Background: If bread sits on my counter for two days, I start thinking about what I’m going to do with it next. I have a three day rule for most leftovers (unless they are preserved in some way) and bread. (These kinds of things are passed down in families. Many of these are things my mom did or made or suggested when I asked her about this.) Here are my favorite ways to use old bread:

1. Make Croutons.
2. Use it for a Panade in meat loaf, meat balls, or extra-lean-meat burgers.
3. Make toast points for hummus, tuna salad, or caviar if you are feeling fancy.
4. Make French toast.
5. Turn it into breadcrumbs.
6. Use it in frittata di pane (or bread frittata or egg casserole with bread)
7. Make stuffing or dressing for poultry.
8. Make a strata.
9. Use it on the top of French onion soup.
10. Make bread pudding.
11. Throw it in the fridge or freezer and decide later.

Why It Works

1. If I make croutons, I’m more likely to make a salad. However, croutons could also become bread pudding or dressings or stuffing or bread crumbs. You are essentially preserving them by heating the moisture out of them.
2. While panades are great for meat loaf and meatballs (because they are cooked quickly) a panade can work well for burgers made with lean meats and wild game, too.
3. I mean, they are just big croutons. You can save time with the cutting and change up the kinds of dishes you serve them with.
4. This is one my mom used to do that I’m slowly introducing to my family. So far, so good.
5. This is basically the move when I’m long on stale bread and tight on fridge and freezer space. It’s the most compressed move. Also, there are a million moves you can do with breadcrumbs.
6. You might be noticing a theme with old bread: soaking it in milk and/or egg and then cooking it works in a bunch of different configurations.
7. A departure from the egg and milk combos, this is a good move when you need to use up bread and have extra stock and mirepoix or trinity around.
8. This could be almost identical to the frittata di pane if you use the same ingredients, but a strata is necessarily layered and can go in many directions, including directions that don’t involve eggs. The oldest strata I could find was a very Midwestern dish of bread, white sauce, cheese, bread white sauce, cheese, and topped with seasoned bread crumbs (from The HAND-BOOK of HOUSEHOLD· SCIENCE by JUNIATA L. SHEPPERD, M.A. an INSTRUCTOR IN DOMESTIC SCIENCE, SCHOOL AND COLLEGE OF AGRICULTURE, UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA.)
9. It’s like a giant crouton raft, covered with cheese, afloat in goodness.
10. Warm bread pudding with cold ice cream is pretty great.
11. I store my croutons, toast points, and breadcrumbs in the fridge to dry them out faster and more thoroughly. Seal them or they can take on the aromas in the fridge.

Mods:

1. Try going savory with the French toast.
2. Try the big cheese crouton on top of other soups besides French onion. I mean, tomato seems like a no-brainer.
3. Change up the flavors and seasonings and make a stuffing that doesn’t remind you of thanksgiving at all.

Background: Sometimes I just can’t. But then I do. Kind of. Mostly not.
Me: “I’m not making dinner tonight.”
Her: “You need to tell me when you are going on strike.”
Me: “I’m not going on strike this time.”
(Actually, I was going to go on strike when I decided I wasn’t making dinner that morning.)
“I’m just not pushing my dinner agenda on anyone tonight. There’s enough food in the fridge for everyone.”
(And, I thought, everyone knows how to work the microwave, which is conveniently now on a speed rack at kid height due to a microhood malfunction.)
“Sometimes the other things–emotional needs, more outside time–seem more important than my plan for dinner.”
Her: “Gotcha.”
“I haven’t eaten all day.”
Me: “I can make you fiesta Mac ‘n’ Cheese out of the Buttered Noodles I’m getting out for the kids.”

Somehow everyone ate dinner. Here’s how I pulled off this magic.

1. Keep Buttered Noodles on hand in the fridge.
2. Keep the sauce from Mac ‘n’ Cheese on hand in the fridge.
3. Keep Pico on hand in the fridge.
4. Keep All Purpose Crunchy Vegan Topping on hand wherever you want to store it.
5. Combine the first three steps above.
6. Microwave until it’s hot.
7. Top with number four.

Why It Works

1. It’s basically a casserole.
2. I don’t tell her that.
3. She doesn’t like casseroles.
4. I think that’s a prejudice against my people because she loves lasagna and lasagna is definitely a casserole.
5. Anyway, it has cheese and starch so it’s delicious. It has at least five different kinds of plants and no meat.
6. It works because it’s fast and simple and cheap and vegetarian and delicious and it didn’t come from a box. It came from your fridge, your prep work. I mean, some of it came from a can a while back. And plastic wrapped American cheese. And, shit, there was a box in there. But there were also wild foraged onions in there so that’s like buying box offsets.
7. Now it also has healthy protein from cashews and nutritional yeast and a few more kinds of vegetables, if you can consider fried onions, shallots, and garlic vegetables.

