Bettina's Leftovers for Unexpected Company

"Is he a real woman-hater? No, I've never met any, but I'll just invite Alice, too, and tomorrow you won't be calling him that."--Bettina, Chapter 3, A Thousand Ways to Please a Husband

Bettina, notice, does not chicken out and order Swiss Chalet for her husband's last-minute guest; in fact, she has time to mentally play matchmaker while also figuring out how to stretch a "simple" meal for two (made out of that leftover steak) into a company dinner for four.

Good ideas from this chapter:

1. Bettina had cooked extra potatoes the night before to save fuel, but they're not enough for the guests. She probably could have just cooked some extra potatoes, but she decides to hard-cook some eggs instead and make it "Potatoes Anna" (scalloped potatoes and eggs). This is something we often do--combine two compatible leftovers, or a leftover plus something freshly cooked, into one dish. Soup is the obvious place where you can do this, or salad; but you can also mix things in hot dishes as Bettina did. I have combined cooked potatoes with leftover potato-stuffed perogies, all chopped in roughly equal-size pieces and heated with some kind of a sauce or milk...not sure what you'd call that, "Leftovers Squirrel?"

2. This barely-married bride already has (besides a pantry full of glass jars--did she scrounge those from her mother?) a box of recipes on "indexed cards" that include leftover suggestions. If you don't already have a good source for these, try LoveFoodHateWaste.com. Or if you have a copy of The More With Less Cookbook, look at the Gather Up the Fragments tips at the end of each chapter.

3. Bettina obviously has a meat grinder and isn't afraid to use it! I'm not sure that calling ground-meat timbales with tomato sauce "Boubons" is enough to make them very exciting...but, on the other hand, I don't usually make timbales either, so maybe the Squirrels would find them interesting.

4. We're still not very big on fresh vegetables here, but the misogynistic dinner guest probably doesn't care about that much.

5. We tried Bettina's Cottage Pudding with Lemon Sauce for dessert tonight. Better than we expected! I'll post about that separately.

"If I add some very good coffee, I don't believe that Bob's Mr. Harrison will feel that women are such nuisances after all!"