Let's Write about leftover cuisine

Check the website "Cook For Your Life" for creative leftover cuisine:

To me, "leftovers" are a subjective concept. For some people, leftovers are breakfast, while for others, they are meant to feed the garbage disposal. In my opinion, leftovers are not really "left over" until they turn yucky in the refrigerator. Up until such time, I will turn my most creative culinary imagination into finding how to be serve them, without falling into the victimization of the "leftover" stereotype.

Avoid the cliché, "What? Leftovers AGAIN?"

Let's try another term. How about "fending"? Maybe the term "refrigerator grazing" is a good description? In the May 24, 2021, The New Yorker, a letter by John Paoli of Missoula, Montana calls the process "spin-mastering". He wrote how "spinning" means tossing up whatever is in the refrigerator and creating a new and totally different take on what it was, in the first place. In other words, the art of re-creation".

Whatever noun or adjective you and your family defines the use of food that was not consumed in the main course, yes, "left over", the meaning of the concepts- fending, grazing or spinning, is essentially meant to not waste food. Therefore, learning how to use leftovers is important.

In an echo essay, Roz Chast writes about this process in The New Yorker, April 26 & May 3, 2021.

“Fending” and Other Terms for Fridge-Foraging Dinners

AKA - leftovers cuisine!

“Getcheroni,” “eek,” “having weirds,” “going Darwin,” “OYO” (on your own), and “farrapo velho”—Portuguese for “old rag.”

Huh? And for the forage menu, try using catchy names like "getcharoni"? 

So, Chast wrote, we were not in the cooking mood. We didn’t feel like ordering out, and, since we hadn’t got our second vaccine, we didn’t want to go to a restaurant. 

I said what one of us says to the other at times like these: “Should we just fend?”

“Fending” is our household’s word for picking around the kitchen, seeing what’s there, and making a meal of it. We’re not complete savages—i.e., we don’t stand next to the refrigerator at any old hour shovelling food into our mouths. No. We eat together at a table, which has been set. We might even open a bottle of wine. But there is no prep, aside from maybe heating stuff up. It’s very likely that we’ll eat totally different things. I might have leftover chicken fried rice, some lox and cream cheese on Triscuits and the end of a jar of pickles. He might use up the chicken salad, Tuesday’s chili, and the last of the roasted cauliflower, which, by the way, is still good. (Hmmm? Leftover smorgasbord?)

I got curious about what other people called this activity. I polled friends. Turns out there are lots of fenders. Also scroungers, scavengers, and foragers. One friend’s family called it hunt-and-peck. Then I put the question to Instagram, and in a few days I received more than seventeen hundred responses. Here are my favorite responses: California plate, spa plate, eek, mustard with crackers, having weirds, getcheroni, goblin meal, gishing, phumphering, peewadiddly, picky-poke, screamers, trash panda, rags and bottles, black-cow night, blackout bingo, miff muffer moof, anarchy kitchen, mush gooey, fossick, going feral, going Darwin, schlunz, goo gots, oogle moogle, you getsty, jungle dinner, dirt night, mousy-mousy, and having Pucci. Two different people used the term “ifits,” as in “if it’s in the refrigerator, it’s fair game.”


Several people liked acronyms: oyo (on your own), yoyo (you’re on your own), myo (make your own), fifi (find it and fix it), and core (clean out refrigerator of everything). Someone told me that her grandmother called it “eating promiscuously.” Someone else, as a kid, called it “orgy.”

There were also some non-­English expressions for fending. In Persian, it’s khert o pert, which means “odds and ends.” 

In Quebec, it’s touski. That’s short for tout ce qui reste—“all that’s left.” In Portuguese, it’s farrapo velho. Translation: “old rag.”

One person told me that, in her family, fending was known as “zoobecki,” which was “icebox” spelled backward. Which is true, if you squint.

Okay! Up to the challenge! Maine Writer created top three favorites "creative leftover" recipes list:

Gold award to "Shepherd's Pie".  In my opinion, a Shepherd's Pie is anything in the "zoobecki", so long as the base ingredient is mashed potatoes.  Therefore, it's a natural menu served up after a turkey dinner when there's usually lots of leftover mashed potatoes and gravy.  Don't worry about cooking Shepherd's Pie with beef, it's just as good with shredded chicken and turkey. 

