she gives home cooks the tools they need to improvise confidently.

Illustrated with full-color photos, Secrets of Great Second Meals makes re-imagining food for a second meal not just a good, cheap, waste-reducing thing to do, but way of making every day eating more inventive and enticing.

“[For] anyone who has ever looked quizzically at a container of leftovers while trying to plan a new meal will find what they’re looking for.” —Booklist

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Feb 12, 2019
• ISBN: 9780062672995

Book preview

Dedication

For Andrew—

there’s no better companion

for second (and first) meals

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction

Choose Your Own Adventure

Second-Meal Semantics

Food Waste, the New Frontier

Making the Most of Your Food

Reanimating Stored Food

How to Use This Book

Getting to Cooked

Aromatic Braised Chard and Kale

Lazybones Beans

Miso-Roasted Tofu

Grilled Vegetable Party

The Sesame Roasted Winter Vegetable Party

Garlicky Pork Shoulder in a Pressure Cooker (or Not)

Planked Salmon

Spaghetti and Meatballs

Braised Whole Chicken with Star Anise

Shiitake Dashi

Roasty Chicken Stock

Slow-Roasted Tomatoes

Mayonnaise

Salsa Verde

Scallion Oil

Snacks

The Banana Date Blastoff

Creamy Spinach and Shallot Dip

Fromage Not So Fort

White Bean Tonnato with Roasted Tomatoes and Scallions

Roasted Cauliflower and Tahini Crostini

Salmon Rillettes

Marinated Mussels

Roasted Chickpeas with Rosemary

Spanish Ham Croquetas with Pickled Pepper Salsa

Mixed-Cheese Gougères with Dates and Arugula

Eggs

Devilled Egg Salad with Radishes and Rye

Meatball Frittata with Mozzarella and Tomatoes

On Omelets

Steamed Eggs-in-Pots with Ham and Spinach

Winter Squash and Sausage Strata

Curried Swiss Chard Soufflé

Rye Crepes with Beets, Leeks, and Fried Eggs

Salads

Green Goddess Chicken Salad with Chickpeas and Carrots

Crunchy Salad with Roasted Beets, Avocados, and Feta Dressing

Roasted Squash and Eggplant Salad with Creamy Chive and Coriander Dressing

Ginger-Scallion Chicken Salad with Cucumbers

Warm White Bean Salad with Pork, Apples, and Sage and Mustard Dressing

Farro Salad with Broccolini and Walnuts

Wild Rice Salad with Smoked Salmon and Celery

Grains and Legumes

Coconut Rice Waffles

Spiced Oatmeal Buttermilk Pancakes

Black Rice Porridge with Mango and Lime

Flank Steak Vermicelli with Asparagus and Herbs

Brown Rice Congee with Chicken and Crispy Noodles

Black Lentils with Beets, Asparagus, and Sauce Gribiche

Quinoa Bowl with Greens, Sweet Potatoes, and Turmeric Cream

Farro Pilaf with Caramelized Onions, Cauliflower, and Golden Raisins

Quinoa Cakes with Panela and Spinach

Soups and Curries

Spicy Tofu Soup with Bok Choy

Chickpea-Chard Soup with Parsley-Chive Gremolata

Parsnip-Hazelnut Soup with Scallion Oil

Fennel-Scented Tomato Soup with Grilled Vegetables

Avgolemono with Spinach and Dill

Turkey-Vegetable Tortilla Soup

Gingery Kidney Bean and Lentil Stew with Naan Croutons

Green Curry with Tofu, Broccoli, and Basil Puree

Chicken Curry with Spinach and Potatoes

Shrimp Curry with Coconut and Tamarind

Comforting Mains

Bit o’ Salmon Sandwich

Roasted Tomato Meatball Sandwich

Hot Ham and Cheese with Dill Pickle Relish

Ricotta Sandwich with Braised Greens

Warm Potato Salad with Cornichons and Parsley

Spring Lamb Hash with Artichokes, Peas, and Mint

Black Cod Cakes with Cilantro, Scallions, and Tomato Salad

Stuffed Zucchini with Bulgur, Feta, and Preserved Lemon

Barbecued Pork Fried Rice with Mushrooms and Extra Ginger

Salmon Kedgeree with Double the Greens

Parsley and Celery Pesto with Whole Wheat Spaghetti, Sausage, and Broccoli

