04 Jan 2025
Elena Hogg, founder of local culinary company FOOD by Elena, is on a mission to declutter her festive food supplies…
Well, readers, we’ve made it to another year! The glitter of Christmas has settled, mostly lodged between the floorboards, Twixmas has been survived despite nobody knowing what day it was, and the last refrains of Auld Lang Syne are hanging in the air now to be replaced with the mantras and manifestations of New Year resolutions.
My resolutions will be based around health, which is the case every single year.
So in an effort to liven things up, I’m adding a ‘be more organised’ item.
Admittedly, this is somewhat generic, and we all know generic resolutions are perfect if you don’t really want to do them (shhhh!). Despite this get-out clause I’ve left myself, I do genuinely want to reduce chaos in my life.
This is half-inspired by one of my very good friends, who’s launching a new decluttering and organising business called Sunflower Sorters (@sunflowersorters on Insta and Facebook), which essentially helps make households feel more zen. But I’m also inspired by a desire to live more simply, efficiently and cleanly, so less energy gets wasted on the mundane or irksome.
I hope this will take shape by checking my social calendar more regularly, to avoid the double-booking I’m renowned for amongst family and friends. I’ll also get started earlier on bigger catering jobs, making sure I’ve made my orders in plenty of time and have the requisite number of bamboo cocktail sticks for the following week’s canapés, avoiding any last-minute panics.
Eliminating the wodge of business receipts I allow to build up is another ambition, aiming to label and file them straight after the job in question.
Similarly, I will try to deal with household chores sooner rather than later, so that loose buttons or wobbly screws are still attached when I come to them, rather than lost altogether.
In the kitchen, there’s plenty to improve on as well. Our good friends, Wen and Amir (big foodies themselves), had us round to theirs over the festive period and I happened to open their fridge at one point. What greeted me was a meticulous food management system consisting of Neolithic towers of takeaway boxes, each with a label clearly stating the contents and the date it was made.
This alone is transformative, especially because Wen and Amir only keep the same kind and size of takeaway box so you can always find a lid that fits and they stack properly.
Gone are their days of opening up the fridge to have half the contents topple out, or rooting around in a Tupperware cupboard flinging mismatched lids here and there. And, perhaps most radical of all, being able to see immediately what leftovers are available for pairing up or amalgamating into a new dish, without having to open up a zillion containers and run visual-olfactory analytics on them to determine both identity and state of edibility.
One small step for your fridge; one giant leap for food waste reduction! And on that note, here are two of this year’s efforts to declutter the festive food you might still have lurking, adapted from one of my all-time favourite chefs, Yottam Ottolenghi.
First is a cheese and vegetable bake that hoovers up both leftover roasted or steamed veggies and also those nuggets and nibbles still kicking around from the Christmas or New Year cheeseboard – nuggets being the random unfinished knobs of cheese and nibbles referring to the various crackers that went with the cheesecake. Frankly, even the remnants of your jars of chutney wouldn’t go amiss in this oven-bake, adding a nice, jammy tang to the whole affair.
Chop whatever cooked veggies you have leftover into roughly bitesize pieces, be they parsnips, carrots, butternut squash, courgettes, broccoli, cabbage – it all finds a home here. Tip into a baking dish and add any other bits and bobs you want to use up: chestnuts or pancetta that didn’t make it into the sprouts dish at Christmas, leftover stuffing, or any scraps of turkey or ham.
Next, crumble over your cheese – again, nothing is off-limits. Volume-wise, however much space your veggies take up, you need about a quarter of that in cheese. Mix everything together and add any herbs you have and some seasoning.
Now to the wet ingredients. How much depends on how moist your veggies are to begin with. You need enough to be absorbed but not so much it drowns the vegetables.
Use a combination of stock and some cream or crème fraîche, yoghurt or cream cheese – again, whatever you have in the fridge waiting to be used up – and bring it to a gentle simmer.
Add salt and black pepper, some nutmeg or some paprika if you fancy a kick. I had some roasted garlic I’d made for a gravy leftover, so squeezed that in, as well. Perhaps a spoonful of Marmite if you fancy it?
You can adapt this entirely to your taste. Pour the liquid over the vegetables and pop into a medium oven for about half an hour to bake, or less if you’re making it for two people only, say. While it cooks, make your crumble topping.
Crush up your leftover crackers, nibbles, oatcakes or breadsticks to a rubble consistency.
Add some softened butter and some pepper or herbs if you like and mix it all up. I find scrunching the butter into the mixture with my hands both more effective and more therapeutic.
Sprinkle the topping over the veggie mixture and return to the oven. Turn the heat right up and bake again for around quarter of an hour, or till you see the topping start to brown. Leave to rest for a bit, then devour.