Silver award winning leftover award goes to "Frittata del giorno" (Frittata of the day).  Yup! Just toss up any leftovers into eggs and add shredded cheese- mild or sharp cheddar preferred. Season to delight your senses- try Creole, Mexican or Italian blend spices. Bake in a cast iron skillet at 350 degrees F until the eggs are set. You don't really need to cook the ingredients much because, presumably, they are leftovers and therefore just need to be heated up.  By the way, always add garlic powder to your frittata, regardless of what other seasonings are added, along with salt and pepper to taste. 

Bronze award winning leftover recipe is "mixed up soup".  The secret to making any soup is to begin with a sauté, carefully decide what oil base you want to use, my preference is usually to mix one tablespoon of butter with one tablespoon of olive oil (any kind of olive oil).  Then, sauté your selected leftovers, maybe even add a few fresh ingredients, especially chopped celery with leaves, if available, then add the broth- chicken or beef broth purchased in the Dollar Store is good.  Season to taste.  My secret ingredient for soup is to add one or two packets of Herb Ox no sodium bouillon.  This is a special ingredients I use in many many recipes.  

If you can't conjure up, fend or graze the ingredients to create a leftover Shepherd's Pie, or a Frittata or a Soup du jour, then you have no business keeping leftovers in your zoobecki. 

Let's write about our soul!

This short essay is echo transcribed from the book, "I Heard God Laugh: A Practical Guide to Life's Essential Daily Habit", by Matthew Kelly, published by Blue Sparrow, 2020.

I enjoyed reading this short essay, an excerpt in Kelly's book:

The Missing Piece

Trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle without an important piece is incredibly frustrating. That is the story of millions of people's lives.  Day after day, they are frustrated, but they don't realize they are missing a piece.  They drive themselves crazy trying to put the puzzle of their own lives together without that critical piece.

The essential piece most people are missing is a vibrant spirituality.

You're a human being, a delicate composition of body and soul, mysteriously linked by the will and the intellect. The important word here is soul! You have a soul. It is literally your life force.  When it leaves your body, you die.

It's time to start paying more attention to your soul. Think about these four aspects of the human person: body, soul, will and intellect.

We are obsessed with three of them: body, will and intellect. We pamper our bodies, vigorously defend our right to decide the path we walk, and celebrate our individual and collective intellectual accomplishments. Yet, we often ignore the most important- soul.

Have you been taking care of your soul? Rate yourself between one and ten. Most of us neglect the soul in favor of the body. The body is constantly barking orders at us: Feed me, wash me, clothe me, pleasure me, feed me again and so on the body makes a continuous stream of demands upon us. The soul, on the other hand, is quiet and faithful. When the soul is hungry, our stomach doesn't rumble and growl. But, it is important to feed our soul each day.

Yes, each day. How many days has it been since you intentionally fed your soul?  You are a spiritual being having a physical experience in this world, You have a soul. Feeding your soul is the missing piece of the puzzle. There is no better time than right now to nurture your inner life, discover your spiritual needs and feed your soul.

It's time to stop ignoring our souls. The soul integrates and harmonizes every aspect of our humanity. It re-orients us toward what matters most. 

Let's write about people who we will not like

One of the most celebrated British writers of his generation, Graham Greene’s own story was as strange and compelling as those he told of Pinkie the Mobster, Harry Lime, or the "Whisky Priest", in The Power and the Glory. 

A journalist and MI6 officer, Graham Greene sought out the inner narratives of war and politics across the world; he witnessed the Second World War, the Vietnam War, the Mau Mau Rebellion, the rise of Fidel Castro, and the guerrilla wars of Central America. His classic novels, including The Heart of the Matter and The Quiet American, are only pieces of a career that reads like a primer on the twentieth century itself.

The Unquiet Englishman biography braids the narratives of Greene’s extraordinary life. It portrays a man who was traumatized as an adolescent and later suffered a mental illness that brought him to the point of suicide on several occasions...

Maine Writer:  I agree with this statement by Gerald Russello:

"I knew nothing about Graham Greene’s life when I began reading his novels. Only because they were books I could not put down did I want to learn about the life of the man who had written them."

