Stretching your leftovers

First of all, an update on our $20/day spending plan.  We're kicking butt.  Last week we spent an average of $14.44 per day.  That was a full dollar less than the $15.44 per day that we spend the prior week.  I think we're becoming comfortable with the spending allocation, and will probably lower it to $15/day pretty soon.

In that time, we have gone out to eat dinner at McCormick and Schmick twice using the coupon that I found on Slickdeals.net.  In fact, our latest trip to McCormick and Schmick is the subject of this post.

On Sunday, we used the $25 coupon to have dinner at McCormick and Schmick's.  My Fiancee ordered the seafood cobb salad (so good, by the way), and I ordered the seafood etoufee.  The seafood cobb salad had crumbled bleu cheese, bacon bits (the real stuff, not bacos), crab meat, cocktail shrimps, and scallops.  Oh man, that was good.  The seafood etoufee is this gumbo/jamalaya sort of dish with a flavorful sauce, pieces of chicken, squid, crawfish, shrimp and scallops served with rice.

Her salad was $15.95 or so, and mine was about the same.  After the coupon, our tab was literally $7.42.  Throw on a $6 tip (close to 20% of the original amount), and we had dinner for $13.42.

So, the leftovers.  I helped finish her salad, because salad doesn't do as well for leftovers.  I
intentionally ate most of my seafood and about half of the chicken, but leaving quite a bit of sauce.  We asked our waiter to box mine up, and asked for more bread.  Their bread is a really yummy sourdough.  You use the bread to sop up that etoufee sauce, and oh man!

Now, the remaing sauce and couple of bits of chicken would not have been enough on its own.  So, the next night, I pulled out a piece of boneless, skinless chicken thigh (we always keep a bag in the freezer), seasoned lightly with salt and pepper, and cooked it up on the grill pan.

I sliced up the chicken, added it to the leftover sauce and ate it up with the bread.  So freaking good!

Now, you can't do this with any type of leftover.  But anytime I have leftovers that have rich, flavorful sauces (like chicken tikimasala or katsu curry), I always grill a piece of chicken to make the lefovers a full second meal.

Comments

[Emy]

Sweet...thanks for the reminder! A friend gave us tickets to see a concert in San Jose tonight, and this helped me figure out the dilemma of what to do for dinner beforehand! :)