Lemony Salmon Pasta

Black Bean Tacos with Mushrooms and Scissor Salsa

Yucatecan-Inspired Pork Tacos with Pink Onions and Radishes

Green Chilaquiles with Pork Shoulder

Enchiladas Rojas with Roast Chicken and Sweet Potatoes

Spicy Scallion-Salmon Pancakes

Mustard-Kissed Chard and Gruyère Galette

Sweets

Saffron Rice Pudding

Banana Bread

Red-Eye French Toast with Coffee and Candied Orange

Roasted Chai-Spiced Pear Compote

Mixed Berry–Oat Kuchen

Swedish-Style Apple Cake

Eton Mess with Peaches and Gingersnap Crumbs

Cinnamon Toast Lacy Cookies

Ice Cream Sundaes with Chocolate Sauce, Coffee Caramel, Caramelized Cereal Crunch, and Cookie Crumbs

Super Chocolate S’mores Cookies

What’s on Hand?

Acknowledgments

Universal Conversion Chart

Index

About the Author

Also by Sara Dickerman

Copyright

About the Publisher

Introduction

Hey, have you checked your refrigerator today? Are there any enticing offerings chilling in there? Some rice from takeout the other night? Maybe a few chunks of rotisserie chicken? Or half a bundle of herbs you bought a few days ago and need to use soon? That stuff is golden: those odds and ends are the seeds of your next glorious meal. You could simmer it all into a soothing, lemon-scented soup. Or for something friskier, you could break out your spices and fill your kitchen with the delicious aromas of a gingery curry. Perhaps you’d like to make two different meals from your refrigerated bounty. No problem: try coconut waffles with the rice, and a scallion-sesame chicken salad for lunch. Is it possible you have some overripe pears in the fruit drawer as well? If so, trim them up and roast them with chai spices for an aromatic fruit compote that you can use to top your morning yogurt or late-night ice cream.

I take uncommon delight in putting together memorable meals out of the morsels in my refrigerator: it’s creative work with just a hint of virtue embedded in it. I hope to sway you with some of this enthusiasm. Secrets of Great Second Meals is a cookbook dedicated to a spirited engagement with what’s really in our refrigerators: it’s here for inspiration to put our food to its best possible use, to limit waste, and to get the most out of our valuable time.

My first goal is to help home cooks transform yesterday’s meal into tonight’s dinner, and an enticing one at that. My other goal—and this one is a little more of a lifestyle adjustment—is to inspire you to start planning for those extras. I’ll show you foods that are versatile and worthy of stocking. Remaking them into a second meal becomes its own exciting ritual, saving you cooking time and shopping in the end. The recipes in this book are designed to be flexible: they can handle all sorts of tweaks and additions. Throughout the book, I’ll share cues for how to improvise with whatever golden tidbits you have in your own kitchen. And with those creative skills, you can start to save time and money in your home.

Welcome to the world of great second meals!

I know how hard it is to cook regularly. Even I fall out of the habit from time to time, and I’m a food writer who works in a home office. But sometimes when I’ve spent hours driving the kids from activity to activity, when volunteering and work pile up, dinner is just another chore at the end of a tiring day. If I have nothing cooked in the refrigerator, the result is usually takeout. But if there is something—let’s say some cooked beans, or a few ounces of salmon from last night’s grilling—then I feel rooted again. I know that it’s easier, healthier, less costly, and frankly, less boring to work up a delicious dinner than to call out for another pizza.

