Leftovers, Fir-Tree Style

Please welcome our guest today, Nancy Adams. Nancy is a librarian, freelance editor, and writer of mysteries and fantasy. Her short story "Saint Nick and the Fir Tree" has just come out in both e-book and print formats. Another short story, "The Secret of the Red Mullet," a historical mystery, is published in FISH TALES: the Guppy Anthology (Wildside Press, 2011).  Nancy is a member of Mystery Writers of America and Sisters in Crime. In her spare time she reads, sleeps, and whacks the occasional dust bunny. Find out more about Nancy and her writing at: http://nancyadamsfiction.com.

Trees and humans have very different ideas about what constitutes food. In the plant kingdom, there are no leftovers. Everything is used. Nourishing humus from decomposing leaves, the natural fertilizer of manure . . . What humans call waste. Leftovers.

Potato peelings left from Thanksgiving's mashed potatoes. Apple peelings from that homemade apple pie. Not exactly leftovers, but left behind nevertheless. These can turn into food for plants. Not in their current raw state, but cook a few months in a well maintained compost pile, et voila! They break down and join the rest of the compost ingredients, the perfect dish as far as plants are concerned.

There's a scene in "Saint Nick" where the Saint and the Tree are sitting in a diner. Fir Tree's become mobile, thanks to Nick's magic, but eating human food is another matter. When the Tree says there's nothing on the menu it can eat, Nick responds:

"Then keep quiet and suck on your soil. I'm starving. Just order a salad or something."

"A salad!" The thought made me so queasy, my sap almost burst through my bark. "That'd be cannibalism!"

Thinking about that scene now, in the context of compost, logically the "cannibalism" makes less sense. But emotionally, it resonated. It wasn't something I thought about: the words just tumbled out and felt right. Perhaps Tree's reaction mirrors the revulsion some of us experience at the thought of eating raw meat. Or eating fish when that big eye is staring at you out of the plate. Once salad ingredients are composted and "served" to the plant, any resemblance to green, living matter has vanished. Many of us prefer our meat dishes the same way.

In Fir Tree's world, human leftovers mean a bonanza for plants. No meat or oils, but anything left over from chopping or peeling vegetables or fruit. When I first read about compost, it appealed to the romantic in me: Nature's mysterious alchemy, transforming dross into gold.

Our own compost bin, out in the backyard, is sadly neglected these days. What with a full-time job and writing on weekends, I give it only minimum care. Dollops of vegetable leavings, but no fancy turning or layering or watering. Bags of manure get dumped in from time to time, and leaves in the fall. Someday, I say. Someday when I'm no longer working the day job, I'll take better care of the plants in our yard.

For now, I write about them. They'll have to be content with that.

Soup is Good Food

Note: The title of this post was meant to be a reference to a Dead Kennedy's song, but then I realized it's also the Campbell's Soup slogan. Oh well. 

—Gigi Pandian

I've given up making declarations about things I'll never do. Life changes too much for it to make sense to say I'll never do a particular thing, even if it seems ridiculously out of the question at a given time.

Take buying a house. I never planned on staying in one place long enough that I'd do it, but here we are in a cute little house outside of San Francisco.

I also never thought I'd be interested in becoming a good cook. But our little house came with an amazing kitchen (below). For the first time in my adult life, I had sufficient counter space and a gas stove. Low and behold, I discovered cooking was fun!

My Dutch Oven is probably my favorite thing in the kitchen. I can make soup from scratch that tastes better than anything I can buy, and it gives me leftovers that last all week. (I'm always cold, so soup really is good food.)

Butternut squash soup with homemade croutons.

French onion soup.

I've learned that it's the little things that make the difference in cooking soup: learning that a shallot is not the same thing as a small onion, adding spices at the right time, making sure you brown the garlic and onions first, adding a flavorful garnish at the end. I realize that you probably already knew all of these things, but they're still new for me!

