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When it gets to that time of year between Christmas and New Year, sometimes known as Betwixmas, it’s not unusual to find yourself surrounded by mountains of Christmas leftovers. With turkey coming out of your ears, and enough leftover pudding to feed all of Santa’s elves, it can feel a bit overwhelming to find inventive ways to use up your Christmas dinner leftovers. With that in mind, we’ve rounded up a selection of tips and tricks that will help you whip up a festive storm and prevent your leftovers from going to waste. Most importantly, these tips and recipes all require minimal effort so that you can focus on the important things from this time of year, like a festive movie marathon and figuring out how to put together the toys that Santa brought down the chimney. Planning is key The number one thing you can do to lower your food waste over Christmas is to plan ahead and resist the urge to impulse buy. Work out how much food you’ll need – especially if you’re hosting (and remember your guests will probably bring some food with them) – and make a shopping list. Planning is especially important when it comes to use-by dates. When buying meat, dairy or other fresh produce, check out that use-by date to make sure you won’t have to throw it away before you need it. It all starts with storage Marie Kondo your fridge to reduce food waste by keeping your ready-to-eat foods at the top, dairy in the middle, and raw meat at the bottom. Pop all your fresh fruit and veg in the drawers, and just like that, you’re a food waste-fighting machine. This will help you reduce any food waste across the festive season. Most fruit and veg will last longer if you store it properly. Stopping your fresh fruit and veg going bad in the first place is an easy way to reduce food waste. Here are two storage blunders that many of us make in the kitchen: Potatoes (for your perfect roasties) need to breathe, so it’s best to store them in a cardboard box or paper bag in a cool, dark place. Never in the fridge! And remember that you can still eat them if they’ve started to sprout. Citrus fruit, especially lemons and limes, will harden when stored in a fruit bowl at room temperature. To keep fresh and juicy for longer, so you can complement your post-dinner gin and tonic, store them in the fridge. Don’t neglect your scraps Once you’ve just finished baking, roasting or frying up a delicious feast, and you’re about to throw away all your leftover food scraps, always take a moment to think about where your waste is going. Here are a few unexpected scraps that you can use up instead of throwing them away. Beetroot tops can be used as a substitute for greens, like spinach, swiss chard and bok choy. They can be steamed, sauteed, braised, added to soups, or even eaten raw. Sautee the stems with a little garlic, orange and shallot to enjoy them tender and crispy – the perfect side to add something different to your Christmas lunch. Just make sure to rinse them well and they’re good to go! Boiling veg for a side of your Christmas dinner? Once the veg is suitably tender, drain over a pot and use the water to make your gravy. This is packed with nutrients to give your festive feast a health boost. If you’re not quite sure how to use up the skins of your potatoes and carrots, cutting them up and roasting in olive oil with plenty of salt and pepper makes delicious vegetable chips, the perfect snack to accompany an afternoon full of Christmas movies and toy building. Bring limp vegetables back to life How many times have you looked in the fridge after Christmas day and seen a few soft carrots and broccoli left over from the roast? Most of us banish limp vegetables to the bin, but you can actually salvage them very easily. You can bring carrots back to life by cutting a bit off the bottom and place upright in a glass of cold water until firmed up. If your carrots are already cut, you can place them in a bowl of cool water. Trim the bottom off a head of broccoli and pop in a glass of water. If you have cut florets, place in a bowl of water until plumped up and crisp. If you reach a point where you’ve exhausted all leftover recipes, why not donate to a local foodbank? It’s worth checking what they need before you turn up, but many will be incredibly grateful for your leftover donations. Christmas leftover recipes These are some festive favourite recipes from Gousto that will mix it up from the usual bubble and