The basic plan of saving money on food and such has multiple facets and "re-purposing" leftovers is but one of them. My family, specifically my son,
loves roast. Now, roast can be a little pricey for a single meal BUT! I decided to buy a slightly larger roast and try to get 2 meals out of it. And that's exactly what I did.
The first night I made our family's "regular" roast which is to stick it in the slow cooker with a packet of onion soup mix (I don't know why that works, but it's good), potatoes and carrots, and just let the thing cook until the meat starts to fall apart. Yummo. Then instead of dumping the "drippings" or "gravy" or whatever you want to call the soupy stuff that's left over, I put it in the fridge with the rest of the meat.
A couple of days later (because I wanted it to be far off enough that it didn't feel like we were eating the same thing) I took out the meat and the "drippings" and
attempted to make
this Yorkshire Pudding recipe that I found on Allrecipes.com. I know that there are multitudes of actual Englishmen who would shudder at the idea of this being called Yorkshire Pudding, even before I completely screwed it up. However, not only did my family clean their plates, they said it was good enough to make again. Aha! Success!
So the recipe says to put a 1/2 cup of the "drippings" in a casserole-type dish and bake it until it bubbles, then pour this batter on top and it kind of floats and boils and bakes this bread on top and then you eat it with the roast. Well, I must admit, I did not do the math here. Ah, why only a 1/2 cup of drippings? I'll just use whatever I have left here (a lot), and I'll just throw the meat in there too so it will all be like some big casserole thing, right? See, I envisioned the bread sitting on top of the meat and drippings, making a crust of sorts on the top, then when you cut into it to serve it there would be this meat pie/ pot pie thing happening inside. WRONG! What actually happened was that I mixed the batter according to the recipe, and even let it sit out for an hour as directed. Then when I poured the batter onto the meat it just sort of sunk and spread like milk in your cup of coffee. Not meat pie at all. I had soup with uncooked bread in it. Well, I wasn't going to waste half a roast so I threw the thing in the oven and decided we were eating it no matter what. So I baked it for about 35 minutes, but the bread never browned because it was submerged in roast juice but I took it out anyway and dished it out into bowls.
Not exactly going to be on the cover of a magazine, is it? But! It was very casserole-y. In fact, when I scooped it out of the dish the bread had kind of baked around the meat so that it was all really mixed in together and the bread soaked up a lot of the "drippings." If anything, this was roast and dumplings. :D So that may be what I call it now. Look at me! I created a recipe!