Stirring the Embers of Faith:  Let's write about Graham Green

Book review: The Unquiet Englishman: "Stirring the Embers of Faith", By Gerald J. Russello

Critics can continue to fight over the question of whether Greene was a Catholic writer or, rather, what he called himself: an author who “happened to be Catholic.”

Book review echo published in Commonweal

So, a poet friend of mine complained about the common assumption that learning the biographical details about a writer brings us closer to the quality of the work. Learning that a scene in a novel came from a real-life meeting with a Mrs. Smith in Soho or the author’s experiences in Vietnam does not inevitably make the scene more appealing, or even more intelligible. A literary biographer must establish or assume that her readers already find her subject’s writing interesting. The fact that Tolkien got bitten in a Great War trench by a large spider will be of interest only to those already interested in Shelob, from The Lord of the Rings.

As it happens, The Unquiet Englishman, Richard Greene’s sparkling new biography of Graham Greene, would have a lot of interest even if the latter were not an important writer who, twenty years after his death, still has a large audience. Graham Greene traveled widely, through Europe, Mexico, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Vietnam, and the United States, and he wrote about what he saw in all those places. He worked for the British secret service during World War II, and spent a lot of time with Kim Philby, who would later turn out to be a double agent for the Soviet Union. Greene became a Catholic in 1927 in order to marry Vivien Dayrell-Browning, but almost from the start, he had trouble with the practical demands of Catholicism—and in particular, trouble with marital fidelity. Soon after his marriage, he began a long series of affairs, but Vivien refused to grant him a divorce, and he continued to support her.

“There is no understanding Greene except in the political and cultural contexts of dozens of countries,” Richard Greene writes. But he does not explicitly say that those contexts are needed to like the novels. 

I knew nothing of Graham Greene’s life when I began reading his novels. Only because they were books I could not put down did I want to learn about the life of the man who had written them. Richard Greene, a professor of English literature (and no relation to his subject), does draw out the facts behind Graham Greene’s fictions, insofar as these are available. Even more usefully, though, he discusses how the novels work together or draw on the same themes.

We learn, for example, about a dinner Greene and his wife had with T. S. Eliot in 1935. The typically tightly wound poet got to “unbutton” himself when talking about detective stories. Greene liked them too, and the following year would finish a kind of detective novel, A Gun for Sale. But Richard Greene points out that some of the themes and techniques associated with detective fiction can also be found in Greene’s following book, Brighton Rock. In both books, “he put a repulsive character at the heart of the novel and set about making him compelling.” This is biographical literary criticism at its best. 

In the Eliot story, some helpful context is provided, but more important to readers of Graham Greene’s fiction is the observation that both A Gun for Sale and Brighton Rock—very different books in most ways—have the same challenge of dealing with a character a reader may not want to like.

A whole chapter of The Unquiet Englishman is devoted to the facts behind Brighton Rock. That town was apparently a rough place where murder was not infrequent. Graham Greene had spent a lot of time there and some version of the town is the setting for several of his stories. He wanted his anti-hero, Pinkie, to be a “repulsive” character whose life had “failed utterly.” 

Originally, Brighton Rock was meant to be simply another detective story, but after the first fifty pages it turns in a different direction. Pinkie marries a woman named Rose to keep her silent about a crime he has committed. Both are Catholic. Pinkie finally decides that he won’t be truly safe until Rose is dead; but, cornered by the police, he ends up killing himself before he can kill her. Rather than feeling relief at having been spared, Rose continues to feel responsible for Pinkie and vows to accompany him into the “country of mortal sin.”

Greene could have written the same story without any confusing religious issues entering into it. For nonbelievers “the country of mortal sin” means less than it does for Catholics. The priest to whom Rose speaks after Pinkie’s death refers to the “appalling... strangeness of the mercy of God,” suggesting that we cannot know whether anyone is damned, even after committing suicide. 

At one point, Pinkie says of himself “I suppose I’m real Brighton.” Greene’s “repulsive” anti-hero thus stands for an entire town, and by implication for our common humanity. If the mercy of God could reach him, whom couldn’t it reach?

Critics can continue to fight over the question of whether Greene was a Catholic writer or rather what he called himself: an author who “happened to be Catholic.” Some of his characters were good Catholics; many were not. And as Richard Greene reminds us, Graham had a lot of trouble practicing the faith he never quite abandoned. 

