So this doesn’t happen often, but after making the waffles with homemade blueberry jam, there was a little bit of jam and cream left over. I know. Gasps all round. How could there be jam and cream left over? Well, somehow there was a glitch in the matrix and there was. So then the question emerged – what does one do with a spoonful of leftover jam and a dollop of cream? I know that the obvious answer is “eat it Katie!” but, this happened on a day when another anomalous thing occurred. I woke up early enough and felt energetic enough to cook breakfast rather than just toast some bread. This happened on a week day people!
Just when you thought i’d fallen off the healthy lunch wagon, here I am with another edition of Lunch At Your Desk.
Today I bring you the Leftovers Salad with New York Steak!
(apologies for the shadow cast by my arm – i’m definitely getting better with the whole ‘good lighting makes good pictures’ thing but clearly have a way to go!)
The leftovers salad is my go-to lunch when there weren’t enough leftovers from dinner to just have that meal for lunch again the next day. I find that there are generally some odds and ends of roast vegetables that are left in the pan and often a lonesome little bit of meat. It’s not too difficult to fluff it up with some raw vegetables and a simple dressing the next morning to turn it into a substantial lunch.
The night before hubs and I had made some delicious New York cut steak and roast vegetables. Hubs ate all his steak but I only managed about half of my huge piece. So I wrapped the rest in foil and left it in the fridge for the next day. In the morning I sliced the remaining meat up and left the gristly fatty bits behind. I added some raw carrots, lettuce, sweet corn and radish to bulk up the few remaining roast veggies.
and bam! Healthy lunch that travels pretty well too
For a dressing I just drizzled the salad with olive oil, a twist of salt from the grinder that I keep in my desk drawer and squeezed some lemon on top. There may have even been some pepitas sprinkled on top for good measure! So here is another healthy lunch dish that requires barely any prep and makes the most of the odds and ends that might otherwise go to waste a the end of a meal.
So lovelies, what did you all have for lunch this week?
And it’s time for another edition of Lunch at Your Desk! Hooray! This week i’m sharing a sneaky and super easy way to use leftover bolognese and sweetening the deal by throwing in a delicious snack to keep the munchies at bay. Enjoy, my lovelies!
I have been thinking about this snack for so long it’s genuinely ridiculous. When I was amping up for my European Holiday I was starting to think seriously about all the delicious German food that I was going to eat right at the beginning when I was in Berlin. Naturally, pretzels were number one on the list. Well, actually strudel was but thats not really related to this post so we will just ignore that. I picked up a fairly substantial packet of pretzels from the supermarket for $1 then spent weeks and weeks trying to think of the perfect dip to pack it with. Ultimately the answer was super easy and staring me in the face. Who could resist the siren call of the salty sweetness that comes with peanut butter and nutella? And those salt encrusted pretzels!
One scoop Nutella + one scoop peanut butter + a handful of pretzels = salty sweet heaven in your mouth
Try it. Seriously.
And on to the main event!
This lunch is really all thanks to my super dooper mother in law who kindly stocked our fridge (amongst doing many many other things to make our apartment liveable again) with delicious home cooked food for us to eat when we were too jetlagged to go to the shops. One of those dishes was a tub of bolognese sauce beefed up with mushrooms. Im still adjusting to the whole cooking-for-two malarky so I always underestimate how much pasta to cook to feed hubs and I. The few scattered pasta shells you see above are the only ones left from dinner the night before. It seems super efficient but unfortunately there is almost always a fair amount of sauce left over.
In the morning fog of tired eyes and lethargic limbs, I definitely couldn’t sum up the energy (or the mental capacity) to boil some more pasta so I called on that other carb staple, the good old crusty bread loaf to help me out. A few slices slathered with salty butter was the perfect vehicle to get the bolognese from the container into my mouth. It was a godsend on that awful cold and rainy week that welcomed us back to Sydney. You know, that week when it snowed in places that it has definitely never snowed before?
So, what have you been having for lunch this week? And do you have any other sneaky tips for what to do with leftover pasta sauce?
