It’s a Monday night and it’s my turn to cook dinner. One of the deciding factors determining our meals is the status of ingredients. Tonight’s near-crisis was a dish on the kitchen counter with 5 small fresh tomatoes which were fully ripe and nearing their end-of-life. As usual, I began the search for the meal by taking the key ingredient and exploring the options.

I’m very comfortable in the digital world and use my computer to canvas recipes in my Dropbox folder (with about 7,000 recipes), as well as on the internet. Tonight, however, I started with my analog resources (a few hundred cookbooks). One book caught my eye: Pierre Franey’s Cooking in France. As I perused the pages (which I had not read in a few years), I quickly located one from Burgundy, Sautéed Spinach with Tomatoes that interested me. It was short, clear and concise, in Franey’s inimitable style. and I was thrilled to see what I could do with a full bag of spinach purchased two days ago, in addition to using the tomatoes.

Now I needed some protein, and my wife had just bought a bag of Lundberg Organic Long Grain Brown Basmati at the market. Here’s where the leftovers kick in. I sliced the remaining half of yesterday’s shallot to add to the rice. The other home run in the leftover department was 2/3 cup of mushroom potato broth, recently used to braise fingerling potatoes. The 1/2 cup of rice was cooked with the broth, topped off to make 1 cup of liquid, plus 2 Tbs of unsalted butter. That required 45 minutes of simmering and 10-15 minutes of resting to finish the grain.

It took less than 15 minutes to cook the spinach and tomatoes. I also sliced some of the focaccia I made yesterday to accompany the vegetables.

La Piece de Resistance, as we say in Burgundy, was a glass of Italian wine from Friuli at the Slovenian border. Made from the not-well-known Schioppettino grape, it was a gift a few days ago from a good friend of ours who is the importer and distributor for I Clivi wines in our state.

The meal was a big hit. It also checked all the boxes: used must-cook ingredients, leftovers, on the table in less than an hour, healthy, easy cleanup, and delicious. Bon appetit!