Clearing the fridge
This was everything I wanted to use up tonight before leaving for a trip tomorrow morning:
I would have defaulted to more lentils with sausage, because that's easy, and I was trying to be done in time to make it to an architecture talk in Manhattan, but that would have been useless---lentils last forever---so I focused on getting rid of the potato and the half head of cabbage.
Here's how that effort went.
Cabbage --> All cooked
Potato --> All cooked
Tomatoes --> All cooked
Sausage --> 2/3 cooked; the date on them is the day I return I just put the last one back in the fridge. Fingers crossed.
Scallions --> "All cooked" meaning, I threw the bottom parts in the pan, saved a little of the tops for garnish, and threw the rest. It was getting wilty and I'm not in love with it yet.
Ginger --> Used only a little but who cares, it's ginger, I wasn't actually trying to use up all my ginger.
Garlic --> 1/2 cooked; used 1 head and put the other back. It will be fine.
Bread --> Didn't touch after all. Will have some for breakfast tomorrow.
Sour cream --> Half gone. I'll use what I can tomorrow. Hope the rest will be okay. It's not that long.
Milk --> It's a goner tomorrow.
What I actually made I boiled the potatoes in little pieces thinking it was necessary to get them cooked to my liking; I was planning on frying them too. But I had them cut small enough I shouldn't have boiled them. They would have been great little brown pieces of buttery potato, but instead they turned to passably delicious mush. Oh well. Then I cut up the sausage into pieces and fried that up, added garlic, ginger, the tomatoes, and then dumped in all the cabbage, which I had shredded. I poured some Shaoxing over it at some point and then vinegar, and black-peppered it to death. Then I put those things on a plate next to each other and put tons of sour cream on the potatoes, with some of the scallions on top for... effect.
It was an insane amount of food in the end, and I didn't have time to eat it all (if that were even possible or desirable), so now I have leftovers, ironically. I think cooked leftovers will be more palatable than raw or wilted leftovers, though. The cooked cabbage was actually surprisingly good. Everything was flavorful, at least. It's not pretty. But it didn't feel like failure, or starvation.
I still one small meal left for the day, for which I had cheese and crackers offered by the architecture forum. I haven't had good (hard) cheese in weeks. What bliss!