There’s nothing I like more than figuring out the right way to reframe a good meal into another satisfying meal. There’s the self-congratulatory pleasure of reducing waste in my kitchen and producing a frugal meal. There’s the anticipation of new flavors and textures at the next meal to come. And most distinctive, there’s the eureka! moment when I fit together disparate extras into a delicious new context. At my house, reinvention might mean crafting a beautiful salad with some second-day salmon, stuffing cooked whole grains into a gorgeous summer squash, or pureeing extra beans into a dip to share as an after-school snack with my daughter.

Now, how you deal with extra food in your refrigerator can be a touchy subject.

On one hand, thoughtfully saving and repurposing food is environmentally and fiscally responsible. But sometimes warmed-over seconds can also feel a little boring, obligatory, or even miserly. In this book I want to add the element of play to the whole equation. Is it good for your budget and the environment to throw out less food? Of course it is. But it’s also the best way I know to make home cooking work in busy modern lives. If you cook intentionally, knowing some part of one meal is destined for the next, you have a step up when it’s time to cook again. By the way: I’ll try to avoid using the word intentionally from here on out, lest I sound too much like a recently certified yoga instructor.

As I got started on this cookbook, I had to help my mother move out of her house and into an apartment. Helping her downsize made my own childhood kitchen memories percolate. All these objects that crackled with memory: her tattered sea-green copy of Joy of Cooking from the postwar years (with techniques on how to cook beaver and opossum, advice trimmed from more recent editions), the perfect, heavy French tart pan that she still won’t give me even though her new kitchen is tiny, and the yellow spatter-ware bowl that was the start of every baking project in our home.

Into that bowl my grandmother and she would carefully trim all the forlorn apples that our four ornery apple trees produced in my childhood yard. We could never eat any of them out of hand because each bite would risk a sloppy bruise, or worse, a wriggling worm. But every September we would gather the fallen apples and my mom and grandma would stand over the yellow bowl paring and editing any imperfections from dozens and dozens of apples. Most would go to make applesauce, which Mama kept in the standalone freezer in the garage. A special few would go into her glorious apple cake, studded with translucent apple chunks and crowned with a thin crust of buttery brown sugar frosting.

The cake is still one of my favorite things in the world—and I’ll provide you a recipe for a similar apple cake in this book, one that also upcycles leftover bread! That apple cake also represents a key part of my kitchen instincts. There was frugality at the core of my mother’s cooking: she was only a babe during the Depression, but the ethos lived long into the war years of her childhood and beyond. Nothing was to be wasted; every item, whether costly or not, could be stretched into another meal. We grew up on reheated spaghetti and vegetable soup filled with the odds and ends of the past few dinners. Because my mother was a good cook, the second meals were rarely unappealing: leftovers were a fact of life, a way of economically feeding a hungry family. The already-cooked ingredients in the fridge also gave my tired working mother a head start on feeding us at the end of the day.

As we grew older, I’ll admit, some of those instincts of my mother’s drove me a little bonkers: my sister and I would joke about the tennis ball of plastic wrap it took to preserve the thimbleful of salmon leftover from a meal or the forlorn Tupperware containing fourteen peas.

My feelings about leftovers became further complicated as I got older and started to run my own kitchen. Some of this had to do with my career in food, first in cooking and then in writing about restaurants. Years of seeking new flavors and new textures spoiled me and made me cranky about sameness. I would eat out so often that the extra food in doggy bags would dry out before I could rewarm them. Cooking magazines like the ones I wrote for were celebrating the joys of freshness, of farmers markets and novelty, all of which, consciously or not, kind of undermined the concept of food thrift. Preservation, like fermenting and jam-making, were all the rage, but little was made of the day-to-day preservation ordinary people did in their refrigerators and freezers. We looked askance at foods that were known for incorporating leftovers; retro cuisine like casseroles, Jell-O salads, and turkey tetrazzini.

This was something of a generational gap, which Nigella Lawson pinpointed in her book How to Eat. Of her mother, she wrote, She, you see, was a product of her age, which believed that cooking lay in what you did to inferior products. . . . I, however, am a product of mine, which believes that you will always use the best, the freshest produce of the highest quality you can afford—and then do as little as possible to it. With that bias in mind, I felt ambivalent about leftovers. That doesn’t mean I threw out the extra food that I had left over: I would regularly toss day-old remnants into pastas and salads and soups and sandwiches. But I kind of kept it to myself.

