Making leftovers new again

On Monday I made a poor version of eggplant lasagna.  The eggplant was still a bit raw and it just tasted funny.  My mouth itched, does raw eggplant do that to you?  Anyway, we eat most of what we could and saved the rest for left overs.
Today I was looking in the fridge and noticed that I had: two tablespoons of cottage cheese, left over eggplant lasagna, some pie dough, baby potatoes, three small portobello mushrooms and frozen spinach, frozen carrots and of course the usual suspects, onion and garlic.

I went online and searched for a website that would allow me to punch in all those items and give me a quick list of recipes.  I found one called Recipe Matcher. (recipematcher.com) I put in all the items I had on hand and it gave me a complete list of recipes I could make.  They were all useless because they all required me to go out and buy something new.  The whole idea was to make something right now and not have to buy anything.

So I put down the computer and just got to work.
I cut the baby potatoes in half and added it to a boiling pot of water.
While that was going, I minced garlic and onions and tossed them into a hot pan.  I also diced up the mushrooms and threw them on top of the garlic and onions.  I let them cook down for a while.
I took out the left over lasagna and pulled out the raw pieces of eggplant, chopped them up and threw them into the pan as well.

Once that looks like it was cooked through, I grabbed a bit of frozen spinach and frozen baby carrots and threw them in as well.

While I waited for the spinach and carrots to defrost, I drained the baby potatoes that were not soft and ready to be mashed.  I added butter, some seasonings, nutritional yeast, and cottage cheese run off.  Mashed it together with a fork and called it done.  I then took the left over eggplant lasagna which was now just ground beef, sauce (red and white) zucchini, broccoli, and mushroom and placed it in a loaf tin.  On top of that I put the mash potatoes and let it sit while I got everything else ready.

The spinach was melted by now but I wanted to wait for the water to cook out.  While I waited, I took the dough out of the fridge and started rolling pieces out to flatten into discs.
Once the water had cooked out, I added the cottage cheese and turned of the stove to cool.

I continued to flatten dough out like mini pizzas and set them aside.  Once the mixture was cool enough I took a tablespoon of the mixture and put it in the middle of the dough, the closed it up.  I put the dough filled balls seam side down onto a greased pan and kept going until I ran out of dough.  I was able to fit 14 dough balls in the pan before I ran out of dough.  With the leftover mixture I spooned it on top of the mash potatoes and placed everything in the oven. (carrot poking out of the middle one)

I had pre-heated the oven to 150 C and left it to bake for 30 minutes.  The results came out well and I didn't even get a chance to photograph it.  My husband ate seven of the dough balls and half of the "cottage pie."  He loved it and I have to say, it was pretty darn tasty.

And had no added salt at all with very little oil. Some butter for the mash and to grease the pan but thats for looks anyway.  I was pretty happy with it.  Next time you have leftover, try making something new and fun!  Its all going to the same place anyway, your stomach.