I read that Julia Child didn't learn to cook or learn French until she was 36—exactly my age—so there's still hope for me on both fronts. Yup, I've also been trying to get better at my French. Speaking of which, I should probably go do my lesson for the day. So I'll leave you with a few photos of the backyard garden where I get many of the ingredients for my soups.

Herbs in the backyard garden.

Chard in the garden. Chard is a great substitute in soups that call for Spinach.

Pretending to water the garden; in truth, I only approach the watering can to take artsy photos of it.

Martha's (Stolen) Leftover Secret

A few years ago, for the first time ever, my trained chef brother was going to be home for Thanksgiving. Implied: he was going to be cooking and oh, we were not disappointed.

He refused to plan a menu, saying how could he, when he didn't know what would be fresh in the grocery store that day. Such pretentious words were never more welcome!

For the first time in years, I ate a turkey that was moist, perfect, dare I say - delicious - without the help of gravy or other accoutrements. The mashed potatoes were fluffy and buttery. The cranberry sauce tart. The other side dishes were classics with culinary twists. Everything was, in a word, delicious.

When the chef bro said he'd be coming back the next day to "take care of leftovers" I was positively gleeful. What magic would he work??

So imagine my surprise when he stopped by with nothing but a bag King's Hawaiian Sweet Rolls. (I'd have a picture here...only Blogger hates me...so...sorry.)

Anyhoo -

I thought to myself, there's gotta be a mistake. There's no way someone trained by the likes of Lagasse and Keller is bringing ghetto hawaiian sweet rolls into my kitchen.

But he was totally serious and explained that sweet rolls make the perfect leftover sandwich. He then proceeded to breakdown Thanksgiving dinner by its components.

Mashed Potatoes or Sweet Potatoes were to be used like condiments. We slathered the bread in them.

Proteins like ham and turkey were layered.

Then we looked for something crunchy, like green beans.

We topped it off with a sweet element, like a dollop of cranberry sauce.

We made a half dozen combinations and spent the better part of an hour creating close to a hundred sandwiches.

They shoulda tasted so gross, but it was like the perfect Thanksgiving slider.

Turns out he uses hawaiian spring rolls to make a leftover for almost anything. Leftover ground beef of any kind - spaghetti, taco, whatever - makes a beef or sloppy joe slider. It's great for sopping up leftover soups and stews. And it's bite sized, so you can eat like...a hundred of them and it's only five calories, right?

NOW I USE THEM FOR EVERYTHING.

Leftover Words

L. G. C. Smith

I write like I cook for holidays. If a twelve-pound turkey is enough, mine will be twenty, and I might bake a ham, too. If two kinds of pie will suffice, I will make five. And a cake. And a pumpkin cheesecake. If a 75K word novel works for most of the world, mine will be a minimum of 125K. One of mine is 160K. (It reads fast, I promise.)

I try to write a short story, and I end up with a novella. I try to write a novella, and I end up with a novel. And one time, I tried to write a novel, which I did finish (the 160K word thriller), and ended up with two additional novellas (one of which is Staindrop, available now from many fine ebook emporia), a 75K word novel, and 150K words of variously related bits and pieces. These last are my leftovers.


In the best of all possible worlds, my time-traveling Anglo-Saxon warlord kings brought into the twenty-first century to bolster counter-terrorism efforts in Britain will eventually find reader favor akin to that enjoyed by Karen Marie Moning, Diana Gabaldon and Sherrilyn Kenyon. When that happens (a writer can dream, can’t she?), my lengthy forays into my seventh-century hero’s experiences with modern-day life might be of use as giveaways for loyal readers. There’s a lot of story in those leftovers.


For now, however, they’re sitting in files like so many pickle jars in the refrigerator. They won’t go bad. They have an indefinite shelf life. It seems a waste to toss them out. So I keep them as I forge ahead with new projects and work on getting Warlord published as well as it deserves.

