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GLORIOUS LEFTOVERS It's a new year, but it's not all "out with the old and in with the new." Sometimes the old needs to be transformed into the new. In the first days of January, we eat leftovers. If you do holiday cooking and entertaining on any sort of scale, this is probably inevitable in your house, too - and not altogether a bad thing. Sometimes leftovers are a bore, but now and then the right idea pops up at the right moment, and leftovers are transmuted into something good enough to make from scratch another time. This alchemy happened a couple of time in my kitchen this year. Each year for Christmas Eve I make pierogi to serve with wild mushroom soup. Everyone loves those little Polish pastries stuffed with potatoes or cabbage, so I make hundreds. but in preparing the potato filling I go mad and overestimate the need. This year I had a whole bowlful left, far too much to toss without contortions of guilt. Then it came to me: gnocchi. The tiresome part was done - I already had the cold mashed potatoes, divinely flavored with plenty of caramelized onion, so the gnocchi would have a unique, rich flavor. I worked in an egg and some flour to make a dough, then shaped and boiled the gnocchi. I mixed them up with a jar of simple tomato sauce from last summer, put them in a gratin dish and sprinkled them with Parmesan cheese. Forty minutes in a hot oven gave me time to make a salad and set the table, and we were eating a sumptuous meal - and I was feeling virtuous for not wasting those potatoes. There was something very fun about the whole thing. It was like blizzard cooking - when you're snowed in, you do your best with what you have on hand. I jotted down the proportions and you'll find it in this month's New Recipes. Another thing I had on hand was cheese - I had bought cheese, people had brought cheese over - there was, in short, an embarrassment of cheese, including a log of beautiful white chevre winking at me each time I opened the refrigerator. On the table were baskets piled high with every kind of citrus, and someone had given me a big bag of shelled almonds. These things all went into a salad that was very simple to make, and delicious to eat. The salad greens that I always have on hand - sweet lettuce, arugula, raddicchio - formed the basis. I peeled and sectioned a handful of tiny Satsuma mandarins, and tossed the sections with the greens. Then I pulled apart a few ounces of the cheese into big, semi-soft lumps and dropped them in, along with a generous amount of coarsely chopped almonds. I dressed the salad with the usual - a good green olive oil and splash of Spanish sherry vinegar. This is a salad that will brighten any winter meal, and makes good use of the produce that is at its best now in California: oranges, almonds, and cool-weather greens. It's a keeper. I went for the oranges again when I decided to use up the fresh cranberries I found in the back of the fridge. My longtime favorite cranberry sauce uses orange zest and wine with a dash of spice, and I adapted it, remembering the fresh relish my sister makes with an entire orange. I cut a large navel orange into pieces, took out the white pith from the center, and dropped the orange into the cuisinart, skin and all. When it was coarsely ground up, I mixed it with cranberries, sugar, wine and fresh ginger and cooked it up. the resulting sauce was excellent - slightly less sweet than the one I usually make, and pungent with orange rind and ginger. For sheer ease and instant gratification, however, nothing beats the risotto you can make with leftover porcini soup. The wild mushroom soup I make for Christmas Eve is a clear, rich-flavored broth, full of sliced porcini and onions. The whole deal with risotto, of course, is to have a delicious flavoring agent to stir into the rice, and a good broth. Here were both, all ready to go. The risotto process is simple, so I could make a nice meal with practically no fuss. You could do this with any broth-based soup. Start the risotto as you start all risotto, with a chopped onion or shallot in a little butter, then add the rice and stir, then add the wine and stir again. Add the leftover soup after you have cooked away the wine, and supplement the liquid with a simple vegetable broth to bring it up to the amount you need. Keep stirring in liquid until the risotto is creamy but still firm. Add cheese. That's it, no mystery. Don't despair over your leftovers. They may not have nine lives, like your cat, but they surely have more than one. Personally, I enjoy January leftovers more than any others, because I know that when they are gone, then begins the January diet. But more on that another time. Happy New Year once again, and look for Potato and Caramelized Onion Gnocchi, and Cranberry Sauce with Whole Orange and Ginger in this month's "Recipes".
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