Daring Food Inventions from Leftovers

I am crazy daring and inventive sometimes. I found some rye berries in the beer-making cupboard and some quinoa in the freezer and so I ground them up in my grain mill and added them into my slow rise sourdough. I tasted the batter and it needed more salt so I added it guessing, mixing and tasting. So far I have cornmeal and oat groats and bread flour and whole wheat flour and sesame seeds and sunflower seeds. Why not? As my grandmother Sophie would say, "What could be bad?" But she never cooked.

Sophie did like to eat mostly in Chinese and Italian restaurants with my Grandfather. And she went to the "pictures" all the time sometimes twice in one day. She would knit in the dark.

I did attend one Seder at her Brighton Beach apartment in Brooklyn when I was six or seven. I remember green card tables strung together and draped with lacy white linens, and there was a matzoh ball the size of a softball. I was terrified.

As a kid I was always afraid of the table and yet I longed to be there. My parents stopped eating with us and had the housekeeper feed us. On the weekends we got to see our dad at meals even though he lived with us. I loved the family when my grandparents were there. I was Grandpa's favorite but I got nervous stomach aches and I had bad reactions to many foods in spite of loving to eat. "She's just like me," Grandpa Nat would say because I sniffed everything and I had blue eyes and a big smile just like him.

Where was I? Last night I took my corn tortillas and shredded them and added beans and spicy Monterey Jack slices of cheese. It was dry. Today I topped it with my kale soup and baked it in a small covered casserole. That was good. Then I added leftover ziti and home made tomato sauce and my latest chicken carrot onion collards soup. It is a multi-ethnic geological dig of leftovers casserole for dinner.

My mother in law and my fairy god mother both grew up French Canadian and dinner was lunch with the whole family. Fathers would come home from work for a midday meal called dinner, and supper was the night meal before bed. I think that was a better idea.