Dinner from Scraps

CEBU, Philippines — I am not a professional cook – I am a full-time homemaker, but which role also demands for me to do some cooking. Given that, I am most cautious about throwing away anything that may still have good potential to be useful. This is especially true with foodstuff.

Whether it’s party leftovers or scraps from ordinary meals at home, these often go through serious consideration whether to send to the garbage bin or back to the cooking pan. It just defies my sensibilities to be throwing away food that is still potentially beneficial when there are people in some parts of our neighborhood who might have go to sleep hungry. Besides, it is most fulfilling for me to be able to ‘rescue’ portions of food that would have otherwise gone to waste.

People tend to fill their plate more than what they can actually consume or need to eat. This results either in overeating or in wasted food. It is sad, because any food that reaches the dining table has gone a very long way – from the farm to the kitchen and finally in the plate.

Besides, food is expensive these days. Money is scarce. It goes against logic to be wasteful of something that’s scarce.

At times, I’d intentionally buy less food than I think the family needs – in order to compel me to use to the fullest whatever is there. I have to be very creative and plan out our meals properly.

Since we have growing kids in the family, it is my challenge to make the meals palatable aside from being nutritious. And, again, there shall be no waste. For me, even composting food scraps is wasteful.

Some cooks, for example, use only the leaves of kangkong or alugbate, and discard the stems. I use those stems, except when these are too ‘woody’ already. I also have uses for those carrot tops that most cooks just throw away; cleaned and chopped right, these can be stir-fried with other vegetables.

Even those seemingly “finally useless” shells of shrimps have one more use. These will still do for making shrimp shell stock. I use the stock to cook the rice, paella style, with those very inexpensive meats of “litob” shells sold by scoop at the wet market.

Another common leftover that’s just reheated over and over to everybody’s boredom is lechon manok. I have my own ways to recycling it, to make it feel and taste a bit differently every time. But I’ve recently come across something else that I want to try any day now.

Commonly with leftover lechon manok, the chicken meat is finely shredded, tossed with mayonnaise and chopped vegetables and piled between slices of bread. But rotisserie chicken salad can be so much more than the ubiquitous sandwich filling.

In the following rotisserie chicken salad recipe from https://casaveneracion.com, the leftover rotisserie chicken meat is cut into bite-size strips, added to a simple garden salad and garnished with cheese, walnuts and croutons. It’s the kind of salad that even a carnivorous person can enjoy and even consider as a complete meal because it has everything in it – vegetables, meat, dairy and carbs.

Lechon Manok Salad

Ingredients:

1 tablespoon mayonnaise

1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil

1 tablespoon lemon juice

2 tablespoons honey

generous pinch salt

pinch ground black pepper

generous handful lettuce (any variety)

1 to 2 tomatoes

1 small onion (or ½ large onion)

2 to 3 cheese slices

½ cup walnuts

chunks of cold rotisserie chicken

croutons

Procedure:

•             Make the dressing by whisking together the mayonnaise, olive oil, lemon juice, honey, salt and pepper. Set aside.

•             Tear the lettuce into bite-size pieces.

•             Cut the tomatoes into wedges.

•             Thinly slice the onion.

•             Cut the cheese slices into strips about half an inch wide.

•             Roughly chop the walnuts.

•             Scatter the lettuce on a plate. Distribute the tomato wedges evenly on top of the lettuce. Sprinkle the onion slices over the lettuce and tomatoes.

•             Scatter the chunks of rotisserie chicken over the vegetables followed by the cheese strips, walnuts and croutons.

•             Drizzle the dressing over the salad.

Enjoy the healthy treat!