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I love the concept of a Rubber Chicken. Cooking one chicken and turning it into 2, 3 or more meals is not a new idea. Here is a post that shows how to turn that chicken into five meals. I’ve been using the Rubber Chicken (or Planned Overs) concept for quite awhile but not just for chicken. It works well for beef roast, pork roast, ham, any kind of bean and even meatloaf.Planned Overs do take a little bit of planning. It was helpful for me when I first started doing these to portion out the meat on the first night before I served it. Such as, if we were having a roast I would determine how much we needed the first night and then cut off the remaining and divide that into how ever many meals I was hoping to get. Of course, that varies depending on the size of the roast. To be honest, this helps us with our portions a bit. I’ll admit that we do have slight portion control issues here and when given the opportunity we will eat until we are close to bursting. Not a good thing for so many reasons.
The idea of ‘leftovers’ isn’t very appealing but these are ‘planned overs’ taking an original meal and creating something new.
Pinto beans are something we enjoy. This was our dinner Tuesday night. Pinto beans topped with caramelized onions, green salad with buttermilk-kombucha dressing, bread, and kiwi .Tonight, some of the remaining beans will be the basis of chili. That chili will also contain about half a pound of hamburger in it.
Tomorrow night, I’ll turn the rest of the beans into re-fried beans and will use it (along with the other half pound of hamburger) to make a Mexican Pizza as one of our Pizza Night pizzas.
If I actually have any beans leftover I’ll freeze the remaining. Usually, three days of ‘planned overs’ are all I do.
Some other Rubber Meals that we like:
Roast Beef We usually get a nice sized roast beef each month in our beef CSA.
Day 1: Traditional Roast Beef served with potatoes, carrots, onions (I cook it all together) and make gravy out of the drippings to go over the potatoes.
Day 2: Burritos
Day 3: Beef ‘Stroganoff’ over rice. Not a real Stroganoff but my version. Mushrooms (sauteed), the leftover veggies from the roast, the leftover gravy, bite size beef chunks all cooked together until hot and then add sour cream to it. Yum.
Lentils
Day 1: Lentils and brown rice (cooked together) served with salad greens on top. I got this idea from a blog called Lentils and Rice that has since gone private. She did an entire series she called Stretchy Beans.
Day 2: Lentil patties
Day 3: Lentil Soup or Fritatta
Garbanzo Beans (Chick peas)
Day 1: Chick pea curry (this is so good. Also from the Lentils and Rice blog)
Day 2: Bean patties
Day 3: Hummus. We don’t usually do this as a dinner but it is a great lunch or snack.
Antelope Roast This is my favorite right now because I still have a couple of beautiful roasts in my freezer.
Day 1: Traditional Roast
Day 2: Antelope Pie
Day 3: Antelope Stew
Do you do any Rubber Meals? I’d love some new ideas.
This post is a contribution to Pennywise Platter hosted by Kimi, The Nourishing Gourmet.
>Oh btw, is antelope good? There's (OBVIOUSLY) plenty of them around here … but none back east … so we've never had it. Is it like venison?
>We like the antelope. It is a little like venison but different. Definitely its own taste. There are definitely plenty of them!