Pimped-Out Leftovers

NEW YORK-
My stomach was as empty as my wallet. There's another 4 days to wait until my troublesome bank makes my paycheck available. It's been raining steadily all day and it's not supposed to let up until Friday. Going out is really not an option. On a night like this, the temptation is to let depression get the best of you. The defeatist worm in your heart says to eat some toast and cereal and wallow in self pity. But a nobler impulse prevails. It is time to get creative.

Necessity is the mother of invention. One rowdy summer my pals and I came up with a drink called the aneurysm. But in all truth this is not so much a drink as a process, a philosophy. It started when we ran out of ice. Foraging in the freezer I came upon some peach popsicles and in a few minutes we had frozen peach margaritas. Soon, ice was the least of our problems. By the end of the evening we had really run out of options and clean glassware and found ourselves drinking Vodka and Mtn. Dew from Pyrex measuring cups. The aneurysm carried out to its final conclusion is not a pretty sight, but the road to degeneracy is an interesting one and can produce the occasional stroke of genius.

It was with this process in mind that I attacked the situation at hand. The cheapest food in the world is free and it's called leftovers. This word has a bad connotation. It basically implies old food that has been re-heated. But the creative mind sees leftovers as just so many raw materials lending themselves to elegant possibilities.

On an overnight stop in San Sebastian, a precious jewel of a town on the Bay of Biscay in Basque country, I left my pension in search of tapas, the delectable snacks served in bars across Spain. Legend has it that Rey Alfonso el Sabio decreed that no alcohol should be served without food to combat the adverse effects of peasants drinking all their money away on an empty stomach. Bars began serving slices of smoked cheese or chorizo laid on top of the glasses to comply with the law, keep bugs out of the booze, and to increase the thirst of their patrons. Over time the tapa became more elaborate in some regions, nowhere more so than Pais Vasco. Wandering alone through the winding stone streets past buildings splashed with separatist graffiti (eg: Gora Euskadi, Gora ETA) I discovered remarkable and exotic treasures hidden behind innocuous doorways. One tapa I ate consisted of a piece of bread on which was lain a stuffed pepper topped with a fat sauteed shrimp. Fried chicken wings topped with olives, slices of tortilla Espanola and fried baccalao were all laid out as a tremendous spread across the bars.

One thing the frugal cook must be aware of is the shelf life of the food in his larder. Food gone bad is a waste and waste is a sin born of under-appreciation of life itself. On this rainy night I spotted some mushrooms that needed to be eaten. I had bought the mushrooms to add to the croquettes I had made last weekend on a Russian food kick. Several of the croquettes I had frozen before cooking their brothers and sisters. I had also saved a large container of the Borscht I had made the same night. Thus the concept was born: Mushrooms stuffed with the chunky borscht and sprinkled with mozzarella cheese. This would go fine with the croquettes, but I needed a third to balance it all out. I eyed two biscuits left over from breakfast. I roasted a red bell pepper and put it in a paper bag. I chopped some garlic. I skinned the pepper, cut four slices of Gouda cheese and placed them on the halved biscuits. A slice of red pepper on each and the rest of it chopped with the garlic and mixed with mayo, salt, and pepper for a sauce. The mushrooms and biscuits went in the oven while I fried the croquettes. All this artfully arranged on a plate with some salad greens took me to Spain all over again.

Take that defeatist worm, a delicious meal had been born and the night was suddenly cozy.