recipes with trace ingredients

[chas]

I'm a faithful reader of the food section in the local paper, and I probably try one or so recipes a month from it. A lot of these recipes have ridiculous amounts of a couple of ingredients: a tablespoon of tomato paste, one or two sprigs of parsley, stuff like that. Today it was half a cup of rocotta.

So what do y'all do when this happens? I sometimes follow the recipe faithfully and have, say, 3/4 of a can of tomato paste left over. That's easy, it can just go into spaghetti sauce. Most of a bunch of parsley can go into meatballs, jambalaya, or tabouleh. But 3/4 of a tub of ricotta? That can't just go into something random. So I just put a tub of ricotta into a recipe that called for 1/2 cup. Not a good thing to do with a recipe that I'm trying for the first time, but we all like ricotta.

Something like this comes up in most of the recipes from the newspaper, so I'm curious what others do in general or specific examples of things that are really difficult to use up.

[an seanduine]

Um, I'm no kind of a cook. . . .but: If I ever have any spare ricotta around I cannot resist making chocolate mousse. I don't use sugar tho', I prefer to use stevia to keep the sugar and calorie count down. Blend the ricotta until smooth, add cocoa, vanilla and stevia to taste. Easy-Peasey! To go fancy, whip up some cream to top it. Again I use stevia.

Enjoy
Bob

[s1m0n]

If you don't want to use a partial package of some ingredient, why don't you scale the recipe up (or down) to make that the round number? If you'd rather use a full package of ricotta rather than 3/4 of a package, increase the other ingredients by a third, and everything will come out in the correct ratios.

[I.D.10-t]

Tomato paste can be frozen, ricotta can be used in place of other milk things like for making pancakes, muffins, bread, etc...


On the other hand you can look for substitutes, those things can enhance a food, but in general if you keep the liquids and solids consistent you should be fine.

[brewerpaul]

Most recipes are pretty flexible. I just use stuff up, maybe adjust spices to taste. Our daughter is a research scientist, so she follows "protocols" pretty exactly, resulting in tablespoon quantities of things sitting in the refrigerator until they inevitably get moldy. Drives me nuts...

[I.D.10-t]

Yep, as a chemist I quickly found out when ratios need to be precise and when the tolerances could be fudged. Boiling hard boiled eggs it really doesn't matter how precisely you measure the water to a point.

[chas]

My attitude is, I do science for a living, so I treat cooking as an art.

ID, thanks for cluing me in to freezing tomato paste. I hadn't realized you could.

[Nanohedron]

ID, thanks for cluing me in to freezing tomato paste. I hadn't realized you could.

Nor I.

The usual wisdom (that I'm familiar with) is that if you have leftover tomato paste in a can, you just smooth out the top of the unused portion, add enough olive oil to cover and seal it, and refrigerate until the next time you need it. No doubt almost any food-grade oil would do, but if you're cooking Mediterranean you can incorporate the small amount of olive oil seal into the dish, an appropriate addition with no waste.

This is probably why someone invented tomato paste in a squeeze tube. Not everyone can get that, though.

[I.D.10-t]

The usual wisdom (that I'm familiar with) is that if you have leftover tomato paste in a can, you just smooth out the top of the unused portion, add enough olive oil to cover and seal it, and refrigerate until the next time you need it.

Seems more practicle than trying to make paste ice cubes the right size and risk freezer burn. Being low in water and acidic, the paste it should last that way for a long time in a container.

We have a bunch of 1/2 C rubber tupper ware containers that use to freeze things like fresh dill (one container=2 dill bread loaves) Orange juice concentrate (3Oz. frozen concentrate and one block of silken Tofu blended = 1 week box lunch deserts), extra sauces and seasonings, etc.