Ends & Bits: Non-Fussy Pot Pie + Bonus Gin Cocktail

Refrigerator empty? Cupboards bare? Need to stretch the wilty remains of last week’s grocery run until next payday? Toss all those little ends and bits in a pan and make something delicious! This series explores the skill set of just “throwing together” a meal by looking at what you have available to work with and going from there. This takes a willingness to experiment and a bit of a knack for knowing what will taste delicious together. It also helps to have plenty of practice and exposure to a wide varieties of recipes with potential variations. It is in this spirit that we run our regular Ends & Bits series.

So I was having one of those days where nothing sounded good for dinner so I just didn't eat until I got a headache, realised I was being dumb, and decided I had to cook something. So I started with the advice of my old pal Carmel: Fry some onions. Just fry some onions and see where you end up.

I think this was original conveyed as a metaphor or life as well. Profound, yo.

So I started cutting up my onions to fry and realised we had bacon. Lots of bacon. "American-style" bacon even.

Spoiler: Australia does a lot of things really, really well. Bacon is not one of them. The "American-style" bacon my housemate found is an improvement. But... it tastes like the person who made it asked, "How is American bacon different than Australian bacon?" and then made it based off the answer without ever really trying American bacon.

 Anyway, I decided that the only thing better than frying onions was frying onions IN BACON, so I cut up some bacon along with my onion and started frying them all together and pondering what  I wanted this to end up as. About this point, I decided what I really wanted was a pot pie. Completely weather inappropriate to me, but it sounded delicious.

So I started doing a quick internet search for pot pie recipes and I was... underwhelmed by the results. They were all super fussy... Buy store-bought puff pastry and prepare it according to the instructions! Roast the vegetables first! Use only these exact vegetables! Then braise them slowly on the stovetop for four million hours! Make a roux separately and add it to the veggie slowly or you will ruin everything! Etc. And I just could not be fussed.

So I decided to just throw things together and see what happened. What happened was delicious:

Seriously delicious.

It takes a little bit of time to come together, but is incredible unfussy as a recipe. This is basically a "template" recipe--no strict ingredients, just vague proportions. (Thanks to Jules at The Stonesoup for the terminology of template recipes...they're basically the way I think about cooking.) The butter/margarine and some kind of flour are pretty essential, but everything else negotiable. Throw in whatever you have around!

Ends & Bits: Little House-Inspired Bean Soup

Refrigerator empty? Cupboards bare? Need to stretch the wilty remains of last week’s grocery run until next payday? Toss all those little ends and bits in a pan and make something delicious! This series explores the skill set of just “throwing together” a meal by looking at what you have available to work with and going from there. This takes a willingness to experiment and a bit of a knack for knowing what will taste delicious together. It also helps to have plenty of practice and exposure to a wide varieties of recipes with potential variations. It is in this spirit that we run our regular Ends & Bits series.

Hi, my name is Andrea and I'm obsessed with the Little House on the Prairie series. I own all the books and two complete spinoff series; I've been marathon-ing the show on DVD from the library; I even own the goddamn cookbook.

I have literally read this cover-to-cover.

I tend to re-read the original series just about once a year, and so a couple days ago, I finished The Long Winter for the umpteenth time, in which the whole town is snowed in for like 7 months straight and the trains stop running and everybody pretty much almost starves. But early on in the book, it talks about how Ma makes bean soup and how very tasty and warming it is when it's so very cold outside.

Meanwhile, back in real life, for various reasons, the darling husband and I are trying to see if we can make it until next week without going grocery shopping, which means we're digging into the bottoms of the cabinets and fridge to use all the stuff we've been pushing aside because there were other, easier things to cook. And yesterday, I found half a bag of dried beans that have probably been in the cabinet for over a year, and it all clicked: I would follow the example of Ma Ingalls, make do with what we have, and whip up some tasty bean soup.

This recipe is not directly from the Little House Cookbook, mostly because they had rather less on hand than I do and their bean soup would have been pretty terribly bland, and also because I don't have salt pork. (Is that even a thing anymore?) Rather, it is simply bean-based and inspired by the use-up-and-make-do-with-what-you-have attitude so often found in the Little House series.