3 Ideas To Take Advantage Of Cooked Cereal Leftovers
With a simple preparation you can have many dishes ready with little effort. Transform leftovers by baking, stir-frying or stewing.
One of the advantages of batch cooking is that we will always have ingredients already prepared and ready to complement any dish. What happens sometimes is that, despite having everything already done, we cannot think of ideas to use it, especially if we come home hungry or we have to prepare a meal quickly and we do not want to repeat dishes frequently.
Nothing happens, to avoid it I give you a few ideas.
How to take advantage of cereal leftovers
1. In stews and stews
The classic lentils with rice can be made in a moment if you have the rice already prepared. Just add it to your lentil stew and heat it all together for a couple of minutes.
The Quinoa serves as rice so we can also use it with lentils or any other that we would stew in a good handful of rice.
The buckwheat can also be used like rice, but has a stronger flavor. For me it is best with vegetable creams and light stews, thus enhancing its aroma and flavor.
The bulgur is best cereals will be adapted to any stew that you do, both for its flavor and texture. Whether it’s lentils, a chickpea curry, or a bean stew, bulgur will greatly enhance its flavor. The texture of the final dish will depend on how ground or cut the bulgur is. If your bulgur is very thin, it will appear that you have thickened the broth and that it has lumps.
The rye and wheat tender are great in stews and soups, broths especially if they have little dense. Just add it at the end of cooking, just enough to heat up, and serve.
Here are other tricks to make good stews.
2. In stir fry
This is the easiest. A large frying pan and all the vegetables that we want to put more cereals so that they brown quickly. Chopped onion, leek, garlic, red and green peppers, carrots, spinach … Use the ingredients that you like the most.
If you are a fan of Korean cuisine, you will like these loose, spicy rice dishes with the iconic preparation, kimchi. If you have homemade or purchased kimchi (see that it does not have fish) it is enough to chop a large piece and sauté it with the rice in a pan until everything is mixed.
If you like sauerkraut, try making a sauerkraut stir fry with rice, the same as kimchi but with well-drained sauerkraut. To give it a sweet touch add carrot cut in julienne or finely chopped.
With other cereals you can do the same. Buckwheat works especially well with all kinds of stir-fries, be it vegetables, vegetables with legumes, vegetable meats, etc.
The millet can be a little more sticky than the rice in the stir-fries, but it is worth it. The millet granites that are browned in the pan are very fragrant.
The amaranth, the grains to be so small, we can be difficult to sauteing, especially with other ingredients. When they are seeds that are very small and that stick together, you can also cook them in the pan but after sautéing the vegetables. That is, we add it when the vegetables and other ingredients are almost done and we stir it all together.
3. Baked
One of the easiest ways to take advantage of whatever we have made is to assemble a dish that is baked. A casserole, a lasagna, some enchiladas, a gratin. .. You just have to mix ingredients and put in the oven.
A quick way to take advantage of the couscous already made but without repeating a dish is to put it on top of a dish that is going to the oven and gratin it. You can leave it as is or put a béchamel on top.
For example, you can put roasted vegetables that you have also made (potato, onion, carrot, zucchini, eggplant …) in a mold or baking tray, cover it with the couscous and cook for 10 minutes.
Rice does not gratin as well as other cereals, it dries a lot, but we can put a sauce, vegan cheese or whatever we want on top.
Mix the rice with finely cut vegetables, put it in the ovenproof container and top it with a capita of vegetable bechamel or an avocado cream (it is just beat avocado with a little soy drink and a pinch of salt) and gratin it.
With millet you can make crunchy topping for cannelloni and lasagna. The filling can be perfectly made with legumes and some cereal that you have already made (for example, quinoa, bulgur or amaranth). Then you put the béchamel and the millet on top. You will have a gratin with very aromatic toasted millet.