squeak. From sweet to savoury, there’s something for everyone. Chocolate orange yule log with leftover Christmas pudding Serves: 8-10 Time: 1 hour Ingredients: 3 eggs (separated into yolks and whites) 75g caster sugar 1 tbsp cocoa powder 50g plain flour For the filling: 150ml brandy cream (or double cream) 30g icing sugar 200g Christmas pudding For the topping: 150g unsalted butter (softened) 150g icing sugar 75g Terry’s Chocolate Orange Dark 75g Terry’s Chocolate Orange Milk Extra icing sugar to garnish Method: Preheat the oven to 200C/180C (fan)/400F/gas 6. Line a 9 x 13inch baking tray with non-stick baking parchment. Add the egg whites to a stand mixer and beat until stiff peaks form, then turn off and keep to one side. Add the egg yolks to a separate large bowl with the caster sugar and mix well with a wooden spoon or until combined. Sift the cocoa powder into the egg yolks and mix together again. Using a large metal spoon, carefully fold the egg whites through the egg yolk mixture (make sure you don’t knock out too much air!) until well combined. Sift over the plain flour and fold through carefully. Spread the cake mix evenly into the baking tray, then put into the oven. Bake for 10-11 min or until the cake is cooked through. Once cooked, remove the tray from the oven and keep aside for 2 min. Place a clean tea towel over the baking tray, then flip the cake over. Whilst the cake is still hot, use the tea towel to help you roll the cake lengthways into a tight log shape. Leave aside like this until completely cool. Meanwhile, whip the brandy cream in a stand mixer with the icing sugar until soft peaks form then remove to another bowl (don’t bother washing the stand mixer bowl!). Put the Terry’s chocolate segments into a small heatproof bowl over a pan of barely simmering water – make sure the bowl isn’t touching the water! Stir until melted then remove the bowl from the pan and let cool slightly. Into the same stand mixer, add the softened unsalted butter with the icing sugar. Stir with a spoon, then beat until combined. Slowly pour in the melted chocolate and beat until mixed. This is your chocolate buttercream. Once the cake has cooled, carefully unroll and remove the tea towel. Spread the whipped brandy cream over the cake, then crumble over the leftover Christmas pudding. Re-roll the yule log lengthways, pushing in any filling that falls out, until the seam is underneath the log. Spread the buttercream all over the cake and use a small knife to make lines to resemble a tree log. Trim the ends to neaten then put in the fridge for at least 30 min to set. Dust with some sifted icing sugar, if liked, and serve to your guests! Leftover Christmas turkey nuggets Serves: 6 Time: 30 minutes Ingredients: 250g cooked turkey can be white or dark meat or a mix of the two 2 slices white bread 50ml milk 5g parsley 1 shallot 1 garlic clove 1 egg 50g flour 60g panko breadcrumbs Vegetable oil (for frying) Method: Place the slices of bread in a dish and pour over the milk and set to one side. Peel and finely chop the garlic and shallot and finely chop the parsley. Heat a pan with a small amount of oil over a medium heat and fry the onion and garlic for 2-3 minutes until translucent. Add the soaked bread, onion and garlic mixture, parsley and cooked turkey with a pinch of salt and pepper to a food processor and blend until almost smooth. Crack the egg into a shallow bowl and mix well. Add the remaining flour to a plate and season with salt and pepper, then add the panko breadcrumbs to another plate. Remove 1/6th of the mixture at a time and form into a rough nuggets shape. Coat each nugget in the flour, tap off the excess, then add to the beaten egg and finally press it into the breadcrumbs firmly to evenly coat all over. Heat a wide non-stick frying pan (with a matching lid) with 1 inch of vegetable oil. Fry the nuggets for 2-3 minutes on each side until golden brown and crisp. Remove from the oil and drain on a cooling rack over kitchen roll. Alternatively, you can place them on a baking tray with a drizzle of oil and bake in an oven preheated to 200C/180 fan/gas 6 for 20 minutes. Christmas leftovers pot pie Serves: 6-8 Active time: 30 minutes | Total time: 1 hour 30 minutes Ingredients: 320g ready-rolled puff pastry 1 egg, beaten For the filling: 400-500g cooked turkey meat, torn into bite-size pieces 400-500g mixed roast vegetables, such as potatoes, peas, carrots, parsnips, cabbage, and sprouts 200-300g cooked ham, diced 