Make Your Leftover Sauce or Gravy into a Complete Meal

Reader Ariela sent me this message:

I had a “Cooking Manager Moment” yesterday and I “owe” dinner to you. All we had leftover was the sauce from a goulash. My husband had made a delicious goulash with meat and veggies, only 2-3 cups of the sauce were left. I remembered something you wrote about your mom making soup from things like that and your recommendations for using drippings. I put the sauce in the pressure cooker with 4 cut-up carrots, a sweet potato, water, a cup of split peas, a cup of whole grain rice and some salt. It took all of 7 minutes. I cooked it for about 40 minutes and had a delicious soup ? my family licked the pot clean!

Thank you!

Meat drippings or gravy already has plenty of protein. That’s what makes it congeal. The split peas, added by Ariela, contain even more. So there’s no need to add additional meat. I did something similar with my leftover gravy, except I added a butternut squash, carrots, split peas, and some cooked bulgur with onions.

To calculate cooking times, start with the ingredient that takes the longest time to cook. In both Ariela’s recipe and mine, the split peas take the longest, about 40 minutes. When cooking in the pressure cooker, divide by three. So as soon as the cooker signals that the pressure is right, 15 minutes should be enough cooking time.

The amount of water to add can be tricky. A good estimate would be about double the amount of raw grains and legumes. So if you put in half a cup of raw brown rice and half a cup of dried peas, add an extra 2 cups of water. If you are starting off with thin sauce, you’ll need less additional water. If most of the liquid is absorbed by the grains, call it risotto instead of soup.

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Photo credit: Jessica Mullen