Budget Busting: Turning leftover pork roast into delicious ragu - easy!

I hate wasting food.  Absolutely despise it.  Whenever I clean out the fridge it's a shame I bring upon myself.  Why did I buy so much? WHY didn't we eat that? WHO put this in here?  Who left this container with ONE STRAWBERRY in it??.. Ok, I'm getting carried away but I'm sure you get my drift!?  It's confronting seeing how much food you can throw away as a family.

Hubby isn't so great at the meal planning and I've not been around enough to do it or enforce it but that's all changed my friends!  I'm back onto it with a vengeance.  Now GoogleDocs is my friend - I create the spreadsheet and share it with hubby.  I pick it up on my phone when we go shopping.  (You just need Google Drive on your phone - available on iTunes and PlayStore for free!)

Love it.  It also means I can copy and paste the recipes we're going to use and hubby and I can just click on them when we need.. perfect.

OK, so onto this recipe.  I got carried away at the butcher on the weekend and bought a pork roast waaaay too big for us, like, twice the size we needed....   So after I carved up the leftover pork I made last night I had to come up with a plan for it, because we were never going to eat it cold or on sandwiches... So I thought, ragu!

This is such an easy solution, nothing stopping you from doing it with beef or even lamb.  If using beef or lamb I would go red wine instead of white..

You'll need a food processor.  If you are in the market for one, I can (and have many times) hand-on-heart recommend the Breville Kitchen Whizz Pro.  It's got a motor that's guaranteed for 25 years, and that cannot be argued with!  I do love it and use it often.

Now I made a huge batch - which has made 3 more meals for us... (great for lasagna or just with pasta) so you don't have to have a huge amount of pork to make this worth your while - do it with as little as 400g, and cut my recipe in half.

Ingredients
1 brown onion, peeled
1 celery rib, strings removed
2 cloves garlic, peeled
3 small carrots,topped and tailed
800g cooked pork
2 tb olive oil
1 cup dry white wine (I used reisling)
800g tinned diced tomatoes
200ml water
2 tb tomato paste
12 leaves basil, chopped
2 sprigs oregano, chopped
1 sprig parsley, chopped

Method
Using your food processor or a knife, thinly slice your vegetables. It doesn't matter how big it is or if it's in ribbons, it's going to cook down in your dish..

One of the things I love my food processor is the slicer attachment allows you to choose the thickness of what your chopping with this dial.  If you don't have one of these just slice as thinly as you can.

Sweat these off in your stock pot or large pan with the oil, and add the wine and let it simmer.

Change the attachment on your food processor to processing blade and add your pork.  Whizz until ground.

 Now add the tomatoes, water and tomato paste to the pot.

I used 4 x 200g tins of tomatoes and then poured in 2 x tins of water afterwards.

Add your processed pork

And then add your chopped herbs.

Pop the lid on and let it simmer for 1.5  hours on low heat - you could take it off after an hour if you needed to.

I won't lie to you, this smells sooo good you want to eat it straight away.  I'm going to pop some into some friends who is going through a rough time at the moment - and keep a batch for us. Winners all around!

So there's my leftover triumph for this week! What's your favourite leftover to use/eat?

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