1 generous handful mixed herbs, such as parsley, thyme, rosemary or tarragon, roughly chopped For the sauce: 45g butter 2 leeks, washes and roughly chopped 2 tbsp plain flour 250ml leftover gravy and 250ml chicken stock or 500ml chicken stock 3 tsp dijon mustard 200ml pouring cream Salt and freshly ground pepper Method: Preheat the oven to 180C (fan). Melt the butter in a large saucepan over a medium heat, and add the leeks and a little salt. Cook, stirring regularly for about 7 minutes until the leeks have softened. Add the flour and stir for another minute. Add the stock mixture and mustard a little at a time so your sauce doesn’t go lumpy. Then bring to a simmer, stirring continuously for 2 minutes until slightly thickened. Remove from the heat, add the pouring cream and season to taste. Then set aside to cool. Once the sauce is cooled, combine the filling ingredients in a 25cm pie dish and mix well. Pour over the sauce and stir again to mix through. Dust your countertop with a little flour and roll out the pastry a little thinner so it’s a bit bigger than the top of the pie dish. Lightly brush the edge of the pie dish with egg wash and gently lay the pastry over the filing. Trim the overhang with a sharp knife and use a fork to gently press around the edge, securing the pastry to the dish. If you prefer, roll the off-cuts a little thinner, and use them to decorate the top of the pie. Brush the pie top with egg wash and make several small holes with the tip of a sharp knife for steam to escape. Place the pie on a baking tray and bake for 35-45 minutes until the pastry is well risen and golden. Leftover pastry mince pies Makes: 12 Time: 30 minutes Ingredients: 320g shortcrust pastry (scale up/down the recipe based on how much pastry you have leftover) 250g mincemeat Egg or milk to glaze Icing sugar to decorate Method: Preheat the oven to gas mark 6/200C/180C fan. Using a 3 inch cutter (or a glass) cut out 12 circles of pastry and line the holes of a bun tin. Fill each pastry circle with a large teaspoon of mincemeat. Optional – cut out festive shapes from remaining pastry and place on top of the pies. Brush the pastry with beaten egg or milk then place in the oven for 15-20 minutes until the pastry is golden brown. Remove from the oven and allow to cool in the tin for 10 minutes before removing and placing on a cooling rack until room temperature. Store in an airtight container. Brussels sprout and garam masala tart Serves: 2 Time: 40 minutes Ingredients: 40g cheddar cheese 1 tsp garam masala 1 tsp turmeric 200g Brussels sprouts 1 tsp nigella seeds 160g puff pastry 5g coriander 2 garlic cloves 1 red chilli 50g lamb’s lettuce 1 brown onion 300g waxy potatoes 20g mango chutney Method: Preheat the oven to 200C/180C (fan)/gas 6. Boil a full kettle. Add your waxy potatoes to a pot of plenty of boiled water with a pinch of salt and bring to the boil over a high heat. Once boiling, cook for 12-15 min or until fork-tender, then drain and allow to steam. While the potatoes are boiling, peel and finely dice your brown onion. Peel and finely chop (or grate) your garlic. Cut your red chilli in half lengthways, deseed (scrape the seeds out with a teaspoon) and chop finely. Heat a large, wide-based pan (preferably non-stick) with a drizzle of olive oil over a medium-high heat. Once hot, add the diced onion, chopped garlic, and half the chopped chilli (can’t handle the heat? Go easy!) with a pinch of salt and cook for 5-6 min or until softened. Meanwhile, trim the ends from your Brussels sprouts, then finely slice. Once the onion has softened, add your ground turmeric, garam masala and a splash of water and cook for 1 min. Add the sliced Brussels sprouts to the pan with a knob of butter and cook for 7-8 min further or until softened. While the sprouts are softening, grate your cheddar cheese and chop the coriander finely, including the stalks. Once softened, add your mango chutney, grated cheese and half the chopped coriander (save the rest for garnish!). Season with a pinch of salt and a grind of black pepper and give everything a good mix up – this is your Brussels sprout & garam masala tart filling. Dust your work surface with a generous sprinkling of flour. Unwrap your puff pastry and roll it out to approx. 