Latest features Leftovers - the roux solution

Date Published:

30/01/2008

What do you do when the cupboards are bare? With days still to go till payday Hannah Williams finds ways to survive off the languishing leftovers

If you are facing the run up to payday with empty cupboards, all is not lost. It's just a case of lateral thinking - or so I told myself with two days before my pennies were due in the bank.

The ingredients

Languishing between a packet of spaghetti and half an onion were a bag of flour, an ingenious all-day-breakfast-in-a-tin (housemate's), a lone clove of garlic and a handful of slightly shrivelled mushrooms. The fridge yielded half a pint of milk, a slither of butter, a stump of Stilton, and to my delight the remnants of a bottle of white wine.

The wonders of roux

I put the pasta on to boil, chopped the onion and garlic and fried them up in half the butter, adding the mushrooms after five minutes with a splash of white wine. You're never far from a delicious meal as long as you have flour, butter and milk in the house as it means you're minutes away from a good roux. I heated the rest of butter with a tablespoon of flour, stirring out the lumps with a vigorous back and forth motion across the pan. Then I slowly added a cup of milk, stirring regularly but allowing the sauce to thicken. When the sauce had reached the consistency of custard I crumbled in the stilton and let it simmer over a low heat for a few minutes.

Then it was just a case of tossing the pasta in the blue cheese sauce, and serving the veg on top. Basic but delicious.

Roux are a great way of using up left over bits and bobs; mustard, pesto, tomato puree, anything that could make a tasty sauce.