Sandy Eller ● Jewish Press
Who’s ready to shake things up? Stuck as we are in the final stretch of winter when things are still gray and gloomy, there’s nothing like contemplating some new culinary frontiers to chase the cold and the darkness away.
If your childhood was anything like mine, the phrase “waste not want not” was uttered on many an occasion, and was most often applied to food. Taking that concept into the kitchen, Yaffa Fruchter uses those very words as the title of her new cookbook, with 120 recipes that repurpose leftovers into foods that will hopefully have everyone at your table excited. In her introduction, Fruchter describes Waste Not Want Not as more of a cooking course, challenging home chefs to channel their creativity and find ways to use the odds and ends already lurking in their fridges, freezers and pantries and turn them into delicious goodies instead of just chucking in the trash.
Given the subject matter, it seems appropriate for this cookbook to open with a chapter on food safety since giving your family food poisoning by feeding them spoiled ingredients is definitely something to be avoided. Among her suggestions are avoiding anything that looks, smells or tastes off, marking dates on all leftovers, storing things in airtight containers, using extra caution when it comes to anything made with fish, meat or eggs and throwing out any questionable food items. Having gotten that bit of business out of the way, the sky is the limit in Waste Not Want Not, where the vegetables used to flavor your chicken soup are transformed into patties, kugels, veggies loaves and tzimmes, in addition to being used as the base for other soups. Have extra chicken that didn’t get eaten over Shabbos? Try turning it into blintzes, bourekas, shawarma, a fleishig pizza or even chicken sushi. I confess that I think my family would disown me if I tried the recipe for a chummus-like dish made out of pureed, leftover cholent and topped with fried onions, although I can’t see anyone objecting if I followed the recipe for gazpacho made with day old Israeli salad.
I have resurrected leftover challah by slathering it with garlic, salt, pepper and olive oil and making it into garlic bread on many an occasion and Fruchter also suggests turning it into bread crumbs, croutons or soaking it and squeezing it out for use in hamburgers, chopped liver and stuffing. And should you ever find yourself with too much cake on hand, Waste Not Want Not includes it as an ingredient in baked Alaska, cake pops, rum balls and that simcha favorite, trifle. Fruchter also peppers her book with practical advice, like rotating items in your pantry to use them before they expire, keeping spices in the freezer to maintain freshness and tips on salvaging burned items, doing her best to keep food waste to a bare minimum.
Jewish Book Review 