The late Polish poet Adam Zagajewski once said about himself, “I am a failed Catholic, but still a Catholic.” Greene could have said the same thing. Though a convert, he was deeply steeped in the culture of the faith from all the time he spent in Catholic countries. 

It is hard to believe that anyone but a cradle Catholic could have come up with the “whisky priest” in The Power and the Glory, but Greene’s extensive travels in Mexico and his own struggles with Catholicism allowed him to bring that character to life and to keep him from becoming simply a theological emblem.

Toward the end of his life, Greene said, “I don’t believe myself that death is the end of everything, or rather my faith tells me that death is not the end of everything and when my belief wavers I tell myself I am wrong.” 

In a letter to Fr. Albert Huerto, SJ, Greene wrote, “I would call myself at the worst a Catholic agnostic.” The Unquiet Englishman helps us understand what that might mean. Greene was in Mexico during the suppression of the Church, and took the Church’s side in the conflict. He criticized America for its support of troops that murdered Jesuits in other parts of Latin America. The “magic” of the Church continued to hold him even when his rationality was not satisfied. Some part of him continued to believe there was more to reality than rationality.

In any case, Greene knew better than to confuse theological standards with literary standards, and he would not have wanted his novels to be read or admired as apologetic works. 

Fortunately, his best work succeeds on its own terms, and can be appreciated by non-Catholic readers as much as by his coreligionists. The psychology of Rose and Pinkie is fascinating and convincingly wrought, no matter what you think of their beliefs about the afterlife. The Unquiet Englishman is a joy to read for the light it sheds on Greene’s novels, but much of their real-life inspiration remains mysterious—which is just how Greene himself would have wanted it.

The Unquiet Englishman
A Life of Graham Greene
By Richard Greene

Let's write more about the Dame of mystery- Agatha Christie

In The New York Times: "The Mystery of My Obsession With Agatha Christie. "People were dying all around me. So why was I escaping into tales of murder?" writes Jamie Fisher, in The New York Times "Letter of Recommendation" column.

"The more time I spent with Detective Hercule Poirot, the more our COVID pandemic routines started to seem less like boring compulsions and more like apprentice detective work."

Agatha Christie (1880-1976): Writer of 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections, particularly those revolving around fictional detectives Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple.

Although I have not ready every one of Agatha Christie's "Dame of mystery" books about murder, and "whodunit", the fact is, the stories I have read are unforgettable. In fact, Christie introduces us to every kind of mystery twist a reader could possibly imagine by providing enduring and entertaining narrative.

It doesn't take long to read most of her mysteries, but every story is packed with suspense in all its formats. "The Mouse Trap" continues to entertain in books, the movie and for 65years in London's St. Martin's Theater. Agatha Christie's legendary 'whodunit' is still delighting and thrilling audiences in London's West End, as The Mouse Trap enters its 65th record-breaking year on stage. Running at the St. Martin's Theatre since 1974, the original production opened across the road at the Ambassadors Theatre on 25 November 1952 and has since been presented in 27 different languages in more than 50 countries around the world.

The world's longest running show, The Mousetrap now has three entries in the Guinness Book of Records, including those for the longest continuous run of any show in the world, the ‘most durable’ actor (David Raven, who played Major Metcalf for 4,575 performances) and ‘longest serving understudy’ (Nancy Seabrooke, who stood by as Mrs. Boyle 6,240 times). Since The Mousetrap opened 450 actors and actresses have appeared in the play alongside 260 understudies, with a new cast joining the show every nine months.

Who can forget the ending of "Murder on the Orient Express"- the movie and it's remake are absolutely wonderful. Or, the Maj Jong scene, in "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd" published in 1926. (In fact, I transcribed that one chapter in an article posted in this Let's Write blog. Check the blog- click here.) 

So, I was delighted when I read Jamie Fisher's commentary about why Agatha Christie still rules, in the New York Times opinion essay.

Echo: "I fell in love with Agatha Christie during the bad early days of the COVID pandemic, when many of us had lost someone and we were afraid to touch our mail".

It started when a friend invited me to join her remote book club and sent along a pirated copy of, “A Murder Is Announced.” 

Indeed, the book was my introduction to Christie’s indefatigably English world of gentleman detectives and civilized old ladies, their knitting needles and logical faculties clacking away. The murders themselves are “of quiet, domestic interest,” as Christie told Life magazine in 1956: clean, ludicrous comfort food. 