Nevertheless, as I cooked and wrote more, I began to feel like there was something missing from the story: If we revered these ingredients that were painstakingly grown in organic fields and handcrafted by food artisans, why did we not also appreciate them after the first meal? Why wasn’t the skill of cooking a second meal with extra food more celebrated? It seemed strange not to revel in that conservation.

When I started writing a healthy food plan for Bon Appétit: The Food Lover’s Cleanse, which became my first cookbook, I really embraced cooking ahead for multiple meals. Cooking whole-food ingredients like whole grains and vegetables takes time. Longer-cooked items, things such as whole roasted beets and farro, didn’t seem so time consuming if they served in two or three meals. I realized that the dinner-cooking for the night before could be the centerpiece of a fresh new meal, typically a bright, texturally varied salad for lunch the next day.

There are people who have made this same realization and adopted the idea of meal planning: working out a plan for each week’s meals in advance, batch cooking components on the weekend, and following their plans to a tee all week. It is a reasonable way to approach cooking and eating. The problem is that I’m not quite that judicious when it comes to cooking. I start to resent plans that are too exact. I get cravings. I love making spur-of-the-moment menu decisions.

And so, with this book I sought another path, one that acknowledges the wisdom of planning but also affirms my craving for impulsive pleasures. With good ingredients—say, some braised pork from last night’s dinner party and a pile of braised greens—lying around the refrigerator, I know that my improvisations will have a healthier backbone. I get to choose whether to use them in an elegant white bean salad or a golden, puffed soufflé. But I know I am ready to go in either case.

Choose Your Own Adventure

Each recipe in this book is a truly versatile affair, and I will give you plenty of cues on how they can be adapted to fit what you have in your own refrigerator. In the "Getting to Cooked" chapter, I provide you with building block recipes that are especially versatile for the next meals to come, but you can use the deli at your local grocery or canned goods from your own pantry to jump-start your second meals, too. Here are just a few examples of second-meal possibilities!

COOKED FISH

Bit o’ Salmon Sandwich

Wild Rice Salad with Smoked Salmon and Celery

Salmon Cakes with Cilantro, Scallions, and Tomato Salad

Salmon Kedgeree with Double the Greens

Spicy Scallion-Salmon Pancakes

Salmon Rillettes

COOKED CHICKEN

Avgolemono with Spinach and Dill

Braised Whole Chicken with Star Anise

Enchiladas Rojas with Roast Chicken and Sweet Potatoes

Brown Rice Congee with Chicken and Crispy Noodles

Green Goddess Chicken Salad with Chickpeas and Carrots

Chicken Curry with Spinach and Potatoes

Ginger-Scallion Chicken Salad with Cucumbers

Chicken-Vegetable Tortilla Soup

Chicken Curry with Spinach and Potatoes

COOKED GREENS

Chicken Curry with Spinach and Potatoes

Ricotta Sandwich with Braised Greens

Spicy Tofu Soup with Bok Choy

Aromatic Braised Chard and Kale

Mustard-Kissed Chard and Gruyère Galette

Curried Swiss Chard Soufflé

Quinoa Bowl with Greens, Sweet Potatoes, and Turmeric Cream

Creamy Spinach and Shallot Dip

Quinoa Cakes with Panela and Spinach

Chickpea-Chard Soup with Parsley-Chive Gremolata

Second-Meal Semantics

Leftover food has some hard connotations to shake. I’m not sure if it’s the memory of one too many reheated casseroles, the ache of a poor childhood with few options when it came to food, or a parent who was a lousy cook, but the very word leftover makes some people recoil. I’ve had a few people tell me straight up, I don’t eat leftovers.

