Tuesday dinner: vaguely Spanish leftovers

The great thing about blogging a week of dinners is that I don't have to think about what I might talk about today. I just upload the photos and get going. And I'm hopeful that by Friday I'll have tons of other interesting things to tell you.

Yesterday was a using-up-leftovers sort of day. I've said before that I hate leftovers, but that's because my mother's attitude to them was to put yesterday's dinner back on a plate and stick it in the microwave for three minutes. This is fine if yesterday's dinner was something gloopy like chilli or curry or stew, but when you've got half a pork chop and a rejected potato and some grey green beans looking back at you for the second time, well, you're not much more likely to eat it today than you were yesterday. I like leftovers if I can do something new with them.

The challenge: a sausage and a half, cooked; half a red pepper; about half a can of fire-roasted tomatoes, decanted; the tail end of a jar of pasta sauce before it went off.

The dilemma: no onion.

So I sweet-talked my friend into bringing an onion with her on a playdate, with tempting mentions of peanut-butter cookies and freshly baked bread. She arrived with two boys, an onion, and freshly baked bread of her own that put mine in the shade. (Which is kind of funny, because it was from a cookbook I had lent her.)

The playdate ended in some amount of chaos when the children broke into opposing factions and started sending raiding parties from one room to the other to purloin soft toys to be taken on either the Animal Train or sent in the Animal Truck (I think; we weren't sure what the difference was, but the Train proponent was adament that the animals were not going on a Truck, and there was some element of (Baby) Animal Hospital going on with the Truck) and there was a lot of shouting and then they went home but were gracious enough not to take the onion back with them.

So I sauteed it in olive oil, with the chopped red pepper and a clove of garlic, tossed in the tomatoes and the pasta sauce, added a drained and rinsed tin of cannellini beans from the storecupboard, sliced up the remaining sausage and stirred it in, seasoned with paprika and oregano, and called the whole thing Spanish.

I wasn't sure what carb to put with this - in Spain they might have had it in a bowl with some amazing bread, or on rice; but my rice is Basmati which didn't seem quite right so I decided to use cous cous for a change. And because it's quick. I sloshed in a glob of fancy garlic olive oil with the water, and it made all the difference.

There were leftovers to the leftovers, despite my best efforts, but in fact the garlic cous cous seemed like such a good idea that I've just polished that off for lunch.