Traditional recipes made with leftovers… and olive oil

Even traditional Italian cuisine helps us not to waste: here are some recipes in which leftovers are protagonists.

Today we talk about traditional recipes for recovering leftovers and avoiding waste. A particularly popular topic, and not only in the periods following the holidays

Environmental sustainability has become a hot topic in recent years. Respect for the environment also means not wasting food, both in order not to unnecessarily consume the energy used to produce food and to avoid increasing waste. Waste that has to be disposed of, treated, transported, creating pollution and further dispersion of energy.

However, combating waste is by no means a new habit: many traditional Italian recipes derive precisely from the need not to throw away even the crumbs, and therefore to cook with leftovers.

Let’s look at some traditional Italian recipes made with leftovers and accompanied by our extra virgin olive oil from Frantoio Muraglia.

Leftover pasta in the fridge? Make pasta frittata

If pasta is a fundamental food in our culture, it is to Naples that we owe the recipe for frittata di pasta. It was created precisely to avoid wasting leftover pasta from the day before and is also a quick and easy recipe to prepare, with endless variations.

Meanwhile, let’s look at the basic recipe.

Usually spaghetti is used which can also be the day before but must be cooked strictly al dente.

In a large container, beat 4 eggs, 4 tablespoons Parmesan cheese, pepper and salt. You can also add chopped Neapolitan salami and scamorza cheese.

Now pour the lukewarm or cold spaghetti over the eggs and other ingredients.

You can add butter or milk to soften the mixture. T

ake a large, high-sided frying pan. Pour in the Frantoio Muraglia extra virgin olive oil and let it warm up well. Pour the egg, spaghetti and cheese mixture into the pan, level it and then when it has made a bit of a crust underneath and is firm enough turn the frittata over to brown on both sides.

You can also make the baked pasta frittata by greasing a pan with extra virgin olive oil.

Tuscan ribollita: the dish that warms and nourishes

From Tuscany comes another traditional dish that saves leftovers and waste: ribollita.

Cabbage, carrots, chard are stewed for a long time. T hen the beans are added with the cooking water. After a couple of hours, stale bread can be added.

The advice is to make a layer of bread, add soup and then continue alternating soup and bread layers until filled. After letting our ribollita rest for an hour, you can put it back in the oven.

With such an intense dish, it is ideal to use our Fumo, smoked extra virgin olive oil.

Country cake: don’t throw bread away, sweeten it!

Bread can never be missing from our tables. Today we have the most varied types, not only white, but also wholemeal, cereal, ancient grain, kamut, rye.

An essential companion of our meals, it often ends up leftover and thrown away.

But did you know that with dry bread you can also make cakes? There is a traditional leftover recipe from Brianza called torta paesana.

Stale bread (almost half a kilo!), milk, macaroons, pine nuts, sultanas, chocolate, liqueur, sugar: mix everything together, put in a buttered or oiled mould, and off you go, into the oven at 180° for about 45 minutes.

La Cucina Italiana suggests in its version of the recipe to accompany the torta paesana with ice cream

Apulian meatballs: fried, with sauce, as an aperitif

Talking about cooking, we could not forget Puglia. A traditional Apulian recipe that saves leftover bread from being wasted is the famous bread balls.

Simply soak the leftover dry bread in milk for 15 minutes. When it is soaked in milk and well softened, squeeze it, add chopped parsley, grated pecorino cheese, salt and pepper, and eggs.

Mix the soaked bread with the other ingredients and form little meatballs.

They are then cooked by dipping them in plenty of hot Muraglia extra virgin olive oil and frying them. Once golden brown the excess oil can be removed by placing them on kitchen paper.

You can then cook them a little longer in the sauce and fresh basil, or stick them on a toothpick and serve them as an aperitif.

There are many more traditional recipes made with leftovers than those suggested in this article: for example worth mentioning are agnolotti del plin, typical of Piedmont, perfect for recovering meat leftovers; cappon magro, a fish and vegetable dish from Liguria, created to recover leftovers on fishermen’s ships; and pancotto and canederli, which again recover bread.

There are many anti-waste recipes and some are rooted in our past. Perhaps this is also why, according to the Waste Watcher / Zero Waste International Observatory, we manage with third place in the ranking among the countries that waste the least food, as described in this article.

At the top of the list of the most wasteful countries is the United States, if you were wondering.

Cooking with leftovers can make us even more virtuous in the fight against waste.

Cooking with leftovers can make us even more virtuous in the fight against waste.

This does not mean sacrificing taste and quality: just use healthy, carefully produced, environmentally friendly ingredients.

Our extra virgin olive oil is among them.