Using up leftovers and stale bread

✅ The essentials

A leftover is not a reheated dish, it is an already-cooked ingredient that saves you twenty minutes. Pasta becomes a gratin, rice a stir-fry with an egg, vegetables an omelette or a soup, chicken a salad, and stale bread croutons, breadcrumbs or French toast. Nothing gets thrown away, and tomorrow's meal is half done.

🍳 The method

1. Stale bread, as croutons: two-centimetre cubes, a spoon of olive oil, salt, ten minutes in the oven at 180 °C (350 °F). They go into soup and salad, and keep a week in a container.
2. Stale bread, as French toast: two eggs beaten with 250 ml milk and two spoons of sugar, the slices dipped ten seconds on each side, two to three minutes per side in the pan in butter.
3. Very dry bread, as breadcrumbs: blended, kept in a jar, for breading or gratins.
4. Pasta and rice: as a gratin with a béchamel, or fried in the pan with a beaten egg, a spoon of soy sauce and whatever vegetables are left.
5. Cooked vegetables: in an omelette, a quiche, a blended soup, or mashed into patties with an egg and breadcrumbs, browned in the pan.

📏 The landmarks

• Cooked chicken and meat: cold in a salad or a sandwich, or reheated in a sauce, never dry.
• Mashed potato: as patties in the pan, or as a gratin with ground meat underneath.
• Cooked fish: flaked into rice, a salad, or patties with mashed potato. It keeps two days.
• Hard cheese: grated over the gratin. Radish tops and leek greens: in a soup.

⏱️ How long it takes

Ten to fifteen minutes, since half the dish is already cooked.

🩹 If it goes wrong

The croutons burnt: ten minutes, not fifteen, and you watch the last three. The French toast is soggy: dipped too long, ten seconds is enough. The patties fall apart: a little more breadcrumbs, and you only turn them once, when the underside is golden.

🍽️ Make it tonight

The Caesar salad, with croutons made from yesterday's bread. Or French toast at snack time, with what is left of the baguette.

🥘 The linked base recipe: French toast (serves 4)

• 8 slices stale bread
• 2 eggs
• 250 ml milk
• 2 tablespoons sugar
• 20 g butter
• 1 sachet vanilla sugar (optional)