My Grandpa Johnson was a South Dakota rancher who reserved a part of the field south of the house and barn for broken machinery that might come in handy one day. He had a small forge, and he did a little blacksmithing, so he could reshape an old pin to fit a new use with a little fire and some hammer work. I like to think of my leftover words as being similarly adaptable. They’re a resource. A potential treasure trove. A word hoard. Leftover the way the Staffordshire Hoard of gold and garnets was when it was buried, its value waiting to be rediscovered.


Just to be clear, though, now would be a good time to discover any food leftovers from Thanksgiving and toss them out. Except for pickles and jam. Those you can keep.

The Leftovers: Or Dating in my Thirties

I’m thirty-three, and I am single. That’s by choice, as I’m both very independent and very peripatetic. But about a year ago, now, I decided that I should try to put down roots, mostly because I love my job here in Pennsylvania and I wanted to try to make the state home. For while the job is a great fit, the place…not so much.

Anyway, that led me to embark on Internet dating. Which, a bare six months later, led me to declare a moratorium on dating, period.

This is not a slam on Internet matchmaking. I know tons of people who’ve met their SO over the computer, and I’ve had a long term, long distance, "not-a-relationship!" with someone who, for all intents and purposes, I met on Twitter.

Instead, this is about dating in my thirties, and how all us thirtysomething singles have left are the leftovers. Granted, I think dating in my thirties would be very different if I lived somewhere else—somewhere more ambitious, more productive, and more economically healthy, like New York or London. But here’s what I discovered make up the leftovers—what’s left when someone’s still single in their thirties:

·      The Walking Wounded: Those men and women recovering from a divorce or separation so brutal, they’re basically an ambulatory sucking wound. Don’t get me wrong, I actually enjoyed these dates, as I am a writer. So under the auspices of being “a good listener” I probed for all the gory details, carefully filing them away for future use in my fiction. 

·      The Great Unreconstructed: This is the man (although I’m sure there’s a female equivalent) who adheres to a patriarchal view of the world that places him at the apex because he is THE MAN. Therefore, he’s certain he’s more successful than you, the woman. When he discovers he’s not, it’s like watching one of those bizarre New Guinean birds do a territorial display—all puffed chest and flaring comb(over).

·      The Disaster: Just what it says on the package. He’s got awesome excuses for why he lives in his sister’s attic and has never achieved a single one of his ambitions, excuses which you totally want to believe, because at least he’s fairly liberal. Then you realize he doesn’t judge because he can’t, as he’s really a total loser.

·      The Chameleon: That guy who tells you everything you want to hear. At first you wonder if it’s a Machiavellian plot to get in your pants, and you giggle to yourself because you’re actually rather easy. But at some point you realize that the poor sod actually has no idea who he is, and that he wants to be everything, anything, other than himself.

·      The Marquis: He’s the guy who advertises himself as a warehouse of fetishistic carnal delights. Inevitably, he’s also 5’4”, with a potbelly, no hair, and coke bottle glasses. Or nine feet tall, 150 pounds sopping wet, with a ponytail trailing down his back like an anemic polecat. Either way, you’d be too busy giggling at the sight of him in a leather harness to choke out the word “Daddy.”

·      That Guy Who Poses In Photos With a Python For No Apparent Reason: I still haven’t figured out that guy. Lemme know if you have any thoughts.

Meanwhile, the last thing Internet dating taught me was that I, Nicole Peeler, am myself a leftover. I might look good as a bullet pointed list, especially in terms of career success, etc. But in truth, I’m so successful because I am utterly, unapologetically selfish; I take the concept of “independence” to an obsessive, slightly paranoid level; and I ALREADY HAVE MY OWN LIFE, THANKS. So, anyone knocking at my door, trying to move in with their schedule and their (ugly) furniture and their (terrible) thoughts on home décor and their (stupid) ideas about where and how to live and their (crazy) idea I can’t travel whenever I damned well please and their (selfish) demands I give up my lover and their delusion they can cook sometimes and their propensity for moving my pots and their inability to put the shit back in the cupboard where it belongs and their leaving their shoes in the hallway where I trip over them and their………. Well, they can go fuck themselves.

I, my friends, am a leftover. Make some casserole out of that. ;-)