Weeknight wonders: Three dinner recipes that leave tasty lunchtime leftovers

Weeknight wonders: Three dinner recipes that leave tasty lunchtime leftovers – The Globe and Mail

Welcome to The Globe’s Recipe Lab, where food culture reporter Dakshana Bascaramurty explores what makes recipes work well.

The objective

Three dinners whose leftovers would make appetizing next-day lunches

It happens so often: I make something delicious for dinner. I pack away leftovers. But when I dig into them for lunch the next day, the five-star meal is barely edible.

Overnight, the noodles in the Taiwanese beef noodle soup become bloated with broth and lose their chew. The gnocchi bake with mozzarella and cherry tomatoes emerges from the microwave dry and gummy. The once-tender lettuce and crisp cucumber in the fattoush salad turn sludgy.

I am constantly in search of things that can serve as a quick, tasty dinner and remain craveable at lunchtime the next day. Vijaya Selvaraju’s Indian Food Is Easy is packed with double-duty dishes, which average about 30 minutes of active cooking time.

“I think a lot of people think of Indian cuisine as special occasion food, or that food that you go out to eat. Never that food that you cook at home unless you’re of that background,” the Toronto-based recipe developer says. “I wanted to demystify, to let people know that Indian food is not all food that’s stewed for hours and hours on the stove.”

On a recent week, I tried out three of Selvaraju’s recipes for dinner that used three different proteins, but otherwise relied on many similar spices, herbs and aromatics, which streamlined my grocery shopping. I wanted to see how easy they were to pull off and if they’d keep and reheat well for lunch the next day.

Cheesy Keema Quesadillas

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The process

Selvaraju developed a version of this recipe as a kid. Her mom would cook great quantities of keema – spiced minced meat – on weekends and would incorporate it into meals throughout the week. When she was hungry after school, Selvaraju told me in an interview, “I’d just grab a tortilla, fling a little bit of keema in there, top it with some cheese and I was good to go.”

The filling doesn’t stray far from Mexican quesadillas, and to Indian-ify them, Selvaraju asks you to add a few more spices to the lamb, such as coriander. And instead of salsa, she serves them up with a zippy mint coriander chutney (which I made in the blender while frying the quesadillas).

The result

Everyone in my family inhaled the quesadillas at dinner – my daughter dipped hers into a mound of sour cream on her plate while I piled coriander mint chutney and a mild hot sauce on mine.

The following day, I put them in my daughter’s lunchbox, and she happily ate them cold at camp. Later that week, I brought some to a spontaneous playground picnic with my kids. I’d quickly reheated them in the oven, put them in a container and we had them with hot sauce and leftover coriander mint chutney.

Reshmi Kebabs

The process

Every chicken kebab I’ve loved was made with thighs, which are fattier, juicier and more flavourful than breasts, which I never buy. But the inclusion of yogurt and cream in the marinade and instruction to baste them with melted ghee made me hopeful these would not dry out.

The only thing I cut back on here – and with all these recipes – was the volume of green chilies, for my children’s sake. Selvaraju, who also has two young kids, says she does the same – but that’s the only modification. “I never dumb down the other spices because I feel like that’s just all flavour there, and that’s what they’re going to get used to.”

I don’t have a grill, so I cooked these in an oven set to 425 degrees for 15 minutes, basting them with ghee at the halfway point and then again at the end before I put them under the broiler for a few minutes to develop a little char.

The result

These would’ve tasted better off the barbecue, but even cooked in the oven, my husband and children ate everything on their plates and then had more. The kebabs were tender and incredibly flavourful from the unexpected mix of lemon, nutmeg, ginger and cream in the marinade. We made wraps with warm naan and coriander mint chutney with a quick cucumber, corn and tomato salad on the side.

The next day I microwaved the chicken (which was still juicy) and made an identical wrap for lunch with some leftover roasted peppers I found in the fridge. On another day, I chopped up the cold chicken and mixed it into a salad.

15-Minute Egg Bhurji

The process

Selvaraju says she’s found herself in the same bind as me on many weeknights, realizing all the meat she has is in her freezer and she has no time to defrost it. Eggs often come to the rescue.

In India, they’re so much more than breakfast food. Hard-boiled ones are simmered in a tomato gravy flavoured with garam masala and dried fenugreek leaves to make a Punjabi egg curry, while a Chettinad egg pepper fry is made by frying halved boiled eggs in a spice paste with curry leaves.

This dish starts off like you’re building the base for a curry in a frying pan with ghee, aromatics, chilies, spices and tomato, but then when it’s all fragrant and jammy, you add in beaten eggs and turn it into a scramble instead.

Selvaraju prefers a soft scramble, but knowing I was going to serve this with fresh, flaky parathas rather than heaped onto buttered toast, I let the eggs cook a little longer for a firmer final product.

The result

I loved scooping up the egg bhurji with small pieces of torn paratha the night I made it – it was so much more complex and memorable than a breakfast scramble. My eight-year-old daughter’s best friend, who was over for dinner, watched how I ate mine and copied, an approving smile stretching across her lips as she took her first bite. She didn’t finish everything I served her, but told me she’d have eaten more if it wasn’t so hot (next time I’ll cut back on the chilies even more).

For lunch the following day, my husband put some inside a challah bun he’d spread mayo on and added an Indian lime pickle for some extra heat. When he got home, he rhapsodized about how it tasted even better this way than it had at dinner.