0.5cm thickness with a rolling pin and cut into 1 square per person. Transfer the pastry square to a baking tray lined with non-stick baking paper and score a 1cm border around the edge of the pastry with a knife. Top the centre of pastry square with the Brussels sprout & garam masala tart filling. Add the drained potatoes to a baking tray and crush gently. Add a drizzle of olive oil, your nigella seeds and a generous pinch of salt – these are your nigella smashed potatoes. Put the Brussels sprout and garam masala tarts and nigella smashed potatoes in the oven for 15-20 min or until the pastry is golden and cooked through and the potatoes are caramelised. Wash your lamb’s lettuce, then pat dry with kitchen paper. Serve the Brussels sprout and garam masala tart with the nigella smashed potatoes and lamb’s lettuce to the side. Add a drizzle of olive oil and a grind of pepper to the lamb’s lettuce. Top the tart with the remaining chopped coriander and chopped chilli (not a fan of spice? Just add a little!). Recipes from Gousto, the UK’s best value recipe box, offering 75 meals weekly from £3.14. Visit gousto.co.uk for more information and recipe inspiration. Read More Why the Spanish are calling bull on M&S’s chorizo paella croquetas! 21 alternative Christmas recipes from top British chefs Why restaurant influencers have just ruined your dinner The Independent high street Christmas sandwich and drink taste test Seasonal affective disorder: Can you eat to improve your mood? An air fryer can make Christmas as easy as mince pie – here’s how

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In Cartmel, a picture-postcard Cumbrian village on the cusp of the Lake District, chefs in their whites are scurrying across the cobbled streets like an army of well-dressed worker ants. Some are heaving wheelbarrows stacked with mounds of freshly picked vegetables, still earthy from the farm; others are dashing from one building to another, precariously balancing enormous stacks of clean pans. They all have one thing in common: they work for Simon Rogan. If they’re the workers, he’s the queen. This well-rehearsed choreography is a typical sight every morning in Cartmel, where the Michelin-starred chef – one of only eight to own a three-starred restaurant in the UK – set up shop 20 years ago. After a decade of working at various levels in restaurants around the country (including a placement under Marco Pierre White and two years at the three-star Lucas Carton in Paris), Rogan was keen to open his own restaurant. Priced out of Hampshire and Sussex, he looked further afield and found a rundown 800-year-old former smithy in Cartmel available to rent. “I didn’t come here for anything as glamorous as the area or the scenery or the people,” he tells me, having just taken me on a tour of said area to meet said people. “It was just for this building. I was desperate for my own restaurant. I felt like I had never really achieved the things that I’d wanted to working for other people. I wanted to make my own mistakes and be in control of our own destiny. I know it sounds cheesy, but it’s true.” He made an offer on his way back from his first visit to the area, and L’Enclume was born. “Once you realise where you are, you think: s***, this is beautiful,” he adds, laughing. Over the next two decades, the ambitious chef transformed the Cumbrian village into a culinary destination unlike anywhere else in the UK. It’s now home to not only L’Enclume – awarded the environmental green star in 2021 and the coveted third star in last year’s Michelin Guide – but also the one-starred neighbourhood eatery Rogan & Co, and Aulis, L’Enclume’s six-seater chef’s table behind the main restaurant. He also put his name to Henrock, a more informal and relaxed offering just a half hour’s drive away at Linthwaite House, overlooking Lake Windermere. The engine behind this mini empire, and the reason I’m here, is Our Farm, a 12-acre plot in Cartmel that supplies the majority of the restaurants’ ingredients. A sustainable, closed-loop growing operation had always been “at the back of his mind”, Rogan says. He was inspired by his father, a fruit and vegetable salesman who would bring home a box of the day’s best produce, teaching him the importance of using every part of the ingredient. When they arrived in Cartmel to get started, though, “the standard of produce”, Rogan says “was absolutely rubbish. The reason we got into farming was my frustration at the ability to buy a perfect radish, which is the easiest thing in the world to grow.” They rented a small plot close to the restaurant, and filled in the gaps with local suppliers. But, back in 2002, it was too expensive to buy