I feel differently, of course: leftovers feel almost like a gift from my past self. It’s joy, not drudgery that motivates me to make the most of my home-cooked food. Joy like that of my friends Robin and Molly, who both own booming food businesses in town. They get together with all their extra food every Monday and improvise a meal with what they have on hand. Or take my French hair stylist, Christophe: he fairly dances around the salon chair when he tells me about cooking leftovers. Once a week, he says, he’s in charge of working with the bits and bobs in the refrigerator and cooking them into something delicious. Spoiler alert: it’s often an omelet. The thing is, he’s working from a different language, where what’s left after a meal are called les restes, the remainders. It’s not such a different word from leftovers, but it doesn’t necessarily have that connotation of something left behind and devalued. The leftover in a French cook’s hand is a precious ingredient to be turned into something exquisitely delicious, Susan Herrmann Loomis, an American writer living in France, writes in her book In a French Kitchen.

A celebratory second meal—whether it’s a French standard like hachis parmentier made from beef stew (and akin to shepherd’s pie) or a delicious panful of enchiladas made with extra Thanksgiving turkey—is so much more festive than an obligation to leftovers. I want to bottle that pleasure I get from talking to Robin, Molly, and Christophe. Forgive me if I don’t use the word leftover very much throughout the book, even if you can bet that I am using my actual leftovers.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE L WORD

As historian Helen Veit points out in The Atlantic, the idea of leftovers as a discrete concept didn’t really exist before the end of the nineteenth century: Using up leftover food was so fundamental to everyday cooking and eating that most people didn’t have a special name for it. Before our era, food was plain worth more to the average American household: around the turn of the twentieth century, food costs took up 40 percent of the average American income (today it’s just above 10 percent). So in the United States, as in the rest of the world, last night’s stew would very likely be today’s breakfast. The dawn of home refrigeration—first ice chests and then mechanized refrigerators from the 1920s forward—gave Americans a new approach to perishability: they could buy more food than needed for a day or two, and any remains could be archived in a cool place, to be considered for later eating.

And with that, left-overs (hyphenated back in the day) became one of the key fixations of the Home Economy movement of the turn of the century and the first decades of the twentieth century. How a housewife managed the surplus food in her house was a key measure of her modern scientific approach to the kitchen. A flush of manuals were published for new refrigerator owners, including Elizabeth O. Hiller’s 1910 volume, published by the McCray Refrigerator company, called Left-over Foods and How to Use Them. Even writing so early in the twentieth century, Hiller notes that leftovers have some negative connotations. It is the careless tossing together of ‘left-over’ food and giving the creation when finished, a name quite as unattractive as itself, that has caused this great antipathy so prevalent among people. Like other home-ec contemporaries, Hiller favored heavy sauces, especially white sauces such as béchamel and velouté, to dignify—and camouflage—reheated leftovers.

In the midcentury, when mechanical refrigerators were more standard in American homes, béchamel was no longer a main method of reviving extra food. First off, if you were going to make a casserole, you no longer made white sauce: you’d just tip over a can of creamy soup. Color also became a signifier of freshness: you’d find sandwich loaves garnished with maraschino cherries and frozen fruit salad swaddled in lettuce leaves. And then there was the gelatin, the cool and jiggly repository of all that came before. Perhaps you’d like some buffet meatloaf, made with a layer of green gelatin studded with cucumber, celery, and green peppers and a red layer made from jellied tomato soup and leftover ground meat?

Food was getting cheaper and cheaper for the American public by the second half of the century, women were entering the workforce in greater numbers, and by the 1960s and ’70s overeagerness to reframe leftovers looked a little lame. In some cookbooks, like the More-with-Less cookbook, published by the Mennonite community in 1976 (and still in print), leftovers could take on a new meaning by being less taxing on the limited resources of the world’s food economy. But that attitude was an outlier as the more-is-more aesthetic of Reagan and Dallas, and microwavable dinners came roaring into play in the 1980s. Erma Bombeck summed up the ennui with a nod to a fellow funny woman: Phyllis Diller used to talk about her idea of a perfect world—a stove that flushed.

Packaged food somewhat limited the conundrum