Mods:

1. If you had time and energy for mods, you wouldn’t be making this.
2. On the bright side, now you’ve used up the last of the queso, pico, and buttered noodles. You have fridge space and the marginally healthy food is gone. Your mod is actually trying tomorrow.
3. Maybe you should make kale tomorrow. Then they will go on strike.

Background: I love quail. I get local quail four at a time at the meat counter I go to. They are pricey, so I don’t get them often. But they are also very fast and easy to prepare. Here’s what I do:

1. Preheat an oven (or convection oven) to as hot as it will go (like 500 degrees).
2. Get some local partially boneless quail and lay them on a sheet pan.
3. Salt and pepper to taste.
4. Put a pat of butter on each.
5. Roast for 7 minutes and check the temp with a probe thermometer.
6. Using a basting brush, cover each quail with the now melted butter on both sides.
7. Flip them and roast the other side for 7 minutes.
8. Check the temp again and continue roasting and flipping at 2 minute intervals until the birds hit 165 degrees.

Why It Works.

1. I cook my quail like I live my life: hot and fast.
2. The boneless ones will cook faster, so adjust if you have ones with bones in them.
3. You could add other seasonings as well.
4. The milk solids in the butter will help the quail brown.
5. Your oven, convection oven, or air fryer (which is actually a convection oven) may vary. You are looking for browning.
6. Rather than painting on melted butter before roasting, this method makes use of the butter solids. When you melt butter, the solids sink, but we want them on the top because they will help with browning.
7. You are looking for browning. When the skin is browned, they are almost certainly done.
8. If there is a beautiful brown side and the temp has hit 165 degrees F, you have a choice to make. Do you keep cooking to get more brown crispiness but risk overcooked bird, or do you pull them now, and serve a done bird with the beautiful brown side up? Your call. You could use the broiler to push the browning.

Mods:

1. Use compound butter.
2. Use untoasted aromatic seeds like fennel seed, coriander seed, or caraway seed. They will toast in the butter as the birds cook, adding more scent to the dish.
3. Stuff the birds with woody herbs like thyme or rosemary. This is a great way to use those sprigs without having to pick little leaves. (Also there are tricks to that, but that’s another move.)

Background: I remember when I saw and tasted my first wasabi rhizome. I remember it because it was the only time. The wasabi we get in sushi restaurants (at least in my neck of the woods) or the stuff that comes in a tube is mostly Western horseradish, mustard, food coloring, and thickeners. This isn’t to hate on the stuff. I have a tube of it in my pantry right now. A good wasabi powder is basically the same thing, but with fewer extra ingredients and a bit for versatility. It’s a good thing to have on hand. It takes up little space in the pantry and it packs a punch. It will be there for you when the SHTF. Here are some moves you can do with it:

1. Make some Handmixer Mayo and mix the wasabi powder into it for a great wasabi mayo. It’s a great way to make that canned tuna sandwich a little more interesting. It’s even better with a fresh piece of yellowfin. But since mustard plays a large role in the ingredients, it even works on a ham sandwich.
2. Make a poor-man’s cocktail sauce by mixing the powder to the desired consistency and then adding those packets of ketchup you’ve been hoarding in your desk or kitchen drawer.
3. Add tomato juice and use the aforementioned cocktail sauce as the start of a Bloody Mary mix.
4. Make a version of “Jazz Club Shrimp,” one of the first dishes I ever learned to make in a restaurant. It’s simple: P & D your shrimp, put some of that prepared wasabi down the crack where the vein used to be, wrap the mess in a half slice of bacon, secure the bacon with a toothpick and fry ’em up.
5. Prepare the wasabi, add sour cream, mayo, chives, and S&P to taste and you’ve got a great horseradish sauce for your favorite steak.

Why It Works

1. You can also use Duke’s or whatever your favorite mayo is. It’s already not fancy.
2. It works because you don’t have prepared horseradish in your fridge, but you have leftover shrimp and ketchup packets.
3. Yes, there are better Bloody Mary recipes. But we’re already using a product that is powdered, bomb-shelter-safe, predicated on false advertising, and implicated in a web of cultural appropriation.
4. The original recipe, like most of the things here, called for prepared horseradish, but the wasabi powder actually works better because you can make a paste that better sticks to the shrimp under the bacon.
5. With a rare steak, the slight green is a nice contrast, especially around the holidays.

Mods:

1. Experiment with all the above swapping out wasabi in a tube, prepared horseradish, and actual Wasabia japonica if you can find some.
2. Try it on sushi, I guess.
3. Try making a spice with it like they put on those wasabi peas that no one ever asked for.