So, I ended up outpacing the book club and staying up until midnight to polish off “The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.”

It might seem perverse to have escaped into murder mysteries at a time when people were suddenly dying all around me, but Christie offered deaths that were orderly and manageable. Her murders are committed in midcentury vicarages and hamlets with names like Chipping Cleghorn and Nether Mickford. On the whole, the closest people come to dying of illness is strychnine poisoning, and the only communicable disease that matters is a lust for dispatching one’s neighbors with their own scarves. Her books are basically fairy tales that happen to have a lot of dead people in them.

The Christie detective whose company I most enjoy is Miss Marple, who spends an alarming part of her time hiding in cupboards and flushing pinkly. But the character who got me through the pandemic was Hercule Poirot, that mustachioed and gloriously petty rationalist, finding clues in every hint of disorder. Poirot makes breakthroughs by sniffing carpets, tweaking chairs, observing that a flower bed is either in disarray or menacingly undisturbed.

In a Christie novel, we don’t know who did it or how they did it, but we know that we’ll eventually find out both. I found myself contrasting this enviously with the panicky stasis of the pandemic, when sometimes it seemed as if we knew too much about the murderer (spoiler alert: It was the coronavirus) and sometimes infuriatingly little (could it strike twice? What in God’s name was it doing to toes?). We had a collective national sense that the butler did it, but we couldn’t make him leave the house. By contrast, Agatha Christie was a refuge of definitive resolution.

Yes, it is probably coincidental that Poirot was first introduced in 1920, on the tail end of the great influenza pandemic; Christie wrote “The Mysterious Affair at Styles” four years earlier, while nursing soldiers in Devon. 

But Poirot is the patron saint for the world of soul-numbing procedural care we found ourselves in last year, and might find ourselves in for the foreseeable future. His watchwords are “order and method.” The more time I spent with him, the more our pandemic routines started to seem less like boring compulsions and more like apprentice detective work. If I was fussing over hand-washing procedures, or eyeing every slightly crooked mask with suspicion, maybe I was just a Poirot in the making.

This is not to say Christie’s universe is, on the whole, an orderly place. Indeed, her mysteries often feel ghostwritten by Camus. On the one hand, we have logical Poirot, parsing the crime scene to determine whether the furniture is adequately symmetrical. On the other, we have the completely absurd universe that Poirot occupies. The plot twists are, as my book club complained happily over Zoom, unfair. People have identical twins as a matter of course. They put out advertisements in the local paper inviting neighbors to a murder. They strangle girl scouts as a diversionary tactic. They have disturbingly free access to obscure and deadly chemical reagents.

And yet Poirot, like Sisyphus, is happy. His world is utter hooey, but he finds satisfaction in small pleasures, like a properly dusted mantelpiece. There’s something both deluded and encouraging about this; I wanted to roll my eyes at Poirot, but I also found myself turning to him as a spiritual teacher. What could he teach me about coping with a world that didn’t make sense? And later, as vaccines rolled out: What he could teach me about trying to return to a world we can’t trust? Two world wars and a pandemic elbowed their way into Christie’s life, and then everyone was expected to go on working and gardening and buying cans of condensed milk as if the world hadn’t recently been set on fire. That bipolarity is embedded in Christie’s books. Life magazine wrote admiringly of “the unruffled cheerfulness of these doomed people.” In writing “quiet, domestic” murders, Christie warned us that our quiet domesticity can be interrupted at any time, but she also held out hope that it might return, perhaps in the epilogue.

In recent months, my fixation on Christie has loosened. I am now able to read books without bodies in them, mostly. But I still wonder what it means to be doomed and unruffled, and if that’s a power anyone would really want. The indulgence of Christie is the dream of vacationing, for a little while, in a static world where people never stopped leaving their doors unlocked or gossiping viciously at the local fishmonger’s. But it’s also a dream of something remarkable interrupting the stasis: a mysterious clutch of pearls, a set of men committing crimes in costume beards, a body in the library, a terrible virus. It comes into your life with the force of revelation, maybe changes you forever. And then you go quietly back to the vicarage.

Jamie Fisher is a writer whose work focuses on culture and literary criticism. She is working on a collection of short stories.