Dark Days: The Leftover Life

Sunday, January 04, 2009

This week’s Dark Days challenge update includes lots and lots of leftovers.  The black-eyed pea and mushroom ragout with polenta made excellent lunches! 

From the leftover lamb from the roasted leg of lamb I made lamb pot pie.  I think it does qualify for the Dark Days challenge, even though I cheated and used store-bought pie dough.  The lamb was, of course, local - but so was the carrot (Lancaster Farm Fresh), onion (Landisdale Farm), parsnips (Lancaster Farm Fresh), beef stock, lamb demiglace, garlic (my garden), flour, and stout beer used for filling and gravy.  And that also made tremendously good leftovers all week!  Seriously, I could eat pot pie every day of the week during the Winter.  There’s something incredibly comforting and warming about it.  I also froze the lamb leg bone for making stock.

With all those leftovers, I really didn’t have to cook much this week.

Today, though, I did head into the kitchen.  I’ve been craving frittata lately.  I have a zillion pounds of sweet potatoes hibernating on the back porch - toward the end of the CSA season with Landisdale Farm, we ended up with many, many sweet potatoes.  I like sweet potatoes just fine, but I don’t really know very many ways to use them.  But this morning it occured to me that maybe I could use them in place of regular potatoes for frittata…plus, I had a few duck eggs left that I really needed to use double quick.

In our cast iron skillet, I melted some butter that I made from local cream (over medium high heat) and sauted chopped onion (Landisdale Farm) and garlic (my garden), along with some sausage (Country Time Farm) removed from its casing.  I threw in some salt and pepper, and a teaspoon of dried, rubbed sage (my garden).  And then I added in spinach (Rineer Family Farms) and fresh cranberries (Paradise Hill Farm), and sauted that for another few minutes until the spinach was just wilted.  I scooped all of that out and layered sliced white sweet potato (I used a mandoline to get the potatoes sliced thinly) into the skillet in concentric circles.  After the first layer, I spooned in some of the sausage/spinach mix, and then just kept layering potatoes and then sausage/spinach mix.

When I got everything layered into the skillet, I let it all cook on the stove for 15 minutes.  While that was cooking, I whisked together the last six duck eggs with a cup of milk (Natural by Nature) and then dumped it into the skillet.  The skillet went into the oven (preheated to 350 degrees) for 40 minutes.  After it was out, I shredded some raw milk cheddar (Green Meadow Farm) over top.

It was better than I imagined.  The cranberries were perfect against the sausage, and the sweet potatoes were great!  And it looks like I’ll have enough to eat for leftovers this coming week!  I guess I know what will be in my report for next week!