organic. “Things were triple the price they are now,” Rogan tells me, taking a sip of his beetroot juice at the Aulis counter. “So we bought little bits and pieces here and there alongside the normal suppliers. Then we had the opportunity to take over the farm. That’s when we thought: ‘Right, let’s start growing radishes.’” What started as a little garden has become something bigger than he could ever have anticipated. A restaurant growing its own produce is not a groundbreaking concept, but a kitchen garden this is not. You won’t find pristine beds and trimmed rose bushes and arty ornaments. But you will find a patchwork of muddy fields growing hardy vegetables, the topsoil painstakingly “fluffed” by hand; a regiment of polytunnels housing the more finicky plants, delicate micro herbs and other culinary experiments (I try something that tastes like pickled onion Monster Munch); and enormous hand-rotated compost bins that process all the food waste from the restaurants into mulch for the farm. All this is surrounded by hedgerows that have been carefully curated to attract birds and other wildlife to act as natural pesticides. None of this would be possible without head farmer John Rowland. Regenerative agriculture might be his trade, but birds are his true passion. During a tour of the farm, he lists off the species he’s seen circling overhead, drawn by the blackthorn, hawthorn, rowan and birch trees he’s been planting on the borders. “We cater for the birds more than the people,” he tells me, in a Welsh accent so bucolic I wonder whether he’s been shipped in specifically for the tour. “Everything on the farm has a use, and not only in a culinary way. The seeds and the berries attract the birds onto the farm. The birds are my pest control, so the more I can attract to the farm, the more pest control I have, and that is fantastic for birdlife. In Britain, we’ve lost 84 per cent of our bird species, but this area is really rich because of these techniques.” While he might prefer looking upwards, it’s what’s beneath our feet that Rowland is really focused on. “The life is in the soil,” he says, grabbing a great fistful of the stuff. “You have hundreds of types of fungus right here. We don’t want to disturb that biome in the ground so rather than rotavating the soil [breaking up the earth with a machine ready for planting] and destroying the millions of organisms that live in it, we build a six-inch layer of compost on top and aerate it with a fork. Once you’ve done that, each year you just top it off with an inch, and that’s regenerative farming,” he says matter-of-factly, clapping the dirt from his hands. Well, that’s the gist anyway, and while it’s perhaps a little more complicated than that, Rowland struggles to understand why more people aren’t farming in this way. “We’re the most nature-depleted country in the world. We’ve lost our wildflower meadows, we’ve lost our insect population, we’ve lost our wild songbird population. They’ve taken the hedgerows away to make the fields bigger. All the natural food in our countryside is being lost to intensive farming.” Regenerative techniques like those Rowland is putting into practice on Our Farm would go some way to reclaiming it, he says, but “it’s a shame that they don’t realise that”. He pauses for a moment, then corrects himself: “Well, it’s not that they don’t realise it. They know. It’s just that they want intensive farming because it makes them money and it’s wrong because we are killing everything.” How this translates to the table at L’Enclume is manifold. Every dish on the menu begins life on the farm, where Rowland will flag what’s in season and at its best, or suggest something new he’s been experimenting with. Or it might start as an ingredient foraged from the countryside or sourced from a local supplier. The idea is then tweaked in the development kitchen at Aulis, before it finally makes its way to the pass at L’Enclume. This results in a transient snapshot of Cumbrian cuisine that changes every time you dine, and a menu quite unlike anything else I’ve come across. When I visit in February, Boltardy beetroot – a variety chosen for its resistance to erratic weather – shines in a bitesize tart with smoked pike-perch fished locally, and perilla, a Southeast Asian herb cultivated on the farm that adds notes of mint and licorice. Elsewhere, there’s lovage and rose hip and lemon thyme, all foraged; there’s Cornish cod and Mylor prawns and potted shrimp and Maldon oysters; sweetcorn and champagne rhubarb from the farm that were fermented after they were harvested last summer so they could be used year-round; and an enormous selection of British cheeses, including Tunworth, which is frozen and crumbled in a palate-perplexing, salty-sweet dessert. It happens to be my favourite dish. Managing a farm-to-fork operation this complex, not to mention the empire, is no mean feat. “I could pretty confidently be a tax exile given how little I am in the UK at the moment,” he jokes. When we chatted in February, the team was preparing to revive their pre-Covid plan for a five-week residency in Sydney, which concluded this month. The punchline, of course, is the delay meant Aussies were given a taste of not a two-star L’Enclume, but all four stars. Given Australia is yet to receive a Michelin Guide and is not particularly well known for its agricultural sustainability, it was an interesting move, but one there is clearly appetite for. Despite the $420-a-head price tag, it was sold out, serving more than 4,000 diners. While the food at L’Enclume, at home and abroad, is clearly special, it’s the people that set it apart from other restaurants in this league. Their hospitality, affability and, perhaps most noticeably, northern accents, are not typically what you find at this price bracket (£250 a head for the tasting menu, plus £100-£290 for a pairing). Stuffiness is neither present nor tolerated. Many of the staff have been with Rogan since the beginning, switched between the restaurants, or left for pastures new only to return. “We get a lot of people coming back – only the ones we want, anyway,” he says slyly. There’s certainly been a few famous quarrels. The “Rogan alumni” is a term thrown around a lot during my visit, and includes Mark Birchall, who was executive chef at L’Enclume during its two-star era before setting up a curiously similar “restaurant with rooms”, Moor Hall, in Lancashire, which also boasts two stars and a further green. Then there’s Dan Cox, who cut his teeth at Rogan’s now-closed Fera in Claridges as well as L’Enclume, and helped him set up Our Farm in the early days. He’s now down in Cornwall, running the farm-to-table Crocadon. But, generally, people are drawn back to L’Enclume for the variety it has to offer. “Look around the country,” says Rogan, “and [other restaurants] haven’t got any staff because they can’t offer as many career progression opportunities for people. I suppose that makes them lucky. “It’s about not spreading yourself too thin. We’re only able to do these things because these guys are really, really hungry.” Acknowledging that hunger, he established the Simon Rogan Academy in 2021 to “nurture aspiring chefs”. It includes paid work across the Cartmel restaurants, and culminates in a week-long placement at his restaurant Roganic in Hong Kong. In the beginning, “we thought that maybe if we had just a third of them left at the end of the quarter, it’d be brilliant,” Rogan tells me. “But almost all of them stayed on! And now they all want jobs” – he comically rolls his eyes – “but really it’s great.” As I drift between the farm and the Cartmel restaurants, everyone hard at work but always smiling, it strikes me that L’Enclume isn’t just a restaurant; it’s a story. And its influence is immense. “Sustainability”, “farm-to-table” and “regenerative agriculture” were mere whisperings 20 years ago. Now they’re affixed to almost every new menu, and you could say they were born here. The people I’ve met could well be the next batch of Rogan alumni, attracting Michelin’s attention with their own restaurants in years to come. If it takes 20 years to craft a legacy like this, then I’ll make sure I come back in 2043. For more information about L’Enclume, visit www.lenclume.co.uk and for more information about Simon Rogan and his other restaurants visit www.simonrogan.co.uk Read More Why I won’t be doing Veganuary this year – or ever again Marina O’Loughlin is wrong – there’s joy in solo dining Michel Roux Jr announces closure of renowned restaurant Le Gavroche to have ‘better work/life balance’ The true story – and murky history – of Portuguese piri piri oil 30-minute summer recipes for all the family to enjoy What to cook this week: Tomato tart, sweetcorn pasta and other summery suppers

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Consumer spending at restaurants in the US may finally be starting to level off following the pandemic-reopening boom,